Lockheed XF-90 in 1/48 by Aurora

Introduction:

One never knows where a new project will lead you. The Lockheed XF-90, although a somewhat obscure design and having a short history, spread its influence across many areas.

It all started for me, some months ago, when I added as an afterthought, the Ginter publication of Lockheed XF-90, by William J. Simone, to a book order. I knew of the plane and remembered building a model of it as a kid, but didn't know any real details. I certainly didn't expect to turn it into a model project.

History:

The XF-90 was Lockheed's second jet fighter design after the F-80. In 1946, the Air Force wanted a new jet penetration fighter, that being defined as a long-range fighter that would fly ahead of the bomber force and clear the skies of opposition.

The XF-90 first flew on 1 June, 1949 and two prototypes were built. It immediately ran into issues. The plane had been designed around a pair of the new Westinghouse J34 engines and like so many jet engines of that period, it never produced the advertised thrust. This left the XF-90 under powered, to the extent that take-offs were only made on the expanse of the dry lake at Muroc (later Edwards) rather than the runway and quite often used JATO to get off the ground. Once in the air, it flew well and was capable of Mach 1 in a slight dive.

Testing continued until the summer of 1951 when Kelly Johnson, Lockheed's chief designer, recommended cancellation. He knew that to redesign the airplane with larger engines, to meet the original specs, would add 12 – 18 months of development, at which time the plane would be obsolete. The Air Force complied and canceled the program in August, 1951. The first prototype was scraped but the second found a new mission.

It was transported to the Nevada desert, north of Las Vegas, where early atomic bomb testing was taking place. A series of three tests were planned to assess bomb damage to parked aircraft. The XF-90 was placed at the 2200-foot mark with other aircraft types at other distances. While pointed towards ground zero, it survived two blasts with minor damage. However, on the third blast, while turned sideways to ground zero, it was destroyed. The remains were left in the desert.

In the late 90's, the remains were decontaminated and brought to the Air Force Museum, in Dayton, OH. During my August, 2022 visit to the museum, I found that the unrestored air frame shell is now part of an exhibit in the Cold War Building, telling the story of the desert A-Bomb testing.

So the story seems to end, one of many prototype designs that had a mostly forgettable history. The plane never even received a name, unlike almost all other Lockheed aircraft. But it turns out to have had much more influence in other, seemingly unrelated, areas.

All through the late 1940's, as it was being developed, and then through the testing period, Lockheed and Westinghouse had done a great deal of publicity claiming it to be the “next great Air Force Fighter!” To the general public of 1950, the XF-90 was the ultimate in futuristic design with its long sleek fuselage, thin swept wings and duel exhausts, almost rocket ship in nature.

Blackhawk comics (1940-1972) picked up the design in 1950 for their primary fighter plane. Blackhawk was a private air force that fought enemy aircraft, villains and monsters in each month's issue. It “flew” with them until 1964 when it was replaced by the F-105.

Detroit began to adopt styling cues from the fighter. Sweptback tail fins, faux jet intakes, bulbous “bullet” fairings and twin exhaust began appearing on cars starting in the early 1950's. The 1956 Oldsmobile's hood ornament was most definitely a stylized F-90 with a long pointy fuselage, thin swept-back wings and large wing-tip pods.

Our hobby was influence as well. In 1952, Hawk Models produced the first all-styrene plastic models in the U.S. (other types of plastic had been used previously for the few plastic models released up to that time). They picked the F-90 as part of their first set and it sold very well. Aurora also started producing plastic kits in 1952. They copied the Hawk F-90 kit, with minor changes. Both companies re-boxed their kits several times into the 1960's. It was a later boxing of the Aurora kit that I first built as a 9-year old. I still remember thinking it was the coolest plane I had ever seen!

The Kit:

After reading Simone's book on the F-90, I recalled that I had cherry-picked a collection in 1978 and came away with, among other things, the 1956 boxing of the Aurora F-90. Digging deep into my stash, I now had it in my hands.

The kit is molded in silver plastic and consists of twelve pieces for the air frame plus six more for bogus landing gear and rockets that Aurora added to the kit. Aurora freely admitted that they wanted to be first to the market at a cheap price and if the kit was accurate, well, that was a bonus. Hawk, on the other hand produced simple, but mostly accurate kits. Luckily, Aurora's copy of the Hawk kit kept the accuracy of the air frame.

The kit has no wheel wells or cockpit, just a pilot's head under the canopy. There is no interior and one can see through the intakes and out the exhaust. The bogus landing gear and rockets just glued to the bottom of the model. As was typical of the time, the markings were raised engravings right into the plastic. The nearly 70-year-old decals looked amazingly good.

Construction:

At this point, let me offer an apology to those die-hard kit collectors for ruining a perfectly good collectable by … well… building it.

I originally did not intend to build it.

Now, with the book full of detail pictures in one hand and a model screaming for attention in the other, what was a poor modeler to do?

I started by sanding down the entire model to get rid of the raised makings. This old-style silver plastic is very strange. It seems to have a clear depth to it. Even though my finger said it was smooth, the markings were clearly visible and even appeared to have a shadow! I sprayed the model, inside and out, with primer black and sure enough, the model was really smooth and the markings were gone.

Next was the cockpit. I cut out the area under the canopy and went to my spares box. I found an old Squadron resin cockpit set for a T-33 -- same era – 1950's, same company – Lockheed. With very little modification other than cutting off the rear T-33 cockpit and adding some sheet plastic, I had a cockpit tub, ejection seat, stick and instrument panel that fit very well into the F-90 fuselage. I painted everything black and highlighted the dials and switches. This really didn't make much difference as almost no detail accept the seat can be seen through the green-tinted, “coke bottle” canopy and opening it was not an option for me.

