1/48 Hasegawa A-4M low-viz

[spejic]

Three months isn't a lot for me - I don't know if I can finish. But I wanted to make some progress on the kit and hopefully this will give me some push.

 

I'm using the Brazil boxing of the Hasegawa A-4M Skyhawk, which I bought when it first came out don't tell me how long ago. I also have the Furball low-viz decal sheet. I won't be using third party parts except for stores, but I will probably be doing some not-strictly-out-of-box work on it.

 

Here is the box cover. Either the Skyhawk is breaking the sound barrier or my camera's flash is too powerful. Probably the first one.

 

 

These are the parts as they are. I have done a little painting and some minor construction. Yes, those are Classic Airframes A-4 fuel tanks. How did you guess? No, I don't know why there are there.

 

 

The main thing I have done so far is fix the slat well so that it slopes smoothly instead of having a step. Here are my steps for doing that:

1) Glue the top wings to the bottom wing.

2) Realize I did things in the wrong order.

3) Cut the slat wells where the step is but keep it connected at the front and pry it up so it is even with the top wing.

4) Stuff the large gap with plastic card that reaches down to the bottom wing part to help support it and sticks up a lot because it doesn't matter at this point.

5) When it's all dry cut and sand the plastic card and engrave new panel lines.

6) Paint it so I can more easily see where I screwed up.

 

And that's where I am now.

 

[modelling minion]

The A-4M and it's derivatives is proving very popular, and understandably so too.

You are well within the 25% rule so no issues there, and nice work getting rid of the lip to the upper wings, something I am wondering whether to do or not.

Interesting that you are turning what started it's life as an A-4KU into an M and I am doing the reverse!

[spejic]

I'd offer you the Brazil/KU nose except I gave it away to someone else a long time ago.

 

 

[modelling minion]

4 minutes ago, spejic said:

I'd offer you the Brazil/KU nose except I gave it away to someone else a long time ago.

 

 

Thats okay, it's not too big a job to make the M's nose into a KU's.

[Foxbat]

22 minutes ago, modelling minion said:

Thats okay, it's not too big a job to make the M's nose into a KU's.

What scale? I have a 1/72 A-4M that also includes the 2 seater nose so I'm happy to donate one and use the other as I have decals for both.

 

Andy

[modelling minion]

10 hours ago, Foxbat said:

What scale? I have a 1/72 A-4M that also includes the 2 seater nose so I'm happy to donate one and use the other as I have decals for both.

 

Andy

Thanks for the offer Andy but my kit is 1/48.

[spejic]

The main thing preventing me from building this before were the airbrakes - I've always wanted them closed, but the curve of the Hasegawa brakes don't match the curve of the fuselage. Every few years I'd take the model out of the box, try to figure out the airbrakes, get frustrated, and put it all back on the shelf.

 

I've decided to brute force it. First I sanded an increased curve into the brakes to get them part of the way there. I also drilled a bunch of holes in the airbrake well. That's because I knew there won't be much of an edge to glue and the brake would need to be held in some other way. I placed the part in the well so that every edge is either even with the fuselage or sticks out. You need to poke back through those holes occasionally to get that to happen. When it looked right, I glued along the edges and glued in plastic rods through the holes from behind. It looks like this from inside:

 

 

With that strong support you can do some heavy sanding to get the brake to fully match the curve and then some fine sanding to smooth things out and restore the shine. Use sanding sticks or a block backed sandpaper because you want to sand the brake, not the fuselage.

 

 

There are a couple techniques to get a shallow panel line from the point where two parts glue together. One is the leave the sanding dust in the gap and carefully use liquid glue to solidify that dust. Let it dry a few hours at least and then fix it up with engraving tools. Another is to use a thin filler, like Mr Surfacer 500 or Mr Dissolved Putty - put a thin even coat along the line and when it dries it shrinks down into the gap leaving an even panel line that doesn't need a lot of clean up.

 

A skillful modeller would have deepened the details on the airbrakes beforehand so they aren't lost when sanding. I guess I'm not one of those because I didn't. I recreated the ones where a hint still remained as best I could.

 

Edited March 7, 2021 by spejic

[modelling minion]

Good job on the speedbrakes, they can be a pain to get flush and your method looks like it works very well, there's a very good chance that you will see others using it before too long.

[Dansk]

On 3/7/2021 at 12:56 PM, spejic said:

The main thing preventing me from building this before were the airbrakes - I've always wanted them closed, but the curve of the Hasegawa brakes don't match the curve of the fuselage. Every few years I'd take the model out of the box, try to figure out the airbrakes, get frustrated, and put it all back on the shelf.

 

I've decided to brute force it. First I sanded an increased curve into the brakes to get them part of the way there. I also drilled a bunch of holes in the airbrake well. That's because I knew there won't be much of an edge to glue and the brake would need to be held in some other way. I placed the part in the well so that every edge is either even with the fuselage or sticks out. You need to poke back through those holes occasionally to get that to happen. When it looked right, I glued along the edges and glued in plastic rods through the holes from behind. It looks like this from inside:

 

 

 

With that strong support you can do some heavy sanding to get the brake to fully match the curve and then some fine sanding to smooth things out and restore the shine. Use sanding sticks or a block backed sandpaper because you want to sand the brake, not the fuselage.

