Trumpeter 1/32 A-7E Corsair

[t15dja]

Fresh from the sheer pleasure of building Airfix's 1/24 Hellcat, and now, as the man said, for something completely different.....

....Although not that different really, since it's got an engine and wings and flies through the air...but from a different era and, if first impressions are to be believed, a different and less forgiving building process.

For some reason I've always liked the look of the A-7 Corsair, aka "SLUFF" (an acronym that always seemed a little inaccurate and unfair to me), but have never built one throughout all my modelling years. I've also never yet built a kit by Trumpeter, so why not kill two birds with one stone I thought....also that colourful box art depicting one of the two possible colourful CAG schemes has been staring at me for too long.  

 

 

 

 

There are various reviews of this kit available online, so rather than go on about what's in the box I'll get straight on with the build.

Without knowing much about this offering from Trumpeter I was initially intending to build it straight out of the box, since it was not a cheap kit to start off with so I didn't want to spend much more on it.  However, having studied the parts I did decide to add a couple of aftermarket items as will be seen below.

 

All of the reviews I've read about this kit state that Trumpeter moulded the engine intake too flat. Even their box art depicts a nice round intake, whereas the model's intake has a very definite oval shape with a flattish bottom. A very quick internet search revealed that a company in the USA called Zactomodels makes a replacement resin "lip" that can correct this fault. Further research revealed that the same company also made a replacement resin seamless intake and more accurately shaped canopy. I say "made" because the intake trunk and canopy set are no longer mentioned on their website and after much searching none are available to buy through any retailers. I thought I'd at least have a go at correcting the shape of the intake so I invested in the replacement lip.

 

Looking at the cockpit and comparing it with photos of the real thing, the front panel didn't seem too bad, but the kit's side panels seem to be a generic collection of lumps and bumps and do not compare well to the actual aircraft. The seat is also interesting. Two types of ejection seat are supplied with the kit, namely the earlier "Escapac IG-2" seat and the later "SJU" seat, although the instructions only show how to build the SJU seat. The parts for the SJU seat are also on a separate small sprue "N" thus:

 

Whereas most of the Escapac seat parts are mixed in on sprues D and E

 

 

I'm assuming sprue D is the same as that included with Trumpeter's 1/32 A-7D version, hence their (perceived) need for the new SJU seat sprue for the "E" version.

 

However, another quick bit of research revealed that the switchover from Escapac to SJU seats for the A-7E started in the early 1980's and took a few years to ripple through. The supplied decals are for two 1970's aircraft so, for me, Escapac is definitely the way to go and maybe Trumpeter got it wrong by instructing that the SJU seat should be used for these aircraft. As I say there are no instructions on how to build the Escapac version but it isn't hard to work out which bit goes where....there are only 6 parts! Even so, comparing kit to real thing, I think the Escapac seat supplied is a little light on detail, so I decided to go with Eduard's photoetch set, part 32558, which is now discontinued but luckily I was able to source one on ebay. 

The two seat cushions supplied for the Escapac version are also devoid of any detail, so I decided to add some texture by using a layer of milliput suitably prodded and poked.

 

Here's a picture of the parts with the milliput added and the Eduard set.

 

After bit of gluing, bending, cursing and painting, this was the end result:

 

Many pictures I've seen show a pipe coming from the back of the lower seat cushion, so I decided to add that for a bit of interest...not sure what it is though! I also refashioned the 2 canopy breakers at either side of the head rest out of thin styrene sheet to give a bit more depth.

 

As far as the rest of the cockpit goes, as I say I don't think the side panels are accurate, however a resin replacement is not cheap so I'll stick with what is supplied.

So, with the usual painting, dry brushing and detailing I end up with this:

 

 

As can be seen, I also added a few extra pipes using fuse wire, again just to liven things up a bit.

 

Next will be the intake and installing the resin lip replacement.....

 

 

 

 

Edited April 29, 2020 by t15dja

[t15dja]

Moving on to the engine intake, Trumpeter make this as a two part item - top and bottom - that has a gently "S" bend and a closed off inner end - there is no compressor fan. You can see the upper and lower parts in the top right and bottom left of sprue E below. Joining these together obviously leaves a central seam that runs the whole length of the intake on both sides.

