Introduction

Many would say that Hasegawa’s series of 1/48 Phantom kits are considered some of the best out there. Unfortunately one shortcoming of the kit is the intakes, which is blanked off about 50mm inside the intake. Most modellers were resigned to scratching some FOD covers or making their own intakes until Cutting Edge produced some seamless intakes. Since the demise of Meteor Productions the void that was created has once again be filled by DMold Modelworks. Dmitri Malkov, who was one of the master pattern makers for Meteor and Collect-Aire Resins, has gone into business himself and has produced a line of products some of which include seamless intakes for the Phantom.

The Parts

This particular set is for the Hasegawa F-4 K or M Phantom II. The K/M was the British version of the F-4, known as the FGR.1 and FGR.2, which was powered by the Rolls Royce Spey 203 engine. The parts come in a small zip seal bag stapled to a folded over backing card with an A5 instruction sheet included in the bag. There are 8 parts in total, two Seamless Intake trunks which are moulded integrally with the trunks, turbine fan blades, two intake ramps and 2 splitter plates. The casting is superb, with no air bubbles at all on the parts, and the fit is amazing (the fan just push fit onto the intake trunks). For some reason the Ramps and splitter plates are cast in a grey resin as opposed to the white resin that the rest are cast in.

In order to use the set you will need to do a little surgery to your kit. This is clearly marked on the instructions. A quick grind with the Dremel tool and it's ready to install. As a plus the resin parts will be hiding the hole you make, so you don’t have to be neat with your cuts but I would still recommend being careful when doing this operation. There is a small resin part that needs removing from the trunks but this easily came away after a couple of scores with a fresh blade in my knife. I would recommend painting the insides of the trunks and the ramps separately and then gluing them together as this make painting them easier. A quick test fit to the Plastic kit shows an almost flawless fit with very little need for filler or sanding to match up the edges. Some would say that the splitter plates are not needed as the kit provided ones would fit onto the resin intakes but a closer inspection shows the fine details that have been added, such as the small vents on the rear of the plates.

Conclusion

This is a wonderful enhancement for the Hasegawa kit. It is very easy to use with only a minimal amount of kit bashing which makes it an ideal set for the beginner who has had minimal experience using resin update sets. The final result of having full trunks all the way back to the engine faces far outweighs the need to build some FOD covers. Coupling this set with the FGR.1 exhausts from Aries will make a vast improvement to the British Phantom. The only negative that I can find is availability in the EU as DMold currently doesn’t have a distributor for the UK or EU. The website doesn’t say anything about purchasing direct from them either and filling in the contact us box resulted in an email linking to another forum. In the U.S. you can get the range from Victory Models and North American Hobbies

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