Siam Scale Decals

1/72 F-5's  Royal Thai Air Force decal sheet

Product # SNN72009

Product Article by Steve Bamford on Aug 18 2003

 

 

 

Siam Scale is a decal company based in in the Far East and their decals focus mostly on Air Forces of the Far East, but they also do decals for aircraft of other Air Forces....such as Israel.  This 1/72 decal sheet focuses on 11 different F-5's of the Royal Thai Air Force.  There are enough stencils included to build quite a few of the 11 planes featured on this decal sheet.

Some of the aircraft have colourful camo schemes.  One features an  anniversary scheme for 50000 hours of flight.  

Tail markings include various artwork from a Cobra to an Attacking Bald Eagle to a shark and more.   The decals are clearly printed.  They are a glossy decal, but they aren't overly thick and should settle down just fine....I don't see this as a problem.  The colour of the decals looks very good and the detail on the tiny stencils is clear and readable. 

I did have problems figuring out where the National insignias go....the colour image to the right show a National insignia at the rear of the fuselage below the tail......but where they go on the rest of the plane is not mentioned.  Figuring out colours and camo for the 11 planes is very hit and miss......you'll need some reference photos to go along with the instruction sheets.

The instruction sheets tell plenty of little critical info about stencil data placement, but you'll have to study them carefully to figure out all you'll need.  

There are 4 pages of black and white instructions and one page showing colour profiles of 5 of the F-5's on this decal sheet.

 

Click on image below to see larger image

Because these decals are from the Far East....the instruction sheet refers to one of the Far Eastern Brand of paints.  This shouldn't be much of an issue, but you will have to dig up a conversion chart of some sort to figure out the paint colours if your local hobby shop doesn't stock this brand of paint.  There are 5 different colours of paint mentioned on the instruction sheet.  The instruction sheet doesn't fully show the right side of the fuselages for each plane.......so you'll have to do some educated guessing about markings on that side of the fuselage.  Go slow on the instructions to avoid making any mistakes and you should do just fine.

All in all a nice set of decals of the Royal Thai F-5's (I quite like the very top plane in the colour image at the top of this review) and I recommend these to anyone wanting to add a Royal Thai F-5 to their display case.

I'd like to thank Siam Scale Decals for sending me this review sample.

Steve

 

 

Photos and text © by Steve Bamford