 

First step was therefore to glue the parts together and remove the closed end so I can tackle the seam. This can then be closed off with styrene sheet later. I then filled the seems on both sides with Perfect Plastic Putty, applying and smoothing it with damp cotton buds. I then sanded it using a wet and dry sandpapers of varying grades wrapped around and taped to a pencil. This had to be repeated several times to get a seamless finish but eventually I was happy with the result.

Then we move on to the replacement lip. Below are the instructions from Zactomodels. There are only two pieces of resin - an inner "former" that will give the intake its new shape, and the outer lip.

As you can see the instructions call for the original part to be cut off precisely 5.72 mm from the front edge. Now this is a very exact measurement that I could not hope to achieve....so I just used the Mk1 eyeball, steel rule and sharp pencil to cut off as close to 5.8mm as possible in the knowledge that a tiny bit of sanding / filling would fix any fit issues.

 

Original part after surgery and having superglued on the resin "former":

 

You will see that I've also added on extra bits of sprue to add as strengtheners to the locating tabs on the sides of the intake. This is because the original tabs are quite flimsy and I broke a couple during the test fitting of the intake to the fuselage. I also added some sheet styrene to the sides of the intake to hold it all together. There is also now a new seam to deal with between the resin part and the plastic.

However after much more filling and sanding and priming the result was pretty good...and with a top coat of white this step is done...

 

Here's another shot with a piece of styrene fitted over the inner end of the intake. You can also see the strengthening styrene I've added:

 

When installing the intake into the fuselage, the Zactomodels instructions above call for pressure to be applied just behind the radome like this:

 

This obviously has the effect of opening up the radome seam, which will need to be addressed later. However I found that the fit of the intake was pretty good without applying pressure in that area as you can see in this photo where I'm holding the fuselage halves much further back.

 

So, the intake has now been glued into one fuselage half with the other side just dry fitted and taped to ensure everything stays in the right place while the glue dries....time will tell...

 

Next step will be gluing the other side of the intake to the fuselage, fitting the cockpit, electronic bays and wheel bays and closing up the fuselage. 

 

[t15dja]

So, moving on to closing up the fuselage, this has certainly proved to be a bit of a challenge.

Here we are with the cockpit and intake installed. I've added some styrene sheet to the inside end of the intake trunk. I also squeezed in some lead weight between the cockpit floor and top of the intake trunk (not shown in photo)  just in case this might turn out to be a tail sitter. There was no mention of adding weight in the instructions.

 

 

Exhaust fitted. Two sides ready to join.

 

My goodness this took some fettling to line everything up and avoid ending up with gaps around the back of the cockpit where it meets the fuselage wall. No matter how I tried (and squeezed) I just couldn't get that gap to close up.

 

I can't tell you how much time this took. Eventually I had to walk away and leave it for a few days before I could face it again however, after many, many dry fits, and judicious trimming in the right places eventually perseverance prevailed.

 

.....but leaving me with numerous seams to sort out along the top and bottom of the fuselage

 

 

 

So, out with the filler. Things always look so messy at this stage, and I always wonder if I'll ever be able to get the seams sorted.

 

 

I also added the external resin lip at this stage and gave it a quick shot of primer to see how things looked....answer - not too good. This will be a key area to get right, sitting so prominently at the front of the plane.

 

 

Looking at real aircraft photos, there is no change of curve between the lip and the fuselage, unlike my first attempt, so it was out with the milliput to try and smooth out the contours. This was quite difficult to do because there is an inner seam to deal with as well.

 

Sanded and primed again....getting better.

 

But not the inner seam !

 

This time it was out with the Mr Surfacer...

 

We're definitely getting there...

 

In fact I've decided, that will have to do!

 

Now we turn our attention to the wings and getting them attached to the fuselage. A dry fit tells me there are problems ahead!

 

As well as the gaps, some of which I'll need to shim with some thin styrene sheet, I've noticed that the spine that rises up into the tail fin is wider on the fuselage section than it is on the wing section.

