Growing up in Upstate New York, I’ve always had a fondness for the two
Air National Guard units that were stationed in that area. At one point, both
units, the 174th TFW out of Syracuse, and the 107th TFG
out of Niagara Falls, flew F-16’s. The 174th’s mission was Close
Air Support while the 107th’s was Air Defence. Having already done
a Syracuse jet, I wanted to complete a Niagara Falls Viper. Unfortunately, there
were two major problems. The first was that there were no decal sheets that
covered the 107th. The second was that Hasegawa never did an ADF
version of their F-16, and the Revell kit just wasn’t as good. But by
combining both the Hasegawa and Revell kits, I was able to come up with a decent
looking F-16 ADF.
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I started with the Hasegawa F-16A kit, since ADF Vipers were converted
from F-16A Block 15 aircraft. I installed a Seamless Suckers small mouth intake
along with a Black Box cockpit and parts from the Verlinden F-16 update set. To
complete the conversion, I used the “bird shredder” antennas from the Revell
kit and put them in place. Surprisingly, they fit quite nicely. I cut off the
bases of both the Revell and Hasegawa kits’ tails and swapped them after I had
scribed the lines on the Revell piece. The last thing that needed to be done was
to drill a small hole for the search light and pop in an extra landing light
from my spares box. An MV lens would also be perfect for this.
I painted it in the
standard F-16 scheme (FS36118, FS36270, FS36375) using MM Acryl paints. I did
change the FS36270 to FS36320 only because I think is has a better “look” to
it. The Neutral Gray has always looked too dark in my opinion. After looking at
some reference photos of 107th aircraft, I lightened the Gunship Gray
a bit and picked out some specific panels to break up the monotone finish.
Now I had to tackle the problem of not having markings. Thankfully, the
scheme isn’t too complex. During the painting phase, I sprayed white on the
tail, masked it off in the appropriate pattern and then sprayed light blue next
and masked it off with trim tape. After I sprayed the tail gray, I peeled off
the striping tape and I had my “waterfall”. I used a “Niagara Falls”
script from an old Monogram F-4 decal sheet and found the ANG shield and letters
and numbers from my spare decals box.
One unique thing about
the F-16 ADF is the fact that it was wired to carry AIM-7 Sparrow missiles. I
chose the loadout to be a complete air defence set up, with four AIM-9
Sidewinders and two AIM-7 Sparrows along with the centerline fuel tank.
In all it was a pretty
easy conversion. If you have a Hobby Lobby near by, you can many times find the
Revell F-16 for $5 with the ½ off coupon, which is probably just as cheap as a
conversion set would be. Plus, you get an extra F-16 model out of the deal. The
Revell kit really isn’t all that bad.
Darren
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