RF-8 Conversions

 From Tom's post on Hyperscale:

There have been several RF-8 conversions over the years, none particularly good. The first was the War Eagle vac for the ESCI kit. The conversion was in some respects better than the base kit, but not worth messing with, because the ESCI kit is really awful.

Two resin conversions were done for the Monogram kit, the one by Maintrack and one by C and H. Of the two, the Maintrack is the more accurate in that it made a real stab at the smaller nose. It is a one piece forward fuselage conversion, but does have a cockpit molded in. C and H just put a Cobra nose cone on a Monogram fuselage which stands out like a sore thumb. Plus, it is also a one piece forward fuselage conversion, but their is one no cockpit! Try doing the intake and cockpit on that! It even buffaloed Phil Brandt. I always hoped Bill Koster would do one, but he didn't.
So far there have also been two for the Hasegawa kit: RVHP and, again, C and H. RVHP gives you the whole fuselage , but less the vertical stab, which you are to adapt from the kit. Far easier to cut the fuselage halves of both the kit and the conversion at the forward main gear bulkhead and graft the RVHP forward fuselage to Hasegawa's aft fuselage. But the big problem with the RVHP set is he made not attempt at all to modify the nose (other than make a provison for a pitot tube and camera window in the E radome, so what you have, in essence, is an RF-8E - which did not exist. The C and H set is better, they ditched the one piece foreward fuselage and used the Cutting Edge C conversion for the nose. Unfortunately, the CE nose isn't right either, because it used the kit windscreen part which includes part of the enlarged fuselage fairing for the E radar, so there is a pronounced step in profile which shouldn't be there, and the base of the radome is too wide as well so it is off in plan view also.
All the conversions also give you solid camera ports that you are meant to paint. That is semi acceptable in 72nd, but not, to me at least, in 48th. Further, ALL RF-8 conversions, in all scales share the same fundamental shape error, and that is that the forward fuselage is essentially a flat sided fighter fuselage, not a true photo bird forward fuselage which is considerably wider - top and bottom - beginning just forward of the main gear wells and tapering back in just aft of the canopy on the upper and into the intake below the windscreen on the lower fuselage. This is why there is no IFR probe bulge on the photo's - it wasn't needed (and why the AC exhaust duct on the right side is pretty much flush with the fuselage - another point missed in all conversions). And there is a slight angle to the flat area where the camera bays and ports are, giving the fuselage in that area a horseshoe shaped cross section.


Note how much fuselage you can see either side of the RF-8 canopy relative to the F-8. And because of all this - using the essential fuselage shape of the fighter - the upper wing-fuselage fairing is not even close to correct in any conversion in any scale, some are ludicrously incorrect.
Maybe someday someone will do it right, either a full kit or a conversion. I am sure Hasegawa had that in mind when they released the fighter, since there is a mold parting line on the inside of the fuselage exactly where it should be: at the forward main gear bulkhead.


But I am beginning to doubt that I will live to see it. 

And regrettably, he didn't... 

For my Tailspin Topics post on the RF-8, see https://tailspintopics.blogspot.com/2013/12/photo-gator.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1/72nd F-8 Kit Review

1. Academy F-8E, F-8E(FN), F-8J. The three listed types have been released, and this is definitely the best 1/72nd F-8, but it is far from perfect, having a lot of warts, most of which it inherited from its illegitimate parent, the Hasegawa 1/48th kit, but some are all its own. Some “genetic” errors include the bogus angled radar screen in the cockpit, the bogus bumps on the upper wing at the wing fold, the flat plank representation of the ACM exhaust fairing on the right fuselage, and the rudder which is not right at the lower forward edge, there should be more of a cut out for the rudder post. A couple errors that are pure Academy are the front windscreen, which has a center section that is about twice as wide as it should be, and the radome cross section, which is egg-shaped , little end up, where it should be an ellipse, long dimension up (It, like all other E kits, is also wrong in profile, being symmetrical when it shouldn‘t be). The latter is not all that no...
Read more

F8U (F-8) Wing

Image
9 August 2022: Added information about the color of the underside of the wing that was above the fuselage The F8U had two different wings: Original and BLC (Boundary Layer Control). The BLC wing was developed for the French Navy Crusader E(FN) to provide a lower landing speed. It was incorporated in the remanufacture of U.S. Navy F-8Es that were designated F-8J for the same reason but not retrofitted to any earlier F-8s, including rebuilds. When the original wing was raised (to 7° incidence), the leading and trailing edge flaps and ailerons automatically drooped from the cruise neutral position, i.e. leading-edge flaps up. Most of the trailing edge control surfaces were ailerons. A small inboard section next to the fuselage was an actual flap, in that it was either up or down. The trailing edge surfaces drooped 20°. The outboard leading edge flaps drooped 27°; the inboard (center section), 25°. The Unit Horizontal Tail (aka stabilator) moved 5° leading edge up for nose-down pitch...
Read more