This is the ancient 1966 Hawk mold. The kit has been reboxed 11 times in total by Hawk, Testors and Italeri, the last reissue having taken place in 1998. The specific copy is the Testors 1992 reboxing and was bought at around the mid 00s from an Athens hobby shop. It comes in a flimsy top opening box, carrying an attractive boxart of a completed model accompanied by a hobby knife, a brush and two Model Master bottles, with three more smaller different angle shots at the bottom.

Upon opening the box, I was greeted with only 61 light gray styrene parts arranged in four sprues. While the general outline of the main parts looks accurate, molding is reminiscent of the 60s era, being soft on the details. Panel lines are raised and quite accurate. Some flash is noticeable, which can be easily cleaned off, but also a number of ejector ping marks are present at prominent places (like the aerodynamic surfaces), which have to be sanded smooth.

The kit is pretty basic detail-wise in all areas. Cockpit is spartan, including only a flat instrument panel where a decal is to be affixed, a crude seat and an average looking pilot. Same for the landing gear where the main bays are shallow and devoid of any detail, whilst the nose bay does not exist at all. The landing gear parts lean towards the toy side. Finally the exhausts are simplistic and shallow, but the intakes at least feature some depth. The main wing is one piece, which will simplify assembly. Two sidewinders, two 750lb bombs and two Bullpup missiles are provided.

Transparencies are clear with well defined frames. There is some flash on them that has to be scraped away. Instructions are of the nice Testors stuff, coming in the form of an 8-page b/w booklet, containing a short history of the type, a color chart, some nice advice regarding parts preparation, painting, tool usage, decals application and weathering hints, with the construction spread in 6 followable pictorial steps which include nice explanatory texts and color callouts where needed.

Two schemes are provided, for the first prototype F-5A in NMF, as it stood in Edwards AFB in 1959 and for a SEA camoed machine based in Vietnam, circa 1965. The over 30yo decals are beautifully printed by Scalemaster and look usable, but you can never know until you use them. I would definitely coat them with some sort of Liquid Decal stuff to reduce the chances of disintegration upon submerging to water. Colors are given in FS numbers and in generic form, so have those conversion charts handy!    

Instructions want you to first assemble the ordnance (of course you may assemble it at end stages), then trap the instrument panel, the canopy hinge and the front landing gear between the fuselage halves. No weight is mentioned (and, possibly, none needed), but I would add some, just to be on the safe side. The seat, the pilot and the intakes are next attached, followed by the speed brake (select “open” or “closed”), the main landing gear, the pylons, the nose machine guns, the canopy (which is positionable), the aft top cooler air inlets and finally the ordnance, ending a simple and seemingly uncomplex build.