Jennings Posted November 21, 2009 Share Posted November 21, 2009 (edited) Got the Trumpeter F-100C a couple of days ago for a decal project. I thought having seen photos of the thing that the vertical fin looked suspicious. Once I got it in the flesh, I started working on a line drawing of the airplane for decal art purposes. I used the color renderings in the kit box (for decal placement), which match up almost perfectly with the kit parts once you scale them correctly. Everything on the drawings is within a fraction of a millimeter to the shape of the kit. The vertical fin still looked suspicious to me, so I started comparing to photos. I've got several photos of F-100As and Cs (which had the same vertical fin) that were very nearly perfect side views. No photo is perfect, so I used four different ones to try to get an average. When scaled to the same scale as the drawing, using landmarks on the fuselage for reference, every single one of them showed the same thing: the kit's vertical fin is too tall, too wide, and the rudder is in the wrong place (it sits too low on the fin). In addition, close-up photos of the small fairing on the trailing edge show that Trumpeter greatly simplified its shape and left off significant details on it. Their F-100C fin is almost the right size for an F-100D/F fin. As I said, photo comparisons aren't perfect, but four different photos all showed basically the same thing within an acceptable (to my eye) margin of error for parallax, etc. Here's the best result I got. What this means in terms of modelling is that if decals are made to fit the kit fin, they won't be accurate and faithful to the real subject. If they're made to the correct size to be faithful to the real subject, they won't fit the kit. Given some of the wild and wooly markings that F-100Cs carried, this could be a fairly significant problem. So Harold, when is your resin fin coming out?? J Edited November 21, 2009 by Jennings Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Ben Brown Posted November 21, 2009 Share Posted November 21, 2009 Jennings is absolutely right. I still can't figure out how I managed to "correct" my original statement that the tail was too big. I'll go back and un-correct my correction in the review thread. I may try modifying a Monogram tail, as originally planned. That way, the rudder will be in the right place. Ben Quote Link to post Share on other sites
thegoodsgt Posted November 21, 2009 Share Posted November 21, 2009 Some more perspective on the kit. http://www.arcforums.com/forums/air/index....howtopic=194383 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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