Greetings! Here is my Skyhawk
finished in the colors of VMAT-102, a replacement training squadron circa
Vietnam. She is the excellent Hasegawa A-4E kit, though it was re-boxed as
a Promodeler kit in the Blue
Angels boxing. I finished the kit
in the gear up mode and fabricated a stand out of a cheap wooden plaque and
clear acrylic rod.
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The kit went
together without too much trouble. Those who have built this kit know that it
has a lot of detail, but also a lot of "fiddly bits." I ended up not
using most of the detail areas since I wanted to build it gear up. I used a
spare pilot figure out of the Monogram F-105D, with his legs cut off and his
rear end shaved down a bit. I did manage to position his hand on the control
stick (something I feel compelled to achieve on all my models).
Usually
I will build something into the tail pipe of the model that the acrylic rod will
fit into to support it, but I found that the tail pipe of the kit was about
5/16", so the rod would fit in without modification. The acrylic rod was
heated in an oven at 350 degrees F and bent by hand into the desired curved
shape (barely visible in the pictures).
I
used Zuni rocket pods, Mk82's and MER's from the Hasegawa weapon set for the
armament. The bombs were painted intermediate blue to represent dummy training
rounds. The drop tank is from the kit.
The
rest of the construction went as usual. It was painted with Tamiya flat white on
the underside, Model Master Acryl gull gray on top. Gloss coat used was Future
through an airbrush, unthinned. Decals were superscale, and went on without
incident. Even the big red bird on the side was not too hard to apply. For
shading and weathering, I used a sludge wash of black enamel/thinner and pastel
dust. It may be a bit overdone, but I think it looks okay overall. Final flat
coat was Pollyscale clear flat.
Thanks
for reading, and thanks to the support on the ARC forums!
Charles
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