 

A shot of primer before the sanding and filling starts....

 

I've attempted to protect the lovely surface detail with masking tape.

 

Slapping on the filler in an attempt to widen the spine on the wing section...

 

After many attempts here is the end result. Considering how bad the joints were I'm quite pleased with how it has turned out.

 

Rescribed and re-rivetted where necessary....

 

 

And that gets me to here. Outer wings, stabilisers and control surfaces glued, prepare and primed.

 

Not forgetting to fill and sand the ends of the control surfaces, since otherwise we'll just see a hole if drooped....

 

I'm really hoping the most difficult bits of construction are behind me now.

 

Thanks for looking !

[JJ2016]

Nice work mate, either you have small hands or that is a big kit !! Love the work on the cockpit, I'll make one down the track as I always liked the A-7s. Looking forward to seeing the progress.

 

Cheers

 

JJ

[t15dja]

On 6/3/2020 at 5:25 AM, JJ2016 said:

Nice work mate, either you have small hands or that is a big kit !! Love the work on the cockpit, I'll make one down the track as I always liked the A-7s. Looking forward to seeing the progress.

 

Cheers

 

JJ

Ha ha! I take size 2XL in motorcycle gloves, so that hopefully shows its a decent size kit! The box says wingspan is 37cm and length is 44cm. It's a good kit and I'm enjoying building it, but it's not without its problems (...but then again, which kit doesn't have problems of some sort or other)

[t15dja]

A question regarding my build if I may please.....

I'm intending to build the A-7E with a full weapons load. I've read an article which suggests that the avionics bays would not be open whilst weapons are on board. I would like to build the aircraft in the correct configuration therefore could anyone kindly confirm if that is the case please?

Thanks in anticipation 

[t15dja]

Hi there folks, hope we are all well.

Time for another update on where I’ve got to with the 1/32 A-7E Corsair.

 

From the time I first opened the box one of the areas that I’ve envisaged problems with is the canopy. Firstly, the front windscreen was slightly narrower than the fuselage, so I needed to slightly sand the latter until the two mostly lined up and then applied fast setting extra thin cement. I then noticed that there was a very obvious step between the front of the windscreen and the fuselage behind the radome. It must have taken me about half a dozen attempts of filling and sanding to get rid of that step. I'm still not completely happy with it but I think it's the best I'm going to get. I'll need to re-rivet the forward edge of the windscreen frame where the detail has been sanded away. I've noticed a few areas on the kit, and this is one such area, where the rivets are spaced wider than any riveting tool that I have. In such cases I use the point of a pin to replicate the rivets, taking care with the spacing and not pressing on too hard in order to avoid creating a crater rather than a rivet head. I then set about masking the windscreen ready for painting using Tamiya tape.

 

In many of the pictures I’ve seen of real A-7s, especially in earlier liveries, I’ve noticed that there is a lightly coloured (usually yellowish) canopy sealant surrounding the “panes” of the front windscreen. Trumpeter have replicated this in the moulding of the clear plastic part and have moulded a very delicate and narrow raised feature just inside what would be the metal frame of the windscreen. However there are no decals in the kit to depict the seal so I’ll need to think about how I’m going to create that.

 

Does anyone have any experience or suggestions on how it could be done? My fallback position will be to try some very careful masking and painting.

 

For the rear tilting part of the canopy Trumpeter supply a clear plastic part for the glass area and a separate canopy frame, which to me seems like unnecessary over engineering and I foresee will be a source of further fit issues (see more below). They also provide a photoetched “liner” for the inside of the canopy frame along with an inside back “wall” to the canopy, the latter of which has 3 very noticeable ejector pin marks on the side that will be visible and within some other fine surface detail  – why oh why didn’t they mould it the other way round so that the pin marks were on the side you’ll never see….doh! See photos here of the components (the photoetch is part no. 17 on the fret):

 

 

Here's the back wall of the canopy showing the filled and sanded ejector pin marks:

 

