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

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