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A-1E Skyraider 1/48 - Crossed the Finished Line


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Greeting ARC modelers,

 

It's been a few years since I did a show and tell here. So this is my attempt on the Fat Face using the Revell/Matchbox kit bash with the Monogram Skyraider wings. I'm going to use a rehab Monogram wings. More about that later.

 

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I'll be using a KMC front cowl set I got on Ebay many years back. The set includes the whole front engine compartments, plus some extras. KMC came out with this update many years ago, and was meant to address the Monogram A-1H small cowl size. Even though the Revell cowl had the right size, the nose ring shape is off. The KMC piece is perfect, though I'm not sure how this will pan out. Preliminary try out seems to indicate that could work with the Revell fuselage. 

 

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I'll use the Quickboost pylons and pneumatic rear wheel. These are superbly cast, and will be a huge improvement over the kit's offer.

 

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Regards

Triet

 

Edited by trietmcam
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About the wings, this is where it came from. I built this 15 years ago.

 

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I had a big snafu. While moving the model around, it slipped off the base and dropped on a hard tile floor. Needless to say, it was obliterated in small pieces. All the kings men couldn't put this back in their wildest dream.

 

 

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It was one of my better build effort, with painted fuselage bands and insignias, and a bunch of scratch builds. 

After my composure recovered, along with some explicit vocabularies, I decided on what to do with it. Then the light bulb kicked in; why not use the wings and tail planes to kit bash the E, instead of wasting a perfectly good Tamiya kit. The Monogram wings is very comparable to the Tamiya wings, minus the raised panel lines. And panel lines were already scribe. I wasn't going to use the Rev/Matchbox wing, too much fixing needed to update. Plus it's a lot shorter from tip to tip, not to mention too much tapered off at the wing tips

 

Here's what it looked like after a few weeks of rehab job. The oil cooler doors are at the side fuselage for the E's, not under the fuselage like the H's . As the results, the whole underside was filled out with plastic sheets. It's one continuous smooth surface at the bottom. The armor plates were sanded out, as the E did not carried them. And obviously, the E's did not have gear doors and the wheel wells were circular, not square.

 

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I collected a lot of walk around photos to get the bottom fuselage references before getting started. The E bottom is a lot different than the H. While all kinds of refs are available for the H, few exists for the E. 

 

 

 

 

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Just added in the pylons. I left off the sway braces for now, just to be on the safe side.  I added in thin plastic strips along each pylon's. They represented some sort of gaskets. You can see them on the real things. Plus they hide imperfections along the joints. The curves on the pylons don't match the wings curves that well. I suspect QB made these for the Tamiya's Skyraider.

 

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Note how the pylons are positioned. The big ones are pointing vertical to the ground, while the smaller ones are perpendicular to the wings. And notice the third pylon from outer has a larger distance gap to the near pylons, while others are shorter. Monogram actually got this right. Scale wise, it's pretty close to the Douglas drawing.

 

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The static wicks are added in. It's probably easier to add them in at this time than later on. They are made from fishing lines, 0.015 inch. I heat each over a candle to get them to bend. Just one quick pass over a flame is all needed to get a curl. I cut a slot about the same thickness along the wing top for each of the line to nest in, and hit them with Gorilla glue. They're pretty strong once the glue is dried. 

 

Also I repaired the rectangular clear orange  lights at the wing tips. There are 2 on top and bottom wing.

 

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The wings are fixed. I sprayed Mr Surfacer 100 to check for any flaws that were overlooked. It's quite difficult to check with all the damages on the surface without a uniformed primer coat on first.

 

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I did have to go back and re-scribe a few panel lines. But overall, it's good to go.  I'll set it aside for now. Since the original model had the flaps down, I'll just continue as is. I'll leave them off til later to avoid accidents. 

 

That's all for now. Thanks for checking out.

 

Edited by trietmcam
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Getting on with the E specifics, I started the dual seats. I wanted to do a Yankee extraction, but the kits only has the early bucket seat version. The only Yankee seat available is the True Details seat, which I think came from the old KMC mold, but it belong to the A-1H. The A-1E had a different design.

Modifications is necessary to fit the Cobra cockpit. First thing is the sides must be sanded off to get it to fit; not sure if the A-1H had wider seat. The rocket packs are mounted behind the seat. And the head rest is modified

 

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I used reference pics from the Wayne Mutza book, "The A-1 Skyraider in Vietnam" to scratch build necessary changes to the seats. Note the rocket cylinder is slightly angled outward. This is keep the pilot ejecting into the canopy bar above. 

 

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Good thing TT posted a link to his most excellent blog page. I was going to scribble something about some youtube video, but the blog page has a link to it.

