In the wings is this beauty.
I’ve been waiting for a large-scale version of this craft to come out and Trumpeter beat the pack. I’m not a big Trumpeter fan, but right now it’s the only game in town. I’ve started collecting reference photos on fan and F135 engine details. Trumpeter always includes good engines, but you don’t see them. When my grandson built their F-18 large-scale model when he was 12, we did a cutaway of the engine bay to show one of the F404 engines.
When I built their F-105G Thunderchief Wild Weasel, I separated the aafterburner and put it back in the plane it looked like and entire engine was inside and then mounted the rest of the engine on brass, hand-built support stand. Then I completely detailed the F75 engine. It worked out well.
For this build I’m still not sure what I want to do. I have some good images of the entire propulsion system out of the aircraft. If I were a rich man, I’d buy two kits so I could extract the entire system and display it while still having the plane intact. If might be fun to display it with the engine systems to be exposed.
What do you guys thinK?
After doing some more research I realized that I was misquoting the horsepower absorbed by the fan clutch and fan. I had thought it was 45,000. That’s the total output of the engine split between the lift fan, the tailpipe and the wing vents. The fan itself absorb about 20,000 hp. And also interesting (to me) is the hp absorbed by the massive compresor is 100,000. Then it gains 200,000 hp in the burner. I never would have imagined that it takes about 1/2 of the horsepower generated from burning the fuel to run the compressor section. Part of the compressor hp is expended from the wing vents since they are using bleed air from the comressor section.
So stay tuned. I won’t be starting this build until I complete the 5"38 naval gun and Takom Apache projects so we’re sometime in late Spring.
