annie.shikinami

i've gotten replacement parts from them twice. once was a single broken F-16 canopy. i had to email them twice before i got a response. their website gives a different email address for replacement parts than the one provided in their manual, so included both on the email. took about a month to get a response but i eventually got my part. the second time i had a big issue where 6 of my new F/A-18 kits had defective canopies. i made a thread about it here on arcforums and Raymond reached out to me. i had the parts a few weeks after that. i think reaching ou

I've got the same problem going on right now. Total bummer! I'd only ordered one item but was planning to get more in the future. Wish I'd had seen this thread before placing an order.

buttoned up, canopy closed, and in-flight with a crew in the cockpit are my preferences. open panels on a kit usually kinda put me off cos of how hard they often are to close up properly. but boy howdy do i love it when other modelers go nuts with the open panels! love seeing the kinda work that i'll probably never do myself lol

and one more from the contest, next to my 3rd place F-14A 😎

this is my most recent completed build. it took 2nd place in the 48th scale and up jets category at the Great South Tigerfest model contest a few weekends ago. it was both my first time entering a contest and my first time winning anything (along with my Tomcat that took 3rd) and i'm real proud of it! this kit was actually the third attempt at an in flight super hornet for this contest. the first was finished in early February, and while i think it turned out real good, there were still some obvious flaws to it. i figured if i was gonna enter a contest, i'm in it to win it, so i pu

actually, the kitty hawk kit is back from the dead! i'm tempted but will definitely wait until Italeri or Hobbyboss put out theirs. or maybe Tamiya will bless us and we can disregard the rest.

can you give more details about what the aft caps are for? are they something that would be present on an aircraft during flight? i've been trying to pay more attention to details like this on ordnance. kills me when a kit missile is just a flat circle at the end!

idk, i'd usually be skeptical due to their lack of variants for the F-4 and F-16 kits, but the fact that they gave us an F-35B only a year after the A makes me think the C wont be far behind.

1.) I usually use dark gull gray FS36231 for the leading and trailing edges on the vertical tails and a lightened FS36375 for the leading and trailing edges on the wings. in most pictures it looks to me like the vertical edges are darker and the horizontal ones are lighter. i can't remember what they called it exactly (not able to look at my reference books at the moment), but the trailing edges are either made of/covered by a different material to the rest of the flap. 2.) early super hornets used to have the same polyurethane boot (i think that's what it's called) at the end of t

Thanks Raymond, I've just sent you an email.

I actually tried to see if I could apply a little pressure to get one of them to fit right after I made this post and it resulted in a cracked canopy lol. There just isn't much flex in the parts. A few of them are so splayed out that the side of the canopy go completely over the canopy sills so in any case those are completely unworkable. I do think that they'd be fine to use with the canopies posed open, as the problem is much less pronounced towards the rear of the part. Unfortunately for me tho I greatly prefer to close the canopy on my builds and lately I'm building a lot more

No no, not the widely known windscreen problem. This time it's the rest of the canopy - and multiple of them! I was test fitting my next hornet build and found that the canopy was too wide. I have 11 of these kits on the shelf, so I went ahead and grabbed another. Same deal, it's too wide for the fuselage. The third one, pictured here on the far right, is the worst. All of these kits were purchased in 2023 and are either from the Gold series CF-188 or Aggressor boxing of the kit. I've built I think 8 of these Kinetic hornets now, and while all but one of them had issues with the f

these look so good! those fuel tanks are a godsend. i have around ~30ish legacy hornets in my stash, so i'm gonna need a lot of em. 😎

I'm doing that exact same hornet right now! i'm about ready to start decals. your kit should have come with a sheet for some of the weapons markings, but the one they usually include is for their old F-16 kits and doesn't include AIM-7 markings anyways. i've also had that same kit come without that decal sheet, and no luck getting a replacement from kinetic. anyways, the stripes on the missiles i think are insignia yellow FS13538 and international brown FS30117. inert ones would have stripes in blue, but i'm not sure if it's a particular FS color. light ghost grey for the bodies o

oh this is good to know! i just pre-ordered a set of their F-4 seats on HLJ and didn't know they were making some for the F-15 too. i'd thought of just going with the kit seat for the GWH F-15C since i'd bought the Quinta set, that way I could just use those seatbelts, but the kit seat is so stinkin HUGE and i think it looks too goofy to be salvageable.