Next up is to assemble the main gear wheel bay. Already painted white, there are 4 parts that make up the whole assy.

RH/LH side gear bay sides, roof and center support bulkhead make up the bits for the gear bay assembly.

1st I will assemble the center support and attach it to the roof panel. I also painted one of the conduits black and two others in tan. A little wash to dirty it up a bit.

Next to attach each side panel of the bay to the roof panel, the center support slips into a notch for correct aligment. Then the other panel is attached and aligned with the roof and RH side bay panel and the assembly is complete and put aside. What is really nice about this piece is that Hasegawa provided some nice detail here and made it deep enough to scale. Not bad for 72nd scale. If you happen to have a 48th scale Academy F-111 any variant, you will see the difference and how shallow their bay is compared to the Hasegawa 72nd F-111. Just wonder why Hasegawa didn't do the F-111 in 48th scale. Imagine if they did. I need to look up the Hobby Boss F-111 and check if their kit has a deeper landing gear bay. Regardless the gear bay in this kit looks busy and nicely detailed for the scale. Next up assemble the main fuselage section.

More to follow.

Going well Chuck, you really don't need any weight in it, I am building my third one at the moment, they are plenty stable without !

Next step is to install the gear bay assy into the lower main fuselage half, the intake trunking, engine faces and the finally assembling the rear section.

First some of the components that will be used for this process. The upper and lower fuselage halves.

LH and RH intake trunks and the engine faces are in white. Then Vallejo Aluminum for the engine turbines.

1st is to install the completed wheel bay. Next the engine face panel is installed using the notches to locate and align properly within the lower half.

Once alignment is set, then each of the intake trunk panels are installed and aligned. Hase makes this simple and easy to follow. Take your time each part aligns as it should, not much fiddling as long as you follow the directions.

Drill out the holes for an electronic pod that will be mounted here for this version.

Finally to seal the fuselage with the upper half. Attaching this is simple, not really difficult to align. Hase again engineered this to attach the upper panel on a natural seam line and will be easy to clean up. Though unusual to not have any locating pins while attaching the part. So again emphasizing to be careful while keeping alignment. The fit is excellent, none of the interior components were a factor checking for alignment before cementing it down.

Next up is attaching the forward nose section. More to follow.

You know Dave, we tout Tamiya with their engineering and ease of assy even with some complicated air frames or armor. Hasegawa does for the most part do go together well on a lot of their kits as well. This one is one that is not labor intensive like their F-14 is. Having a good time so far on this one.

Your correct Louis, seeing some of your work and others on the ICM and Airfix modern tooled kits look really fun to build. Though the details are excellent, they may be still a challenge, not difficult but not let say as engineered like Tamiya are. Still not too easy, still have to put them together and if you get complacent you can find yourself in a pickle and unnecessary extra work by not paying attention to detail.

Nice to see one of these going together; i built two of them back in the early 1990s and i found it to be a straightforward, un-fussy build (although i know i busted at least one control stick, getting it off the sprue).

The kit still holds up very well. "Navy Bird" Bill Gillman did a Grumman F-111B over on another site and it looked great.

A plane that did not get a lot of love until pretty late in its career. Great ground attack concept, lousy standoff interceptor.

-d-

Great looking F-111, Chuck!

One early morning during Desert Storm - about Oh-Dark-Thirty we called it (anytime from midnite to dawn) which that night was about 02:30 I was watching over my little platoon of M1A1 Heavies, when an F-111 (on a Wild Weasel mission, I'm pretty sure) overflew us at an altitude of less than 500 feet - it seemed like about 10 feet! It was thunderous and VERY impressive! That actually happened again twice more, with 3 different types of aircraft: the F-111, and an F4 Phantom and another type I can't recall precisely, but may have been an F-105. All 3 were VERY early in the morning, and flying VERY low and quite fast. As we were parked less than 500 yards (metres) from the Iraqi/Saudi border, I suspect the pilots were using our tanks as an "aiming point" of sorts to get to where they needed to be. The F4 flew so low that my Gunner, who was asleep on the back deck of our tank, was so startled by the noise and realizing that an aircraft APPEARED to be landing on top of us - or him - that he rolled off the back deck of the tank onto the ground about 7 feet (2 metres) below in fright! He swore that the plane "blasted" him off the back deck, but it didn't - he was simply very startled and awakened quickly. I was awake and saw it all and thought (think) it was hilarious. He didn't exactly appreciate the humour that evening ... but I did ...

Not every memory from war is bad. It (and other humourous instances) kinda balances the awful things done and seen.

Long delay in updating this Wip. This step I will assemble and attach the intakes to the airframe. Hasegawa has a few parts involved on a complicated part of the F-111 but not difficult to assemble.

Already pre-painted white, are the LH/RH ramps, trimmed and each one installed onto their section in front of the intake opening. Again the fit is excellent. No gaps.

Next are the intake forward trunk sections, the inner half that will be visible when the intake outer covers are installed. Again pre-painted in glossy white. These will fit over the intake ramps.

Next the intake shock cones are installed, with only the rear half in glossy white, masked and attached to each intake trunk. The forward section of the cones will be the airframe color.

Before installing the outer intake panels, I painted the section of the ramps Tamiya Black. Which will be hard to reach with the airbrush when completed. But will touch it up again when it's time to paint the overall lower section.

Finally attaching each outer intake panel again excellent fit just minor clean up with a swipe of sandpaper. Otherwise this part of the build is done. Next up is adding some detail bits under the airframe. More to follow.