I just recently picked up this new kit from the LHS and I have to say I am extremely disappointed with Hasegawa concerning the quality of the kit

I am writing this to show you guys that there are very many errors and if you truely wish to build an accurate Block 60 Desert Falcon

Most of the errors could be solved, however, some are major and cannot be repaired easily without aftermarket sets, or major surgery. A majority of the parts are recycled from an old F-16B Block 15 kit.

1. Cockpit - The cockpit is from a Block 15 F-16B kit and the instrument panels are not even close to being accurate. Currently there are no aftermarket sets that show the Digital Glass Cockpit in the Block 60, the center console should have three MFDs instead of the normal two.

2. Landing Gear - The landing gear is also recycled from the Block 15. The instructions simply have you cut off the landing lights on the Mains and that is good. The real Block 60 has the same landing gear as the Block 40/50

3. Intake - The aircraft features a small mouth intake, and just includes the parts for the GE exhaust. The GE engine requires the larger intake.

I admire Hasegawa for releasing such a new variant of the venerable Falcon, but for now, I would recommend going with the Kinetic kit for now

The Hasegawa F-16 line is about 20 years old now, and certainly has it's deficiencies to be sure.

Hasegawa does have both the wide-mouth intake and exhaust nozzle parts for the GE engine in its F-16 line and they tend to include them in all their releases these days, so I am surprised they do not have it in this one. Below is a picture of the sprue that contains the wide-mouth intake:



I suggest you contact Hasegawa and inform them of their mistake in not including it in this release (or perhaps it is just your kit didn't get a copy of that sprue???)

You can get updated "heavy" type landing gear in metal from scale aircraft conversions. Though this is made for the Tamiya kit, it shouldn't be too hard to adapt.

The cockpit is perhaps available from Aires in the guise of the "F-16I Sufa cockpit set", which i think should be fairly close in representation (but i am not entirely sure about that)

The cockpit, you might be able to get away with a SUFA cockpit unless someone like me looks and gets anal. (I work with Lockheed on Test F-16's and I was on the Block 60 program for a while)

As for landing gear, I was looking at my pics, and the nose gear is completely redesigned for mission requirement. There is a lot more loaded in the nose of this jet, and the new radar package weighs about 25% more

It’s no secret Hasegawa hasn’t updated their F-16D cockpit since the first D kit was issued. The cockpit in not entirely Block 15ish though, as the front cockpit is representative of a standard F-16C/D, but is quite dated for this day and age. However, as you mentioned the kit cockpit isn’t representative of the Block 60 cockpit.

Hasegawa has yet to update their landing gear to the heavy weight gear; this going back to their Block 50 release in the late 90s. This was another peeve of mine, as not only does the gear represent the light weight gear of Blocks 1-32, but it’s not all that accurate to begin with. Also note that the Block 60 Landing Gear is not the same as the heavy weight gear of the Block 40s and 50s. The NLG lower fork is beefed up and wider; as is the NLG wheel assembly. The MLG wheels have a different brake and set screws on the boarder of the outboard wheel hubs. No kit has got that feature right as well, which also holds true (less the main wheels) for the Sufa and any other Block 52+ Vipers.

Hasegawa didn’t provide the correct NLG and MLG inner door structures (Kinetic missed this too) that are specific to the Block 60. They also didn’t provided the standard radome, instead of the angled cut radome; again specific to Block 60.

The MCID intake sprue does come in the Hasegawa Block 60 kit, as both mine have it. Check again, as the previous post shows it. Also note that "early" GE powered Block 30 F-16s had the small (NSI) intake.

While Hasegawa omitted a lot of key features in their Block 60 kit, at least the external details are accurate and much more so than the Kinetic kit. The Kientic kit includes a so-so Block 60 cockpit, but it's softly molded and like the rest of the F-16 kits; it's too shallow and the seats are under-scaled. Not to mention the sruface tooling qaulity is not near as crisp, clean, consistant, nor as fine as Hasegawa. Then there's the shape errors that plagues the Kinetic F-16s to also consider.

As it is right now, there's not a good or complete Block 60 kit OOTB. If only Tamiya would make a D model... If only...

Mike V