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Another Bandai kit, the Swordfish is based on the fighter used by Spike Spiegel, the main character from Cowboy Bebop. If you haven't seen the show, you really should.
It's much better than Cats...I'm going to see it again and again.
Kit detail is good. There's more to see here than on the Red Tail, such as rivets, panel lines, and other greeblies. Like the Red Tail, the top and bottom halves of the canopy's central sections have large interlocking bits of plastic tabbing that sit right in front of the pilot. I had to cut these tabs off, then sand down the nubs flush and try my best to buff and polish the damage away. I had to use lots of Novus and Future. The tabs on the Swordfish's canopy are mostly obscured by the upper section of the fuselage, but the rear hinges are visible. Also, the pilot figure of Spike is a bit tricky to fit inside, and his big hair presses up against the inside of the canopy. Oddly, the canopy pieces for this kit were provided in clear plastic, while the pieces for the Red Tail were tinted brown/gold. I used Tamiya clear yellow, clear red, and clear smoke to give the Swordfish canopy a tint.
For some reason I decided to leave the folding wings mechanism in place. After the fact, I realized I should have just glued the wings in the locked open position. While the wings can fold now, the fit is very loose, and the gaps between the wing pieces can be quite large. Also, the landing gear don't stay down at symmetrical angles. I think one gear is jammed up against something in the well, so it sticks out a bit farther than it should. The gear are also missing the transverse struts that can clearly be seen in some of the artwork and in the tv series. Other than those issues, the fit was decent, and assembly was simple.
I only made one modification to the kit, and that was do drill out the machine gun ports and replace them with hollow styrene tube. They just look better than the slots that were molded into the winglets.
When I started painting the kit, I tried pre-shading the panel lines. This worked fine for the gray areas, but most of the ship is red, and the black was just far too intense and kept showing through even multiple coats of red, red, and more red. After several days of painting red, I think I finally toned down the pre-shading underneath enough to say it was done. Panel lines were accentuated with a dark red sludge wash.
I'd love to get my hands on the Club-M version of this kit, which is more detailed, but considering the rarity of the kit and the popularity of the subject-- that's a long shot.