I found the supplied photoetch extremely fiddly to fit. Firstly, it is very delicate because it’s very thin and contains the three rear view mirrors, which are only held on by extremely small, easily broken tabs and secondly because it’s very springy and impossible to bend permanently into shape, so requires annealing. Annealing photoetch to me just means heating it in a flame – that alters the chemical structure of the metal such that the springiness of the etch is removed. I’ve seen other folks anneal photoetch by running a blow torch over the fret – however I simply heated it in the flame of my gas hob whilst holding the fret with a pair of pliers. It did the trick and now the etch easily retained the shape it was bent into. To get the curve right I simply bent the etched part around something that had a similar diameter to the inside of the canopy frame – in my case I used a Vallejo paint bottle. Attaching the bent etch to the inside of the canopy frame proved to be another problem – how do you hold the two parts in the correct position whilst applying fast setting cyano? After many frustrating trial and error attempts and much cursing I did eventually manage it.

 

 

 

The clear part of the rear canopy contains a central moulding seam, which must be carefully removed without cracking the plastic, and then polished to restore the clarity. I have a sanding stick that contains four grades of grit. I simply work through them from the coarsest to the finest and then finish off with an ultra-fine polishing stick. That seam is now history!

 

I finished off the plastic with a dip in Klear and left it overnight to dry underneath a plastic container to avoid dust .

 

The problem I’m now facing is how to attach the clear plastic part to the canopy frame. Firstly there is a fit issue in that the clear plastic is wider than the canopy frame and secondly the contact area between the two is very small indeed. The two parts are also very delicate, so I’ll need to be extremely careful.  Now I’m wondering how to attach the glass to the frame. Because the former is wider than the latter, I’ll need to hold them in place with my fingers but obviously don’t want to spend too long doing that.

Any suggestions on what glue to use? I’ll need to use something that sets fast, doesn’t damage the clear plastic, won’t run everywhere and won’t end up generating loads of fingerprints. Is there such a glue – what would you recommend? I’m a bit stuck (forgive the pun!) on a solution to this problem at the moment.

 

Moving to the undercarriage, Trumpeter provides a choice of either plastic or metal components, although with the latter only the main legs are in metal, so if you do choose the metal the gear will be made up with a combination of metal and plastic parts, particularly the front gear. The metal components are also quite crudely cast so required some clean up before they can be used. Each of the two main gear is comprised of three metal legs held together at the wheel end by a tiny “T” shaped plastic pin. I didn’t envisage that tiny pin doing the job very well, so I used appropriately sized plastic rod inserted through the locating holes in the legs and then flattened both ends of the rod with a hot screwdriver blade, thus turning the rod into a type of rivet. The result certainly seems to be more permanent than Trumpeter’s offering.

 

 

Turning to the refuelling probe, again there is a small fit issue. The “door” end of the probe is just slightly smaller that the hole in the fuselage into which it fits. I’ve therefore added a thin shim of plastic card in order to close the gap to an acceptable fit.

 

I’ve started applying some topcoat to the model after first doing some pre-shading of panels lines, hatches and doors with Tamiya flat black. I also used that to paint the windscreen and the top of the radome, which are black according to the instructions. Having masked the area just in front of the windscreen I painted the rest of the radome insignia white, along with the jet intake (yet again), lower fuselage, wheel wells and gear doors, underside of wings, pylons, rudder, top of the fin and upper and lower surfaces of the stabilisers. I used Vallejo “model air” paint, which I find seems to take longer than other acrylics to dry – I wonder if they add retarder to it, which makes it better for airbrush use but slightly longer to dry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m now leaving the paint to dry for a couple of days before handling the kit again and will then start to apply the light gull grey on the upper surfaces.

 

In the meantime I’ll be getting on with assembling the ordnance, of which the kit contains copious amounts, once I’ve decided which weapons load to depict, that is.

 

Thanks for viewing, and more soon.

[t15dja]

Here's a few more pictures of my Corsair II build. As I said in previous posts, the tricky construction issues are (mostly) behind me , so it's on with the painting decaling and weathering.

So, without further ado......

