The Chair Force #1: Hasegawa 1/72 Sea Harrier FRS.1

So I have a hobby.

Apparently they call it plastic modeling and it's something where you glue pieces of plastic together.


Ok I'm just joking around, but welcome to the first installment of the Chair Force, a series of posts where I chronicle my growing love for aircraft plastic modeling.

For the uninitiated, the hobby where you build a smaller scale plastic kit of a fighter plane, tank, robot, or for the more mundane: forklifts.

How exciting!

How did I get into this soul-sucking hobby? Other than the obvious reason of keeping my hands busy, I guess was one of childish ownership. Want an F-14 or a 5-storey tall death robot but too poor or just plain impossible? Well Fuck That Noise bro; I’ll just build one myself! 


The reward you get in the end when you have the final product, with the paint that you put on and the kit you glued, sanded and cried bloody tears of pain over, you can really admire the accomplishment and satisfaction in something you built. 

It's pretty addictive. 

So I built this. It’s a Hasegawa 1/72 Sea Harrier FRS.1 and while it’s the second plane kit I built, it’s my first jet. The Harrier family of aircrafthas always been a favorite of mine, and the legendary performance of the Sea Harrier during the Falklands War made me itching to build one.

Now was that 800 or 801?

Being a Hasegawa release, the kit is in it's usual great quality with excellent fitting and fine details.


Hailing from way back in the 80's when Hasegawa was less stingy, it comes with a full weapon assortment of bombs, AIM-9 sidewinders and Sea Eagle anti shipping missiles.


I built it up as an example from 801 Naval Air Squadron of the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm in their sharp early Extra Dark Sea Grey over White scheme. As you can see from the pics below, it looks pretty impressive! A definitely better look than boring-ass grey all over.

Not so good however, was the glass canopy.

Any aircraft model builder can tell you that piece of clear plastic is their bane of existence. So many different methods have been tried to keep that paint off it nobody knows what's the right way anymore.

Most people use the Future method: The canopy is dipped in a funky liquid called Future Floor Polish which helps to keep it clear and protect its shine before masking and painting.

In theory this should leave it bright and shiny like how a real life canopy should be but mine ends up with some horrible corrosion for some reason. What's causing this is a big mystery for me so if anyone has any theories why, I'd love to hear them.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with the final result! A simple and easy build, and it looks so darn cool just sitting on my desk fully loaded with all those missiles on it.

You can check out larger pics and more at my flickr here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/df0084/

and set:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/df0084/sets/72157629541671750/

Thank you for looking and please let me know what you think!