KIT #:	12232/BKC48003
PRICE:	$
DECALS:	One option
REVIEWER:	Chuck Horner
NOTES:	Brigade conversion set. Cutting Edge decals

HISTORY

McDonnell Aircraft was a late-comer to the American aircraft manufacturing party. James McDonnell started his company in 1939 after leaving Martin. The infant St. Louis manufacturer survived on sub-contracts until they received an Army Air Force contract for their XP-67 “MoonBat”.

Although this radical design failed, partially due to bad engines, the Navy asked them to design its first jet fighter in 1943, which became the FH-1 Phantom I. This was quickly followed by the very successful F2H Banshee and then the moderately successful F3H Demon. During this same period, they had won the Air Force penetration fighter competition with the F-88 Voodoo, which morphed into the successful F-101 Voodoo.

By 1953 both the Demon and Voodoo were in production, and neither the Navy nor Air Force were looking for any new designs at that moment. McDonnell found that although there was no money in the Navy fighter budget, there was some for an attack plane. Anticipating a Navy RFP in the near future, McDonnell began work on its own. What came from this was the AH-1, a single-seat, single-engine, attack aircraft that had a resemblance to a large A-4. This made it to the mock-up stage before the Navy changed its mind.

For the next few years, McDonnell and the Navy went back and forth with different designs changes. Ultimately, the Navy decided it really needed a fleet defense fighter and the AH-1 became the F4H. This was now a larger aircraft, with a two-man crew, two engines and an all-missile weapon system.

During the many hours of wind tunnel testing, two of the Phantom’s unique attributes came about. The first was the up-turned outer wings, to correct lateral instability. The Phantom wing had zero degrees of dihedral. Testing showed the need for 3 degrees, but this would entail a complete redesign of the wing structure. Adding 12 degrees to just the outer wing panels is the aerodynamic equivalent to giving the entire wing a 3-degree dihedral.

The second, the drooped tail, was to prevent pitch-up. Other jets designs, including McDonnell’s own F-101, were experiencing the problem where the plane, under certain conditions, would violently pitch up then fall into an unrecoverable flat spin. The F4’s solution to this was to droop the horizontal tail by 23 degrees.

After six years of work, the design was ready to fly. The first twenty-three F4H-1s would be production-test aircraft. As the plane was about to go into production, Westinghouse informed McDonnell that the original 24-inch radar dish in the nose would have to be increased to 32 inches to meet the long-range detection requirements. Rather than delay production while a new nose was designed and tested, the Navy ordered the first batch of aircraft to be produced with the smaller nose without radar installed so flight test could proceed.

The other external differences in the first batch of F4’s was the “flat” canopy, with the back-seater buried deep in the fuselage and the hooded intakes with a smaller splitter plate.

The first Phantom II (BuNo 142259) took off from the St. Louis airport on 27 May 1958 with McDonnell pilot, Bob Little, at the controls.

These production-test Phantoms were redesignated as F4H-1F and then in 1962 as F-4A. The now familiar shape of the plane began to fully emerge after airframe #19 but remained F-4A’s through production #47. The first A-models were assigned to VF-121 in December 1960 to begin training but they never served with a combat deployable squadron.

For the first time, the Navy had an aircraft that could out-perform any Air Force plane and they wanted the world to know it.

The “Sage Burner” program went for speed. On 28 September 1960, Phantom #2 (BuNo 142260) set a world speed record of 1,390 mph in a 100-Kilometer Closed Course. Then on 28 August 1961, Phantom 145307 set the low-level speed record of 902 mph at 100 feet altitude.

The “Top Flight” program set an altitude record of 98,557 ft. on 6 December 1959.

Very early on, the Air Force noted the Phantom’s performance and as testing near completion, contracted with McDonnell for their own version, initially known as the F-110, later as the F-4C.

The rest is aviation history.

Brigade Models released a 1/48 scale resin conversion set for Phantom #1 in 2018. The donor kit is the Academy F-4B. Brigade is a UK company but this conversion is extremely hard to find. The Brigade web site, which is mostly SciFi figures and gaming pieces, does not even list it. I finally found it after an extensive search of Hannants.

The resin set consists of:

• a one-piece forward fuselage

• cockpit and ejection seat

• Hooded intakes with short splitter plates

• A vac-u-form original “flat” canopy

• The early perforated speed brakes

• A long, nose-probe

• Vertical fin tip

• Early designed tail hook

The rest of the conversion is supplied by the Academy kit.

The conversion set is “old-school” cast resin and it is a bit crude in places. The forward fuselage is a solid chunk with a well-formed exterior and fine panel lines, but there is excessive resin on the inside that really needs to be ground away. The intakes, on the other hand, are very thin resin.

As an aside, only an F-4B can be used as a donor kit for ANY conversion to the F4H-1. This is because, from the C-model on, wider main wheels were use and this created a noticeable bulge on the top of the wing.

I starting with the resin cockpit. This is well detailed. The conversion uses the Academy instrument panels and stick. The ejection seat is the early Stanley-McDonnell type. There was no seat installed in the rear cockpit for the first flight so only one is provided. The familiar Martin-Baker seats didn’t get used until the B-model.

