Jason's Phantom took about a month to paint and there are still a few small items thatn are not complete and will wait until after the maiden flight to be put on the model. Paint is PPG concept basecoat/clearcoat with PPG 2060 Flexed N' Flat used for the clear overcoat. The grey wasa real trick to get right because the olor supplied by our paint store was far too dark for our use. I mixed in white at a 1 to 1 ratio and the resulting color was still a little off but useable. The real color the US NAVY used on these planes was gloss gull grey and actually has a slightly tan hue to it, we came close but it's not exact if you compare a true sample next to the model.

The metallic areas on the rear of the Phantom are Alclad II laquers over Tamiya black laquer from a spray can which turned out tobe a perfect combination, 6 different shades were used to simulate this area of the airplane.

All of the large markings are vinyl and were custom printed by Pro-Sign design here in Omaha. Perhaps the most tedious part of the project involved having the decal sheet from a Tamiya 1/32nd scale plastic kit scanned and enlarged to fit on the BVM kit. This process took a lot of test fitting to get the markings close to that of the actual real aircraft we were modelling. I only had 2 photo's of phantoms in this scheme and that made getting everything accurate a fairly time consuming task. In the end we think the results of the work speak for themselves.

To round it all off Pro-Mark's F-4 nomenclature set of dry transfers was used for all of the specific small markings that all real Phantoms carried. Pro-Mark rivets and screw were applied to represent all of the removeable maintenenence panels and in the bare metal areas on the rear o the model. Panel lines were acented with a mechanical pencil on the basecoat which gave great results.

As I mentioned before that actual painting took about a month of work but the complete project stretched out over roughly 8-10 weeks. Painting a scale jet is a LOT of work that eats up an enormous amount of time.

To add to the time involved the in finishing the model I did a lot of scratch building. The pitot probes and antennea on the vertical fin were scratch built. All of the other antennea's are also scratch built and have yet to be added. Perhaps the biggest and most nerve wracking part of the project was fixing the nose. This model started out as an F-4E and has been converted into an F-4J which involved cutting off the long noseand fitting the short radome. The worst part of the project involved the air conditioner scoops that are on both sides of the fuse mounted low and to the rear of the radome. The E model Phantom has these scoops but they are contoured into the sides of the nose, the J model Phantom has scoops that have a more protruding appearance. To fix this huge gaff I cut the old ones off and plugged the holes with balsa, puttied it up and sanded the contours to the correct shape. The scoops themselves are scratch built from balsa blocks and are attatched to the nose in the appropriate position. Once all of that was finally completed we finally had a decent representation of the Navy version of the Phantom and could proceed with paint and markings.

I have no idea how many acuall hours went into thi project and really have no desire to know, all I can say is it was much bigger undertaking than we originally had assumed it would be. In the end we're happy with the results so it was all worth it.