This will be my most personal build to date. It is for one of my best friends whose dad flew the airplane I'm representing in Vietnam in the late sixties. There will be more of the story when I finish the model.

My friend provided the kit, which is the 1987 vintage Monogram F4C/D in the air defense issue. There were a pair of Verlinden ejection seats in the box, which will definitely be a major improvement over the kit seats. The seat bottoms are molded into the cockpit tub, so they had to be removed to get the new seats in. A Dremel rotary file made short work of that. I had to file down the sides of the resin seats to get them to fit, but they look pretty good and will look even better when painted.

And awaaaaay we go...

3 attached images. Click to enlarge.

Nice start on this classical kit of a classical aircraft, Jaime 🙂 Can t wait to see yours unfold, have a lot of fun with it, there is much fun in the box !
Did this kit last year, and it won t be the last Monogram F-4
positive:
good and accurate form
in some ways better than Hasegawa
well detailed

not so good
everything on the surface is raised, slats,flaperons,flaps...
the cockpit tub fit bad at the back
The intakes fit not very well too
not much detail in the burner cans
the windscreen frames look a bit odd

My idea was to prime the whole thing black, apply the camo and sand it smoothly to the point, the dark colored panel line came out, this worked really good on the underside, but i managed a major painting mess on the upperside. I had to get all the paint of, with a lot of the raised lines, in the end i recreated the lines with small black decal lines and sprayed them carefully over. Not my best effort but it landed on the shelf and not in the doom box.

Cheers
Bernd

After cutting down the seats to fit the cockpit tub, I washed them in dish detergent and water to get the mold release off. I'm lazy and don't like pulling the airbrush out to paint just a few little things (what I really don't like is cleaning it all up!), so the seats were painted with some rattle can Rustoleum high heat flat black that I had around. This was followed by a dark gray wash to tone down the black and highlight some of the details. Once that's good and dry, I'll get to painting the cushions, seat belts etc before doing a final silver drybrushing to liven everything up.

Bernd, thanks for the heads up on the kit. I've never built one of these, but I'll keep an eye out for the gotchas!

Beautiful job on the bang seats Jaime. I think a well done seat is the easiest way to dress up a cockpit. Can't wait to see what you do with the rest of the cockpit, it's possibly the most accurate F4 cockpit available with the exception of the seats.

Looking good, Jaime. Since you're on vacation you'll be done in no time!

I think the "old" Monogram kits were the best domestic kits out there back in the day. Most of 'em can STILL hold their own - especially when comparing prices with the imports. And those seats DO look nice.

Fuselage warp shows up pretty well in this shot. It took every one of those clothespins to hold the wing together.

A few shots of the cockpit. Glued the front part of the tub in place and will pull the back half in after letting the glue set overnight. Might have to do a little trimming to get it all in. The radar scope faces were first painted chrome silver, then gone over with a green Sharpie. Fit is not very good at all, but it does look like an F4 cockpit. The joys of old model kits!

Great progress Jaime. as Rick said, the cockpit looks very realistic. It seems we can watch a really nice F-4 grow up.