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15 hours ago, Tailspin Turtle said:

The A-1E Yankee seat rockets were angled to insure separation of the crew during extraction. Also see https://tailhooktopics.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-1e-yankee-escape-system.html

 

That's what I figured. I always wondered if the center support sliding canopy bar gets blown along with the canopy when jettisoned. It must be scary getting ejected out of the plane with that bar sitting there. So many thing could go wrong.''One of my father's squadron mate successfully ejected out of an A-1E in 1972, but he was killed by machine gun bullets while parachuting down.

 

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I also noticed the bar is a straight line from front to rear, unlike the curve version of the kit's. This is going to be hard to correct since that center bar is part of the canopy. Unless if the canopy is pose opened, it wont be that obvious. I'll figure that out later. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, phantom said:

Excellent recovery and work!

 

Thanks. Just a small update today. I got the instrument panel dry fit to the fuselage and painted. There were a lot of fiddling and sanding to get it to sit right on the fuselage. Reading some of the other build online, I fully expect this going to be a tough fight with this build all the way. So far it's proving that.

 

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I was struggling the last 4 days starting on the fuselage. The cockpit floor was prepare to go into the fuselage first. At this time, the rest of the cockpit component will stay off. 

 

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Before I started this build, I was already planning a strategy to graft the A-1E and H fuselage together. Most of the builds out there used the donor kits lower fuselage (Tamiya) as much as possible. Cutting into the Matchbox fuselage in front of the windscreen all the way to the rear tailplanes. The advantage is there is less work with the wings to fuselage mating. The disadvantage is it required lots of cutting, sanding and fillers. But they all turned out great.

 

My method is a little different. I cut the A-1E at the low bottom fuselage off and mate to the A-1H underside, and maintained the front A-1E fuselage. The advantage is, I already had the dive brake and tail wheel built. Plus the A-1H rear wheel wells have better details. The hard part is maintain the same aircraft profile while fitting two different kits parts.

 

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I scribed a line parallel to the underbody for both kits, making sure they have comparable height throughout. Once I was comfortable with the dimensions of both, I proceed to do the cutting. Cross braces were added for reinforcement and to maintain the same profile as the lower fuselage. This involved a lot of back and forth measurements of the fuselage height at each of the vertical panel lines making sure it still maintain to Douglas drawing as possible in 48th scale. Very tedious work, but less filling and sanding later. 

 

 

 

 

Edited by trietmcam
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the oil inlet air scoop ended up getting chopped and replaced by the Monogram's part. The smiley face shape was not accurate and had no grill backing. This was about the most complicated merge, and it's not that complicated. Some plastic cards were added to blend in with the curvatures of the surrounding areas.

 

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There were some extensive filing and sanding to fix the radiator air inlet at the top. It was hollowed out and a grill was added by using plastic cards. 

 

 

 

Edited by trietmcam
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39 minutes ago, avn said:

Appreciate the detail photos of such delicate work; however, many photos are missing.  Would you please check and post them again.  Thanks in advance.

 

 

Oh, I had no idea. Not sure how it happened. Thx for heads up

 

Triet

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1 hour ago, Tailspin Turtle said:

 

Thanks Turtle. That's where I got a side view drawing from Tailhook to gauge the side profile. One thing I noticed is the difference is the lower side. The drawing has more curvature than the real pic. Even both the Matchbox and Monogram resembled the real pic. The same with real one when it visited Yankee Air Museum a few years back. Could be an illusion, but hard to tell which is correct. That's where the match up mismatch ended, the rest is pretty close to the drawing. I couldn't verify if the nose position is correct. Since the cowl is a full cylinder, it's hard to lay flat to see how it stack up against the drawing. One thing for sure, the E version is a voided subject from manufacturers, and need a new tooling. 

 

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Thanks for the observation on the lack of curve on the bottom of the aft fuselage. It is true that the stations drawings can not be relied upon for shape. However, the display model drawing might be more accurate (green lines) in that regard so I’ll take a look at how it overlays on the bottom of the aft fuselage one of these days.

 

Speaking of the cowl, one error on some AD kits is that the cowling is depicted as being a straight line between the cowl ring and the cowl flaps. As can be seen in your picture, the cowl actually curves down slightly to match the diameter of the cowl ring.

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20 hours ago, Tailspin Turtle said:

Thanks for the observation on the lack of curve on the bottom of the aft fuselage. It is true that the stations drawings can not be relied upon for shape. However, the display model drawing might be more accurate (green lines) in that regard so I’ll take a look at how it overlays on the bottom of the aft fuselage one of these days.

 

Speaking of the cowl, one error on some AD kits is that the cowling is depicted as being a straight line between the cowl ring and the cowl flaps. As can be seen in your picture, the cowl actually curves down slightly to match the diameter of the cowl ring.

 

Roger that.

 

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