Academy 1/72 North American F-86F Sabre

So this kit was a bit of an adventure. 

Fairly straightforward.  Parts went together well.  All the issues I had with this kit were of my own doing.  Read on…

Started out nicely enough with the cockpit.  I added some painted masking tape seatbelts and colored the instruments with pencil crayon.

Fit was pretty good.  A little filling and sanding on the fuselage seams.  

You can start to see that I made an error trying to put the airbrake panels on.  I was thinking for both paint and decalling purposes, having the doors on would be a good idea.  What I didn’t realize at this point was that the decals were cut in a way to be applied with the panels off.  This led to numerous issues.

Air-brushed the entire kit with gloss black Tamiya acrylic in preparation for Alclad II aluminum.

Had some issues with the Alclad aluminum (it’s lacquer, not acrylic), but it worked out OK.  I masked off some panels to paint with a different aluminum finish (Tamiya acrylic aluminum).  

So far, so good.  But here is where the problems began.  Stubbornly trying to fit the decals to the air break panels resulted in a less than perfect job, compounded with problems when I tried to take the panels off.  I had stuck them in there with some blue tac and they wouldn’t come off, resulting in some scratches and decal damage.  

I added the yellow/black Korean War stripe decals and they seemed to be sort of OK…until they dried and moved.  There was really no way to fix this, they wouldn’t re-moisten and come off the plastic.

It was much worse on the underside.  Going to chalk this up to experience.  I might try painting these stripes on the next one.

From many angles, this doesn’t look too bad, but it is far from being up to my own (admittedly low) standards.

Paints

Tamiya Acrylic

X-1 Gloss Black
X-7 Gloss Red
X-11 Chrome Silver
XF-1 Flat Black
XF-2 Flat White
XF-4 Yellow Green
XF-16 Flat Aluminum
XF-19 Sky Grey
XF-24 Dark Grey
XF-58 Olive Green
XF-71 Cockpit Green

Alclad II 
ALC 119 - Airframe Aluminum