Another typical 12 Squared kit. It comes packaged in a plastic bag with a paper header. The parts are crudely cast with lots of flash and large injection gates. The worst parts are those comprising the fuselage (parts 1 & 2), and everything for the Air Logistics trailer except the wheels. It is obvious that building this kit will be no "walk in the park". I had hoped that with some thirty previous releases this kit would have shown some improvement in molding technique over earlier subjects, but I was sadly disappointed. Parts consist of 10 pieces for the Firebee II and 16 pieces for the Air Logistics 3000H trailer, all in a soft, light grey plastic. A paper clip (part 15) is provided for the wheel axles and a metal rod (part 18) for the support rod. The instructions are by far the best feature of the kit. There is a very informative and comprehensive history of the Firebee II, some cut-away diagrams, scale drawings and a set of grainy, but interesting photos on the back page. Panel lines are engraved but they are so faint that they will definitely disappear with any amount of sanding. Decals are included but they had yellowed due to age. To remove the yellow I taped them to a window to expose them to the sun for a few weeks while I worked on the remainder of the model. Construction sequence is shown via an exploded parts diagram with some brief notes. All the parts are butt joined. No locating pins are used, so consequently part alignment is not easy.

The first task is to separate the parts and do some cursory sanding. Construction starts with the fuselage, which needs a lot of work. The mating surfaces of the fuselage pieces (parts 1 & 2) require sanding on a piece of sandpaper mounted to a flat surface to get any kind of a decent fit.

The fuselage halves contain slots for fitting the wings (part 7 & 8). The slots are too small and needed trimming to get the tabs on the wings to fit. After some thought I decided that the best way to minimize the filling necessary between the fuselage and the wings was to fill the wing slots and attach the wings as a butt join. To do this I removed the tabs from the wings and sanded the mating surface smooth. Then the slots were filled with square plastic rod, which was cut to length and glued into the slots. The seams around the slots were filled with super glue and sanded smooth.

The jet exhaust was opened up and a plastic tube added to the inside of the fuselage.

  

Then the body halves were joined. Even with the sanding of the mating surfaces you will still have a "mother of all seams" along the entire length of the body on both the upper and lower surfaces. Once the seam is dealt with, you'll still need to fill some depressions and sink marks in the plastic. There is a significant sized depression about half way between the nose and the jet intake on the upper side of the fuselage to deal with. The jet intake pieces (parts 3 & 4) were joined together and then added to the fuselage. Next came an overall sanding to remove the numerous small undulations in the plastic on the fuselage. The sanding pretty well removed all of the original scribed fuselage lines, so I re-scribed the majority of the panel lines using the diagram as a guide, and then moved on to the other parts. The wings and horizontal stabilizers (part 5 & 6) were cleaned up and then glued to the body along with the fin (part 9). Surprisingly all three fit reasonably well into their respective slots in the fuselage with minimal work required to open up the slot and not too much filling work afterward.

At this point two small decisions have to be made. The first is whether or not to add the belly tank (part 10). I chose to leave it off. The second is whether to make the Firebee as either the USAF or the USN version. The difference is in the length of the parachute shroud cover that runs along the top rear of the fuselage - the USAF version having a longer cover than the USN version. This shroud cover has to be made by the modeller. I chose the USN version and I fashioned my cover from some half round styrene rod. I then sanded the ends to round them and glued the shroud into position.

An Air Logistics 3000H trailer is included. It comes with its own separate instruction sheet. Here is where you'll probably spend the most time sanding. I wanted to replace the support rails (part 11) with some Evergreen plastic I-beams but was unable to find a suitable replacement so I had to settle for the original kit pieces. Also the U-shaped supports (parts 16) are not quite symmetrical so unless you have the talent to remake these complex shaped parts you'll have to live with this flaw.

Painting preparation consisted of two coats of light gray primer, with sanding and filling of imperfections between the coats. Once an acceptable finish was achieved, the Firebee received a coat of Floquil Caboose Red as the base primer coat followed by another sanding to remove imperfections before the final four coats of orange. For this I used Testors Gloss Orange enamel with a few drops of red added to darken the orange. Again, sanding was done between each coat. When everything had dried the black parts were masked and sprayed with a coat of Testors Gloss Black enamel.

The trailer received six coats of Testors Gloss Yellow enamel. The tires were brush painted Testors Flat Black enamel.

Application of the decals ran into a major snag. As expected, the sunlight had done its job in bleaching the yellow from the carrier film, but the application of the first US star-and-bar decal revealed it to be out of register, showing a very noticeable white crescent around half of the blue disc. Close inspection of the remaining images still on the decal sheet under a magnifying glass showed this to be the case for all four of the insignia. What a very irritating turn of events! Previous 12 Squared kits had had magnificent decals that far outshone the kit they came with. But it appears that with the Firebee II the decal sheet quality had fallen drastically to the point where it matched the crudeness of the moldings.

So for about a year the kit's completion awaited the location of new US insignia or some form of alternate markings. After much searching I ran across Starfighter Decals operated by Mark Tutton at Mark's Models and Toys. He was able to custom print me some US Insignia of the proper size using his Alps printer. I gave the custom decals a coat of Microscale Decal Film liquid to protect the inks and I applied the insignia and the NAVY script to the model. Application of Microsol made the images snug down nice and tight to the paint. I didn't think to coat the kit's decals containing the stencils before using them and they separated into pieces when I tried to slide them from the decal paper. Oh well, another strike against the kit decals and my Firebee will be just left in its generic markings.

The final item was the addition of a scratch built pitot tube to the starboard side on the nose.

Conclusion

This a very difficult kit to build, and the poor decal sheet reduces the value of the kit markedly.