HB A-6E 1/48 - Flight of the Intruder

Can’t stress this enough - you will need to wash your Hobby Boss kits with warm soapy water to remove the chemicals left behind for ejection mold release. 

There are a tone of sprues for this kit - with a full complement of munitions. A great value for the money IMHO. 

The landing gears are very intricate and detailed. They rely on plastic to in case the metallic struts.. 

The office builds up beautifully! However, there are no decals for any of the dials or screens– so it’s either aftermarket or scratch build for the decals. For those of you looking to put pilots into this intruder, the Hasegawa /48 pilots will NOT fit without excessive surgery - making in-flight posing difficult. I do not recommend attaching the instrument panel to the cockpit at this stage of the build. 

The fuselage comes together pretty well here, with the exception of the air intakes, which may need a bit of massaging. Minimal filling is required here. The details on this kit is sublime. 

There’s no mention of the need to use a ballast up front to keep this from being a tail sitter - so I decided to play it safe and put some in. Given the fact I couldn’t put any weight on the nose code, I had to double up the weight closer to the fulcrum. A quick test shows that the weights should be sufficient. 

Pairing the wings to the fuselage was a terrible experience - clamps were needed to make them fit with minimal gaps. 

If you love rivets, this kit has it in spades. Unfortunately, a lot of it was erased in my quest to remove the centerline sea lines - so out comes the 0.8mm riveter to restore the lines. 

The wings required serious clamping to get the wing roots to join up. 

I chose the Black Panthers w/c served on the USS Nimitz for this build  

Pylons done 

Although the TRAM version of the A-6E came out later, my kit had this option, so I might as well put it in. Historically accurate? No - but neither was the USS Nimitz traveling back to 1941 in the movie: The Final Countdown. ? 

First layer of the white underbelly completed… 

Underside complete! 

Working on the upper half - everything going well till I sneezed…. ? 

The fit on this kit has been… mixed. The fuselage/landing bay fit to the TRAM / Non-Tram section is terrible - so the area has to be masked off and sanded down for a better fit. I would like to know if these guys even bothered to test build their own kits before they release them… 

Using modeling plasticine is great for a feathered look, but it droops down after a while, so I opted to use tape instead. A gap is left at the top to allow for a feathered look. I ran my hands on the edges to make it less tacky, but in the future, I’ll just paint on that area so it will never stick! 

Almost there… 

Stay on target… 

The A-6 has seen a TON of action over Vietnam - so by the time this unit served on the USS Nimitz in the 1980s before it went back in time to 1941 (Final Countdown movie reference), it’s really starting to show a fair bit of weathering. Even the F-14s shown in that move already started to show a lot of mottling - and those were ~10 years old, and definitely washed for the movie! 

The genius who thought up of the radome color+ red air intake painting scheme definitely didn’t think how easy it was to spot and shoot at a slow moving A-6 with the red intakes! I understand it’s not safe to be in front of it, but come on!

Anyways, it would be very difficult for me to mask of the interior intake to get a fine red line, so I opted to overspray the area, mask it off, and then correct the overspray with white. 

Sanity solved. Al thought I used a blow drier to speed up the drying of the paint, it wasn’t enough and the masking tape left the surface a bit textured. This will need to be knocked down with a fine 4000 grit sanding stick later. At least this part is mostly done! 

Note to self, thin decals don’t need the industrial strength Walthers to make it settle. Note the tears on the delicate decals will need to be repaired with pin-point masking, airbrushing and praying… 

Repairs and decals completed, now it’s time to focus on the armaments prior to weathering 

Paul mentioned that the seats should be khaki in color - so I gently lifted them from the build and repainted them to the correct color. ?