I painted the cockpit with dark gull gray with assorted black instrument panels and other colors for details. Since this was a new airplane, I did not weather of even add a wash to the interior. The entire cockpit slips into the fuselage shell from the rear and sits on the nose well, which is incorporated into the casting. Academy’s plastic forward fuselage bottom then glues to the resin piece. This forms the connector to the rest of the Academy fuselage.

I decided to add a Hasegawa jet pilot. Photos show most of the test pilots of that era wore orange flight suits but had standard OD flight jackets and I painted it that way. I had to modify the figure so that it fit the seat. I then added thin Tamiya tape for the shoulder harness from the seat to the pilot.

Prior to this, I had tackled the Academy modifications. The Brigade instruction clearly shows where to cut the front fuselage off. The Academy fuselage is molding top and bottom, rather than left/right so a single cut is all that is needed

Then on to the wings. The first Phantoms had perforated speed brakes on top of the wing, just ahead of the ailerons. These were later replaced with solid ones. The molded-in kit speed brakes need to be cut out of the wings so that the resin pieces can replace them. This proved a little more challenging, but in the end, worked out.

The Brigade nose-probe was badly bent from shipping and was useless, but it did give me a length. I took a brass rod, encased most of it in a small plastic tube and coated it in super glue. I then put it in my dermal and use files and sand paper to create a smooth taper to the front with a quarter-inch in the rear for mounting. Since the resin nose is solid, there was no problem drilling a hole and mounting the prob. Now, instead of a fragile extension, I had a solid weapon.

From the beginning, I felt that attaching the forward resin fuselage to the Academy plastic was going to be problematic. There is very little surface area to glue the heavy resin to and I was afraid that it could drupe down over time.

The Academy plastic that forms the bottom of the forward fuselage, attaches to the plastic lower wing piece by a sort of butt joint. I added long plastic strips so that there was a lot more gluing surface. For added strength, I added a brass tube, anchored to the lower resin and extending back to be anchored in the plastic piece that holds the intake trunks.

At the top of the plastic fuselage, I added a small bulkhead to hold another brass tube coming off the top of the resin. This was angle slightly upwards so it would rest solidly against the inside of the plastic mid-fuselage.

As it turns out, there was a large gap between the upper resin and plastic, probably due to my over sanding. I filled this with sheet plastic strips and filler and was ready to move on.

The Academy molds the vertical fin with the ability of add a number of different caps, depending on the model. Phantom #1 had no sensor bumps on the fin and Brigadier supplies a clean fin cap. In addition, Phantom #1 only had one pitot tube on the fin so I cut off the lower one.

The intakes were the worst pieces of this resin set. They are very thin and one was short-shotted on the bottom and the other had started to flatten out during shipping. I was able to add sheet plastic to the short-shot and using a hair drier, I bent the flatten one back into shape. In both cases, there was a lot of excess resin on the inside that need to be ground away. I ended up coating the entire surface, both sides, with Mr. Surface 500 and sanding back to the resin to fill the small holes and valleys. Ultimately, to my surprise, the intakes and splitter plates, were a very good fit to the model.

Apparently, quite a bit of flight testing took place to get the right angles for the tail hook both in form and deployment. Phantom #1 had a slightly different tail hook as well as a small fairing on the lower rear fuselage aft of the hook. This was a simple replacement and add-on of the resin parts.

Vac-u-form canopies are always tricky. I’ve done enough of them now that I’m comfortable cutting them out. Brigadier only supplies one canopy so extra care is needed. From my experience so far on this build, the fit was sort of what I expected – marginal. I used a lot of white glue filler over several days until I was satisfied.

The plane was painted the standard Navy light gull gray over white, with International Orange wing and tail tips plus a “barber pole” nose probe. Wing and tail surfaces had a silver leading edge and the titanium exhaust area was pretty much the same as future Phantoms.

Both the gray and white are Tamiya and the orange is from MRP, a brand I had never tried before. It’s very thin (spray only) and goes on beautifully. The “barber pole” nose took a lot more effort. After painting the entire area white, I wrapped Tamiya 2mm tape segments over the entire length, then removed every other one and sprayed the orange. This was a lot a tedious work, but got very good results.

After all was dry and a good coating of Future, I moved on to the decals.

At the beginning of this project, I had purchased the Cutting Edge F4H-1 decal sheet. Although Meteor Productions is long out of business, they have been selling off their inventory of decals for several years. This sheet has markings for nearly every one of the production-test aircraft, include “first flight”. I don’t know exactly how old these decals are, but the copyright is 2006. In any case, they went down without a problem.

The basic Navy markings are minimal, with large Star & Bar and “NAVY” along with the Bu.No. on the rear fuselage. The definitive markings include “F4H-1” on the nose and the stylized orange strip on the upper fuselage from canopy to tail.

I knew the fuselage strip could be an issue and broke the decal up into three parts per side. This let me deal with smaller, manageable pieces.

I added the landing gear and a final coat of semi-gloss clear to complete the build.

I’ve always had an interest in these first Phantoms. Even though there was a little more work involved in prepping the resin parts, they went together well and I’m pleased with the out-come. The hardest part of the conversion was finding it. Best I can tell, only the UK’s Hannants carries it and you have to know it’s there to search the site.

The reference I used was Birth of a Legend McDonnell F4H-1 Phantom II, Tommy H. Thompson, Ginter Publication, 2018