Ben Brown

Awesome!!! Ben

False alarm. I just just proved I need stronger glasses prescription and hearing aids, and maybe a refresher in aircraft identification. 😡 Ben

Excellent advice, MoFo! Thank you! Ben

True. I stopped typing too soon! 😄 Yup, I even have a set in my stash (that I’d forgotten about). Doug’s products are all top notch. Ben

Hypersonic makes some very nice slotted and unslotted stabs that plug right into the Hasegawa and Academy F-4s. I consider them a must have for the Academy kits. Ben

For a drone F-4S, you’ll need one with slats. The old Hasegawa kit is still a good option, even though it has Air Force style slats. This is easily fixed with a little styrene strip and Milliput. It won’t be up to the same level of detail as a Z-M kit without adding intakes, cockpit, and afterburners, and adding those will put you near the Z-M kit in cost. Italeri/ESCI had an F-4S, but I don’t know anything about it. Edit: I just saw what Hasegawa F-4S kits are going for on eBay. Yikes! Ben

I’m still mad I lost my old ZeroStat that I had in the ‘80s. Still have the rest of the DiscWasher set I bought with it. 100 bucks for a replacement is a bit steep. I went looking for mine a couple of years ago when I was doing some touch ups on a model car body. When the brush got within a couple of mm of the body, the metallic flakes would jump across the gap and form lines on the body. Ben

There’s a lot of good info in the 3D printing section over at Britmodeller. LINK Ben

Looking forward to the B decals! Ben

If you haven’t already seen it, the Fundekals F-4C instruction sheet (more like a small reference book) has tons of good info on it: LINK Ben

Wow, that turned out great! Well done! Ben

Caracal makes some nice stencils (Link). They might be more representative of later jets that don’t have a lot of stencils. F-15Es originally had a ton of stencils when they were new. SuperScale had an extensive sheet many years ago, but they were oversized, IIRC. Ben

Take a look at Inkscape. It’s open source and free. I’ve been playing with it off and on for a few years. Like all vector programs, there is a fairly steep learning curve, but it seems to be a fairly powerful program. It can produce many file types, like svg and pdf, but you can’t use it to edit Adobe or Corell files. They can edit yours, though, since svg is a standard type of vector file. There are tons of online tutorials for Inkscape, as well as several print books. Ben

Your iPhone images turn out better than my best attempts with a DSLR camera! 😄 Ben

I think one would have to do quite a bit of sanding to improve the keel and tail hook. You can see in Rich’s photo of the outer wing panels how the RWR antennae on the wing tips aren’t quite right on the Meng kit. They also didn’t get the forward end of the wing fence right. Can’t tell if Z-Ms is completely right from that angle, but it does extend past the leading edge. Z-M’s nose looks kind of wide compared to Meng’s. A pet peeve about slime lights - why do manufacturers insist on having the lighted area sunk in below the edges of the frame? While the lights on the