Skip to main content

RNLAF F-104 Starfighter, 322 Sqn, Leeuwarden AB, c. 1980

Here is my fourth and final (for now) Dutch jet, the awesome F-104 Starfighter! The Starfighter could achieve speeds of Mach 2, which made it great at intercepting Russian bombers. Its tiny wings, however, meant that it wasn’t particularly manoeuvrable and needed to land at exceptionally high speeds so it wouldn’t drop out of the sky.

F-104 Starfighter

The F-104 is a bit of an infamous aircraft. There was a rather large scandal when it was found out that Lockheed had bribed several foreign military and political figures to secure purchase contracts. Among these was the Dutch Prince-Consort Bernhard, who as a result was forced to resign as Inspector-General of the Dutch Armed Forces and was not allowed to wear his military uniform in public anymore. Additionally, high accident rates earned the jet the unfortunate nicknames of Widowmaker and Flying Coffin. That said, though, it’s a really pretty aircraft...

The Dutch Air Force operated the F-104 from 1962 to 1984, alongside the NF-5 Freedomfighter that I built earlier. This one was operated by 322 Sqn out of Leeuwarden. The model is by Italeri, built straight out of the box but mounted on a metal stand by JC Wings. 

Assembly was very straightforward. Only a little bit of filling and sanding was required, particularly around the openable airbrakes. There was one minor problem, however. The paint guide only provide you with instructions for the early, all-grey version of the jet as it arrived straight from the factory. I, however, preferred to paint my F-104 in the common two-tone camouflage scheme also seen on my NF-5 and F-84F.

RNLAF F-104
Starfighter D-6654 after having been repainted.

A bit of googling taught me that the D-6654, decals for which are supplied in the box, was also repainted at some point. Even better, the markings on the camouflaged jet were almost identical to when it was still all grey. In other words, I could just paint it the way I wanted to, without having to buy any aftermarket decals. Great! 

RNLAF F-104

Painting instructions for the exact camouflage pattern were found on the very useful Dutch IPMS model website. The only real difficulty was to get a nice, straight line between the colours on the top and bottom of the aircraft. Using masking tape when brush painting never works properly for me, so there was some cleaning up afterwords. But the end result is pretty cool, I think!

Paints used (Vallejo): 

Camouflage: 70.992 Neutral Grey and 70.887 US Olive Drab

Bottom: mix of 70.870 Medium Sea Grey and 70.883 Silver Grey
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint:  I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...
2 comments
Read more

Space Wolves killteam

  Time for my second 100 pt. kill team, this time featuring the ever popular sci-fi Vikings known as Space Wolves. It’s a nice little group of three Intercessors and three Reivers. The new Primaris models are massive compared to the old Tactical Space Marines and to make them look even more impressive I based hem on bits of cork painted to look like rocks.   The models were primed in Citadel Fenrisian grey. After this, I painted most of the details apart from the faces of the two tough guys that are too cool to wear helmets. I then gave everything a black wash and added (a bit crudely) the odd edge highlight. I then painted the faces following a pretty simple process of applying a base skin colour, washing with brown and then highlighting with a lighter skin tone. Finally, I drybrushed the rocks with dark grey, then light grey and finally very gently with white. As a finishing touch I added two layers of AK Snow Sprinkles for a nice half-melted snow look.   I took my...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again.  Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario.   Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...
Post a Comment
Read more