My kit arrived last week, and the full review will be in Modeling Madness this coming Friday.
This is not an easy kit. That is primarily due to the design of the fuselage, which is the result of the Ukrainians not having plastic molding machines that allow them to do complex shapes. The result is this multi-part fuselage. The major problem is that the locating tabs for the intake and the exhaust are just enough "off" in dimension to make the fuselage a tiny bit too wide when assembled; it's not something you see, but it makes fitting the bottom side parts and the wing sub assembly difficult. Comparing my assembled model with a Hasegawa F-86, there is a loss of dihedral in the wing because of this. I'm working on figuring a way to not use the locating tabs, for the next one. The result of this design problem can be seen in the photo of my model with rubber bands covering the fuselage from nose to tail - and after that I had to apply Mr Surfacer to all those lower fuselage seams, and do a lot of sanding down to get the shape.
The kit can only be done as an early (pre-Korea) F-86A, with the gun doors closed. By the time the Sabre got to Korea, the gun doors were being wired open, or replaced with the open gun ports; I have not found any photos of F-86s in Korea with the closed doors. It's obvious that Clear Prop will do a Korean F-86A, since there are parts on the sprue for the interior of the opened gun ports; there is also a nose cone with the ranging radar scribed in, which means they intend to do an F-86E (which will require a different fuselage, which explains why the major fuselage halves are on one separate sprue).
As you can see from the photos of the model assembled and painted, the extra effort pays off with an accurate model. Clear Prop has done their homework on the early Sabre (ignore "airplane gnu" Larry Davis's comments about the kit in the Hyperscale review; he's wrong about all he said other than the gun doors, as commenters there have demonstrated with photos of the real thing). I particularly like that there's no "ledge" in the wing for the slats - they got it right.
Fortunately, the decal sheet - which has three options for Sabres from the 1st FIW, 4th FIW, and 56th FIW - the three initial Sabre units who used this version - is very good.
As a side note for those using the new Mr Hobby Super Metal;lics - I saw a post elsewhere in which a modeler said he was airbrushing these paints with a 10:1 thinner:paint ratio. I tried it on this model and got an even better final finish with the Super Metallics than I have been raving about previously. Thin 10:1 and mist it on and you will be amazed.
5 attached images. Click to enlarge.
