This was finished in ’91 and then boxed and stored shortly after it was finished…for about twenty-four years. I figured some bits would break off, which they did. I just thought more would have come off. For thirteen of those twenty-four years this was stored in an unheated and uncooled attic.

When it was built, I did a bit of detailing (not a lot). The canopies were vacu-formed (as were their inner frames), the pilot figures were modified from a Tamiya AM set, the oxygen and G-suit lines were made from guitar strings, some details were omitted from the cockpits (the Navy F-5s didn’t have on-board radar so I cut the radar screens off) and some were added (the hydraulic rams of the rear canopy hinge look like steel because they are – they’re straight pins), the formation lights were made from translucent toothbrush handles, hoses and lines were added to the landing gear (and the gear doors were scratch-built), and this was my first (somewhat poor) attempt at scribing panel lines.

Since I was taking it out of the box to display again, some fixing was called for:

This isn’t the first time the front landing gear has snapped here, so this time I added a pin to help keep it where it belongs:

This will do for now. The nose probe is still MIA; the paint that I used in this area is no longer available. (I’ll have to do something about that at some point.) For now, it’s ready to display again:

Photos taken shortly after it was completed in ’91: