Special Hobby 1/48 McDonnell XF-85 Goblin

Edwin Schoch was a WWII Naval aviator and later test pilot for McDonnell aviation. He was the only pilot to ever fly the XF-85 Goblin during its short test program. He was later killed testing an F2H Banshee.
My wife is a novelist and we met Schoch's daughter at a writers' conference several years ago. This build is in Edwin Schoch's honor and a gift to his daughter.

This was my first attempt at building a “limited production run kit.” It was definitely a learning curve and fought me the entire way. The major parts were made of plastic and resin with a vacuform canopy. Several parts had to be scratch built per the instructions…pitot tubes (hypo needles), landing skid, and several trailer parts. There were NO locating pins on any of the parts so great care was needed for proper alignment. The wings and tail surfaces had butt joints so I drilled them and made locating pins out of bits of Albion alloy tubing to add strength. The nose section, exhaust section, and cockpit tub were resin and needed quite a bit of trimming to get a good fit and appearance. This was also my first time to work with a vacuformed canopy so I was pretty nervous…there was only one in the kit. There was no margin for error. That said, it went together fairly well, and I was really pleased with the end result of the canopy.

Once the build was done and all seams filled (there were a few), I primed the model with Tamiya X-1 Gloss Black thinned 50:50 with Mr Color Leveling thinner. This gave a very nice base and hazy spots were touched up with 100% thinner which gave a nice uniform finish. After a few days drying, the model was sprayed with Vallejo Metallics Aluminum. Panel lines were highlighted with a gray/brown oil pin wash. Decals were from the kit and went down well. A final coat of Alclad Aqua Gloss sealed everything.

Finally, I had to build the trailer/dolly. This was composed of plastic, resin, and scratch-built parts. Once more or less together, I had to mate it with the airplane. This was almost like mounting wings on a biplane, except there were more moving parts and the weight of the airplane was on top of the trailer and bracing struts. I made a framework out of my sons' Legos to keep everything steady while I coaxed everything into place and glued all the parts. That was a bit of a “dance” to say the least.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the outcome, and I hope Susan will be too. This little jet won third place in the 1/48 scale, single-engine jet category at Scale Fest 2023, the North Central Texas IPMS model competition. Here are two links for more info on the XF-85 and Edwin Schoch…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_XF-85_Goblin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Foresman_Schoch

8 additional images. Click to enlarge.