The Northrop/McDonnell Douglas YF-23 Black Widow II was a competitor for the contract that eventually went to the Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics team presenting the F-22 Raptor. At the time of the competition, some claimed the YF-23 was faster, stealthier, and more maneuverable than the F-22.
I don’t know about those claims, but the YF-23 certainly looked cool! There were only two flying prototypes, so it is a pleasant surprise to see this plane in kit form — especially in 1/48 scale.
Construction begins with the cockpit, which doubles as the roof of the nose-gear well. Careful painting will be rewarded with a busy looking cockpit. Be careful with the smaller parts — the throttle of my kit joined other parts in the graveyard that is my carpet. The instrument decal refused to wrap around the contours of the panel. If you choose to use it, I suggest cutting it into four sections to solve this minor problem.
The main gear and wells are next, according to the instructions. Be careful when aligning the parts for the wells to ensure a good fit inside the fuselage. I checked to see if the struts could be mounted after painting. This can be accomplished with only a little trimming on the nose gear strut (D10). I painted the gear with Tamiya gloss white and used Vallejo wash for gray vehicles to bring out the details.
Assembling the fuselage, wings, and stabilators proceeded quickly — too quickly, as it turns out. I forgot to install the nose weight. I drilled a hole in the front of the nose-gear well, coated some small fishing sinkers in super glue, dropped them in, and covered the hole with a disk punched from thin styrene.
HobbyBoss’ decision to engineer the wing-to-fuselage joint as a straight line, rather than at the panel line, puzzles me. It took quite an effort to eliminate the seam and smooth out the contours of this wing joint. The stabilator-to-fuselage fit is tight enough to eliminate the need for glue, leaving them free to be repositioned or removed for transport.
I painted the exhaust areas with Alclad II burnt iron and used Testors Model Master paints for the light/dark ghost gray camouflage scheme. This is where HobbyBoss lets us down: The markings guide shows irregularly shaped areas of dark ghost gray on top of the wings and engines. But all of the photos I have seen show the areas on the wings bordered at the panel lines, and smooth, curved triangles on top of the engines.
The decals might have been for the aircraft involved in the flyoff with the F-22, but the kit provides a speculative in-service scheme. Markings consist of four black “stars and bars,” 56 “No Step” stencils, fighter tail codes for only the outer sides of the tails, and four shield-shaped emblems — but the instructions do not provide their location on the kit. All of the photos I’ve seen show markings on all four sides of the tails, including ATF stripes, YF-23 and serial number, and two of the shields. These photos also show U.S. Air Force along the upper fuselage sides and Northrop/McDonnell Douglas on the nose. I chose not to use the stencils, but the remaining decals went down without problems. I oversprayed the black decals with an appropriate gray to tone them down a bit.
The model scales out a little larger than the specifications I found on the Internet, but the finished model looks correct to me. This was one of the easiest builds I’ve completed in some time; anyone with a little experience should be able to build this kit into a nice replica.
It was an incredibly fun kit of an interesting subject. I hope that more reference material and a more-accurate set of decals will become available soon. I’d like to build the other prototype in its all-black paint scheme.
Note: A version of this review appeared in the April 2014 FineScale Modeler.