MPM XF-85 Goblin

The XF-85 was a corpulent little fighter designed to be carried beneath the belly of a modified B-36 Peacemaker heavy bomber. The idea was that the short-ranged little fighter would be carried by the bomber until enemy airplanes were sighted, whereupon the Goblin would detach, defeat the enemy, and then return to link up with the B-36 again. Though the Goblin was said to be a pleasant enough airplane to fly, despite its short stubby nature, the business of linking up with the B-36 via a giant hook never really worked reliably and after a few accidents the Goblin and the idea of the parasite fighter was officially dropped.

MPM's kit is typical of limited-run kits. The plastic parts have large sprue attachments and no locating pins, but the surface detail is pretty good. The kit includes a small fret of photoetched parts, a film instrument panel, and a cast resin cockpit interior that replaces most of the photoetched and film parts should you choose to use it. I did choose to use it; it makes building and painting the cockpit interior much easier.

I had fit problems when adding the compressor face to the nose, which was undersized and ended up with the centerbody off-centered, so to speak, and when adding the jet exhaust pipe at the rear, which was oversized and called for extensive reaming of the fuselage. The fuselage also required heavy clamping to get the seams to close, I suspect because I didn't sand the interior of the fuselage quite enough to provide clearance for the cast resin cockpit tub. The whole nose area seems a bit fiddly to me - there's the plastic compressor face, the cockpit tub, and the fold'n'scream photoetched hook bay to get installed in a fairly small space. I'm not sure that my alignment is right, but everything eventually went in and the fuselage halves closed up, so...

The wings and empennage are all butt joints to the fuselage, so fit and alignment are strictly up to the modeler. The ventral strakes are supplied as plastic and photoetched parts, but I used the plastic ones; I felt they had a more pleasing cross-section than the dead-flat metal parts. The elevators are trickiest to install - the mounting points are just raised bosses on the fuselage and it's easy to get things seriously out of whack. My elevators are set with a large nose-up angle, but that's okay; it looks "candid", whatever that means.

The airplane doesn't have landing gear, so once you're done adding the wings and tail, that's pretty much it for the airplane. Next comes the transport cart, which is blocky and crude. I replaced the misshappen wheels with better wheels taken from my scrapbox, and I subjected the I-beam parts to heavy sanding to true them up. After that, the main task is getting the uprights on the cart to touch the tiny fold'n'scream photoetch brackets on the nose of the Goblin itself. That proved to be difficult; the uprights seemed disinclined to incline far enough inboard to meet the airplane.

Painting was a simple matter of a coat of Testors two-part lacquer in Plymouth Silver, with a little black acrylic on the anti-glare panel, yellow acrylic on the fin tips, and various acrylic paints shoved "down the barrel" into the cockpit. The vacuum-formed canopy was thin, clear and kind of wobbly, making it difficult to cut out. I masked it and sprayed it silver before I cut it out of the vacuum-formed sheet. I could have refined the fit if I'd worked at it longer, but I got it close enough with sanding sticks and filled the gaps with white glue and touched them up with a bit of silver paint caught in a Solo cup. The decals worked very well, though I managed to break one of the red turbine warning stripes and spent a tense few minutes teasing it back together.

In general, I enjoyed the kit. It wasn't without snags, like the tiny photoetched nose brackets and the offcentered compressor face, and the ground handling cart required more work than expected. But it was a fun model of an unusual airplane, and it looks good on my shelf.