Building Italeri's 1/32 F-104 G/S Starfighter: Part 1

That's right for all my professed love of Japanese WW2 aircraft, trucks of all eras and sci fi I am building a jet plane. What's up with that is right.

Downstairs, in the basement is my Hobby Room. Many modelers use the term "bunker" for their areas of meditation. The walls and ceiling of mine are rag rolled a sort of blue, which my wife likened to being submerged in a swimming pool (in a bad way, I think).  I had a lot of people tell me that the walls should be white, so as to not throw off my painting. I'm sure everyone has noticed that my models tend to be less blue. Who know's how many medals it has cost me to paint down in the swimming pool.

Here are my notes so far. #1) What is the level of building? I bought this on a total whim. My intention was "to build for fun", so no after market, no rebuilding landing gear struts or ejection seats. No, no, no. #2) Pick version. I thumbed through the instructions...a lot of Italian aircraft. Duh, I guess. One German and a couple of Canadian. OK, let's do the German one...maybe Canadian. I couldn't keep myself off the compy though. Oh look, there is one with Hinomaru's...  It is like being in a swimming pool sometimes. I vill do scheme C, za German von. "Two peanuts were walking down the strasse..."

#3) Remove parts. Using an old Testors Xuron cutter and the nicer Tamiya one, the good plastic is cut from the bad plastic. I go through and remove the parts that are extra and not for my version. This is a form of simplification to foster the Illusion Of Progress. Model building is like theater, if it doesn't look like something is happening, it is less fun. By getting rid of the unnecessary parts and grouping existing ones it makes it easier to break the project into smaller parts.

What a nice areoplane ! #4) Tape it together to figure out how to build, what is seen and what is easy to change. I only clean up the parts enough to get it together. By checking what can actually be seen you can eliminate the tedious clean up. Also, some parts are more visible than others and require more care. Things on the top and details that always draw scrutiny should get the red carpet treatment. In this case, the cockpit, intakes...probably the landing gear and exhaust nozzle. This is an older kit, so there are lots of panels that can be positioned open to see the cool guttyworks. I'm not a big fan of this, so all those panels need to be blended back into the surface to as to not call attention to themselves. The overall surface finish on the model is pleasing.

Really, building models is an excuse to listen to crap like this: the OST of Conan. It's so bad it's good. Mostly. It is interesting how listening to music has changed. As a youth I had my parents hand me down Hi-Fi and records. Then came cassette tapes, CD's. I skipped over the i-pod, but did digital music services. I digitized CD's onto my hard drive (seems like ages ago), then started Pandora. These days it's You Tube. 

Make sure you understand the instructions. I thought "For Version" meant the real life version, which mine is a "G" for the German one. That is not what those mean, the letters correspond to the version as  noted on the schemes, so the German one is version C, not G. Idiot!

To be continued...