Now it was time for the landing gear. Although Aurora's was completely imaginary, the correct door outlines were on the model, probably from the original Hawk version. The large wheel-well bays in the fuselage were cut out along with the nose bay and boxes were constructed from sheet plastic. Thin plastic strips and wire were added for detail. The main gear bays that extending into the wings were more of a problem. The kit's wings are solid plastic. I tried using a Dremel to dig out the bays but quickly realized that I could not get an even depth or straight edges. I resorted to using a razor-saw to cut from the butt-end of the wing outwards and simply had a hole in the shape of the gear bay. I laid sheet plastic on the top and with some filler and sanding recreated the top surface of the wing and the top of the wheel well. I added some detailing and a plastic mounting block for the gear itself.

The main landing gear struts and wheels are from the Monogram F-106 kit. The F-90 struts have the bottom third angled backwards. I cut the F-106 struts, re-glued them at the correct angle, added some filler and was done. I added .025 wire pins to the top of the gear for mounting to the model.

The front gear came from the spares box but I don't know from what model or even what plane it comes from, it just looks right. I did have to cut the lower part off and rotate it 180 degrees so that the nose wheel faced to the left. The wheel itself is resin and may be from the T-33 set.

The gear doors are thin sheet plastic with added pieces on the inside for details. The main center gear doors are from the Monogram F-100D kit with slight modifications.

I next blocked off the see-through air intakes with a few pieces of sheet plastic for depth and capped the ends. I painted these a dark silver.

For the exhausts, I found some large diameter, brass tubing at my local hobby store. This fit the kit's open exhaust holes perfectly. I cut a couple of short lengths, painted the interior exhaust-silver, capped the ends and glued them into the kit exhaust holes.

An added consequence of this was that considerable weight was added to the very back end of a kit that was already only marginally nose heavy. I almost didn't catch this before closing up the fuselage, but did remember to added weight to the nose to compensate.

With all of the detailing done, it was time for the final assembly – all twelve pieces! Many of today's detail models have instructions that are small books, with many steps. The Aurora instructions are one page, one panel with an exploded view of the kit. There are some added written instructions and some cautions for the young modeler of 1950's, such as, “only apply glue to the inside edges of the parts to be glued together.”

In the earlier 1952 and 1954 boxings, Aurora included a tube of glue since styrene plastic glue was hard to find in those years. By the 1956 boxing there is only an advertisement to buy “Aurora Polystyrene Cement for plastic model airplanes at your local dealer”.

The fit of the kit was surprisingly good. I only had to do a little filling around the exhaust end cap, a little bit at the wing roots and some clear filling around the canopy.

The XF-90 went through several tip-tank configurations with and without fins. What was settled on was a smooth tank with a small vane on the fuselage-facing side of the tank, just ahead of the leading edge of the wing. I duplicated this with some sheet plastic.

The tanks just slip onto the wing tips with no alignment marks or pins. I didn't trust just eye-balling it to get them straight, so I traced the wing onto paper and created parallel lines between the fuselage and the tips. I then use those guides to align the tip tanks.

As almost an after-thought, I added the JATO pack under the fuselage. This came from the Revell F-84E kit and was slightly modified to fit the F-90 flat underside.

Paint and markings:

The model was painted with Alclad II aluminum. I had considered scribing panel lines but none of the photos in Simone's book showed any visible lines, even though the plane was bare metal. I used the Tamiya lacquer metallizer paints to add various surface shadings that can be seen in the photos.

The national insignias are from the spares box. The original decals looked good enough that I was able to scan them into my computer. I wanted to get the Lockheed logo that is prominent on both sides of the nose. I brought them into Photoshop and added the correct yellow color to the logo and replaced the word “LOCKHEED” in red.

For the other two markings, the “F-90” on the nose and the tail number, I used the original decals for size reference. I downloaded a free font of post-WWII US Air Force style numbers and letters. With this I created the “F-90” for the nose and the correct tail number (Aurora's was wrong). I added “U.S. Air Force” above it, to match photos. The custom markings were printed with a standard Epson ink jet printer on clear decal paper. This worked fine over the silver surface of the model but the printed colors are pretty thin and probable would not work over a darker color.

Finally, the base is a free download I found on the internet of a concrete ramp. I printed this on 65 lb card stock and glued it to a piece of Plexiglas. The pilot figure is from the Revell-Monogram F-84E kit and the ground crew figure from the Monogram B-25H. The ladder and tow bar are modified to match pictures and are from the 1980's ESCI ground equipment set. All are painted with Tamiya lacquers.

The tow Jeep is the Tamiya 1976 boxing.

The reality of the time was that things were pretty crude at Muroc. Lockheed quite often used its own 1949 Chevy Suburban station wagon to tow the airplane around. Since finding a model of that Chevy is impossible, I claimed artistic license and substituted the Jeep.

Conclusion:

This is the most interesting and satisfying build that I've done in a long time. It certainly took me down the proverbial “rabbit-hole” but I am very pleased with the end results. It will be the most unique subject on my selves for some time.

References:

1) Air Force Legends Number 222 – Lockheed XF-90 by William J. Simone. Published by Ginter Books, 2020.
2) You Tube videos on the XF-90 and other early 1950's jets
3) My photos from the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Dayton, OH.

4 additional images. Click to enlarge.