Fonderie Miniatures 1/48 Blue Angels F11F Tiger Short Nosed Conversion
By Jeff Thomsen
Overview
One of the things that enthralled me as a kid was watching the annual airshow at Point Mugu NAS. From ejection seat demos to live missile firings to flybys of the latest military aircraft, it was all so fascinating to a pre-teen boy. But the grand finale of every show was when the Blue Angels would fly. I always hoped and prayed the fog wouldn’t roll in and cancel their performance since it was at the end of the show and late in the afternoon. But when they did fly – what a treat! They flew F11F Tigers the first time I saw them, and I’ve always thought they were the most beautiful looking of all the airplanes the Blues have flown since.
The Kit
I’m more into nostalgia the older I get, and it creeps into my modeling. I snapped up the Fonderie Miniature long-nosed Tiger kit when it first came out to build a Blue Angel, and always wanting to do something a little different, began to think about converting it back into the earlier short-nosed version that the they started flying after transitioning from their Cougars. The primary differences were the shortened nose with its refueling probe tip, and the lack of wing leading edge extensions next to the fuselage.
The best thing I did was to find a set of Richard Caruana’s excellent drawings of the Grumman Tiger, including profiles of the short-nosed variant. I first assembled the fuselage per kit instructions, and sawed off the appropriate section of nose. I enlarged the drawing to 1/48 scale and (using it as a template) made a framework of sheet styrene formers and bulkheads in stick-and-tissue-model fashion. This was then attached to the nose-less fuselage and the gaps filled with Apoxy Sculpt, my favorite epoxy putty. After a few iterations of carving and puttying and sanding, I had an acceptable new nose.
My kit canopies weren’t the clearest, so I filled one with Apoxy Sculpt and after curing, popped it out and used it to vacuform a new one. I built up the wedge-shaped fairing at the forward base of the windscreen with sheet plastic and putty, then separated the windscreen from the rear sliding part of the canopy. I used very thin strip styrene to form a glueing strip around the base of the windscreen, giving it some gripping surface for when I would attach it later.
Having the nose out of the way, I fixed the wings up by removing the leading edge extensions - an easy job compared with the nose!
A few other details added were: opening up and deepening the intakes, using brass tubing to replace the cannon bulges at the intake lips, reshaping a refueling probe from a Hasegawa Skyhawk kit and pinning it to the nose tip, making a new pitot tube for the vertical tail from steel tubing, and adding a throttle quadrant, oxygen hose, and decking detail in the cockpit.
The paint job was a bit of a challenge. No decals are available for this version, although I was able to use a few from the FM sheet. ALPS wouldn’t hack it (too transparent), and I couldn’t find any yellow decal film that I could cut the designs from and still look good. I finally ended up using an ALPS decal that I had drawn (and a friend had printed for me) as a mask. To do this I sprayed the appropriate areas on the model yellow, then cut very carefully around each number
and letter on the decal and applied it to the model. After painting the blue areas and letting it dry, I lightly pressed masking tape over the decaled areas and lifted them off, leaving the deep yellow underneath. Some of the edges were a little rough and had to be touched up with a brush, but this seemed to work well for my purposes. I wouldn’t want to do all of my markings this way, though!
Since the Blue Angels maintained their airplanes in a fanatically clean state, I polished the paint with Micromesh and Novus scratch remover. Alclad Polished Aluminum was then sprayed for the flying surfaces leading edges and exhaust cone. After everything else was done, I then added some bent brass wire to simulate the oil tube that provided the white smoke seen during performances. This runs from the left intake area, underneath the left wing, and back to the exhaust duct.
Conclusion
The FM kit isn’t exactly an easy build, but if you like the Grumman Tiger in 1/48 scale you won’t mind too much!
