FJ-2 Fury

Sword, 1/72 scale

Reviewed by Graham Carter

The North American FJ-2 and later FJ-3 were designed as carrier versions of the F-86 Sabre and first flew in 1951. As such they had modifications such as wider track, arrestor gear, extended nose u/c legs, machine gun armament reduced to four 20mm cannon, a modified canopy front and outer wings that folded up to ease storage on a carrier.

They were very different from the straight wing FJ-1, and later FJ-4s had a different wing for new undercarriage and weaponry.

Numerous alterations were made to the airframe to accommodate weapons and  performance changes. Never a really successful aircraft the 200 FJ-2s only served with the Marine Corps, none being offered to overseas nations unlike the very successful F-86 Sabre.

The Fury has been well served in 1/48 scale by Lindberg, Italeri, Matchbox, Hobbycraft and KittyHawk, but in the ‘One True Scale’ there has only been the Emhar/Revell and Aeroclub kits, the latter as a vacform.

The former is bit crude and the latter very hard to find, so Sword’s kits have been a welcome addition on the kit market. First released as a trio in 2018 as kits SW 72107-19, this is yet another iteration with new decals. A hunt through the ether will find these earlier reviews on Hyperscale.

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Thumbnail panels:

The kit comes in the familiar end-opening box with a nice CAD illustration on the top and the two decal choices underneath. Inside is a resealable plastic sleeve containing the two larger mid-grey sprues, a clear transparency sprue and a resin ejector seat, the latter two in their own bags.

The instructions are a colour eight-page folded A5 booklet, and the decals are in there as well.

Parts are nicely moulded with very little flash and only a small seam to clean up, especially on the wheels and u/c legs. Details are very well delineated and finely reproduced, although some modellers would have liked the control surfaces to be better indicated.

As usual with short-run kits, there are no locating pins/holes so can will be needed in lining parts during gluing. The inner wheel bay doors are correctly moulded closed, although incorrectly shown open in the colour scheme drawings! I’m sure the detail nut will be able to adapt PE detail sets for the F-86 to these kits.

Construction steps are clearly set out and start with the cockpit, then the internal intake and exhaust trunking, followed by wings and undercarriage, another nicely detailed area with boxed in wells and good detail for the legs and doors.

Finally come the tanks and canopy as well as seperate wingtip lights.

In each stage there are colour call outs illustrated in colour by an eleven letter key in name alone, with no manufacturers mentioned. Curiously, there are two Sidewinder missiles and a refuelling probe provided but no reference is made to these - they weren’t carried on the FJ-2, so into the spares they go! They do not appear on the sprue maps and are not used in this model. The two-part resin seat will enhance the interior and the instruments are suitably embossed on the side and front panels for careful painting - no decal are provide for these. No mention is made of the need for nose weight and I would be inclined to throw a bit in the front to prevent tail-sitting. Alternatively, the modeller can have the arrestor hook in the down position as a support. 

Markings

Decals are supplied for two examples:

1. BuNo. 131307, LC of Marines VMF-122 USS Coral Sea in 1955, in silver overall with red and yellow stripes on tail and mid fuselage, and

2. Bu.No. 131937 in Navy colours at Patuxent Test Center in o/a dark sea blue.

Decals are very nicely printed by Techmod with great colour, register and density and with barely a whisker of carrier film beyond the image.

With quite a lot of white markings it is nice to see them printed on mid-blue paper so the all items can be clearly identified - thank you Sword!!  Each example is illustrated with four-view colour placement and colour drawing.

In summary, this is a nice little kit and the decal choices will enable the modeller to add to his or her naval fleet.

Thanks to Sword Models for the review samples.

Text and Images Copyright © 2021 by Graham Carter
Page Created 10 November, 2021
Last updated 10 November, 2021

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