 

I used the "tak-worm" and tape method of masking the demarcation between upper and lower colours

 

 

 

The result....top coat of light ghost grey applied and weapons painted

 

 

 

However, I kept getting sink marks in the slat sections of the outer wings. This was down to me using too much cement, which melted the plastic. This took 3 attempts at filling, sanding and repainting because the sink marks kept coming back, a week or so after initial gluing.

 

Decals being applied followed by application of Flory's "dark dirt" clay wash

 

The Trumpeter decals seem thick and quite glossy. I try and remove as much carrier film as possible by trimming the decal as much as possible.

This next photo shows how glossy they are. I hope I can reduce that by applying a matt coat later on.

 

 

[Peter Browne]

Well?  Just like getting to the end of a good novel and find the final pages missing...aaahhhrrhg!

 

So what was the answer about electronics/avionics bays being open when loaded?

[t15dja]

Aha....sorry about that! Some kind member did post some pictures of the avionix bay on an A-7E being open WITH weapons on board.....so that definitively answers the question....yes it is possible!

 

Going back to my model, it's almost finished so I'll be posting in the RFI very soon.

 

Cheers!

 

[Peter Browne]

Thank God.  I can sleep soundly tonight then!

 

Peter

Edited July 27, 2020 by pbrowne

[t15dja]

Hello all, hope everyone is OK.

 

My rendition of Trumpeter's 1/32 A-7E is finished at last....I am not the world's quickest builder!

There is a link below to it in the RFI section when I've had time to post the photos, but I thought I'd just share a bit more about the WIP.

 

The first concerns the front undercarriage. The kit provides both plastic and metal parts for the undercarriage legs and I used the metal parts since this is quite a large and "chunky" kit when built. Unfortunately only the main leg is provided in metal for the front undercarriage, which has to be encased within plastic parts. Two of those plastic parts that go either side of the leg incorporate the short "stub-axles" to which each front wheel is glued. Those small plastic axles are very fragile and flimsy given that they have to bear the weight of the model and it wasn't long before I broke one off. To fix it I simply cut off the other axle, sanded both faces flat, drilled a hole straight through and then used part of a paper clip to produce a one piece metal axle to which the wheels were glued. This should provide a much more robust structure for the front of the kit to sit on.

 

 

The second point concerns how to create the canopy seal that is often more visible on earlier Corsairs, which mine is.

After a bit of head scratching and wondering how on earth I could possible paint such a thin feature onto the canopy, I had an idea of using some micro masking tape, which as a bonus wouldn't need to be painted since to my eyes the tape was roughly the same colour as I'd seen in photos of the actual aircraft. After a bit of research I bought these two products off ebay. I bought 0.7mm and 0.4mm widths because I wasn't sure which would be best to use. After they arrived I decided that the 0.7mm width was probably best.

 

Earlier in this WIP I mentioned how envisaged that fitting the main canopy glass would be a bit tricky because the clear part was slightly wider than the plastic frame, Trumpeter having supplied both parts separately. In the end it was a matter of applying white canopy glue and literally holding the two parts in correct alignment, somehow using all eight fingers, and then just sitting still for 20 minutes or so! Once the canopy glue had gone off I also carefully applied some Tamiya extra thin and allowed the capillary action to do its thing. The result turned out OK, but I did break off one of the photo-etched rear view mirrors, which has been reattached.

 

 

Applying the micro tape to imitate the seal was relatively easy, using a brand new sharp blade to trim as necessary.

 

Moving on to the front windscreen:

 

 

End result....looks OK to me...

 

 

So that's about it really. All that was left to to was to attach the ordnance, outer wing sections and the elevators....I won't bore you with showing pictures of that.

Originally I was intending to display the model with the outer wings folded, however the parts that Trumpeter  provide to join the wing sections together are so small and flimsy that they wouldn't stay attached for 5 minutes, so  opted for the wings out look.

 

So, I'm finally, finally calling it finished. Below is a taster photo with more to be found in the RFI here:

 

 

Thanks for looking !!

 

 

[JJ2016]

Really nice job mate, love the weapons !!

 

Cheers

 

JJ