 

 

 

There are a couple techniques to get a shallow panel line from the point where two parts glue together. One is the leave the sanding dust in the gap and carefully use liquid glue to solidify that dust. Let it dry a few hours at least and then fix it up with engraving tools. Another is to use a thin filler, like Mr Surfacer 500 or Mr Dissolved Putty - put a thin even coat along the line and when it dries it shrinks down into the gap leaving an even panel line that doesn't need a lot of clean up.

 

A skillful modeller would have deepened the details on the airbrakes beforehand so they aren't lost when sanding. I guess I'm not one of those because I didn't. I recreated the ones where a hint still remained as best I could.

 

Brilliant 👌

[spejic]

The next troublesome part of the kit are the intakes. It's easy to have uneven and massive steps between the internal part D12 and the external intake parts Q2 and Q5.  The first step is to install the D12 part so it is in the middle and not touching either side (it's currently glued in on one side only):

 

 

When you do that, the external intake parts almost line up - there's a section where a small step still exists. My solution to this is a little Milliput on the intakes to make them even with the D12 part.

 

 

Technically this was part of the work I did before the build started (and I wrote about this on another site long ago), but I had to do additional work on it now because the puttied parts weren't done that well before and I had to do it twice because Milliput seems to have a 50-50 chance of setting properly for me.

 

I hand painted the instrument panel:

 

 

I wanted to do the same for the panels on the sides, but it turns out the Hasegawa kit's details have almost zero relation to the switches on an actual A-4M. So I sanded them all off and I've designed some homemade decals to replace the details. I hope it doesn't look too dissimilar to the instrument panel.

 

 

[modelling minion]

Very nice job painting the IP, very neat indeed.

Thanks for pointing out your solution for getting the intakes to line up smoothly, this will be very useful for all of us building Hasegawa kits.

[spejic]

As per the HamfistedModeller's list of improvements, I've added panel lines to indicate the spoiler on top of the wing.

 

 

And I did some work on the cockpit. I made decals for the instruments and added some switches to make it a little more 3d. I also added the raised section that later Skyhawks had - it does fit in the kit without further modification.

 

 

That worked well as far as it went. The only thing is that the homeprinted decals bled a tiny bit giving it a reddish tinge. I'm trying to decide how much it bothers me - I printed more so I might try again.

 

What's really delaying this is the intakes - they need a large amount of cleanup and filler and they are really annoying. I'm also constructing a 1/48 TA-4J along with this so that's more work (I'm not entering it in the group build because I don't plan to paint it anytime soon, but I want to do the construction as I learn how to build these Hasegawa A-4's).

 

[modelling minion]

A neat bit of scribing on the wing to add the spolier, seeing you do this has reminded me to add these couple of lines to my kits wings, i have actually made a bit of a start on it and shall get some piccies up later.

 

Your cockpit looks very good to me, you have achieved a nice 3D effect.

 

The intakes are another area of  the Hasegawa kits that can be a pain, you are far from on your own with that issue.

 

If you want to include some shots of your TA-4J in with your M that would be fine, I know you don't want to start a thread for it but pictures of it would still be welcome.

[spejic]

46 minutes ago, modelling minion said:

If you want to include some shots of your TA-4J in with your M that would be fine, I know you don't want to start a thread for it but pictures of it would still be welcome.

 

Not much use at the moment - I've just done the airbrakes, the spoiler, and the cockpit so it all looks exactly the same as what you've seen already.

 

[basket]

Hello .

I'm taking a seat.

 

[spejic]

No updates even though I've been working consistently on the kit. I just have a never-ending series of problems with the intakes. My idea was to paint the insides before gluing them, and once glued fill the internal meeting point with Miliput which, being white and smoothable with water, would result in a minimum of work. It just hasn't turned out. First most of the Miliput refused to harden so I scraped it out with a toothpick and used regular Tamiya putty. But that took repeated sessions to get a smooth join, and it's dark grey so I had to spray the interior with light grey to try to even things out before getting it white. But my repeated attempts to get it white ended up creating an uneven drippy surface, and when I tried to sand it I found out that paint was not drying even after multiple days in nice weather.

 

So now the parts are in a tub of alcohol so I can scrub all the paint off and get back to the starting point on those stupid things.

 

[modelling minion]

Really sorry to hear that the intakes have been causing you so many issues.

If you are planning on having your aircraft on the ground how about having a set of intake blanks fitted, that would solve the issue completely. I am planning on having some fitted on my build.

[basket]

One of the tricks of this scooter ... it's a very cool kit , but ...

 

@spejic : just relax and you'll find the solution to your issue .

[spejic]

On 4/9/2021 at 12:33 AM, modelling minion said:

Really sorry to hear that the intakes have been causing you so many issues.

If you are planning on having your aircraft on the ground how about having a set of intake blanks fitted, that would solve the issue completely. I am planning on having some fitted on my build.

 

It's not really my style to use accessories and I'm not about to let the parts defeat me after all this work on them.

 

On 4/9/2021 at 12:52 AM, basket said:

One of the tricks of this scooter ... it's a very cool kit , but ...

 

@spejic : just relax and you'll find the solution to your issue .

 Yeah, those parts just have terrible fit. The forward edge of the intake needed so much sanding that I ended up with realistically thin splitter plates.

 

I did find out many of my problems were caused by a loose connection in my airbrush compressor. I've been spraying at like 2psi for who knows how long. Now that it's at 15psi I feel like I'm using a firehose.

 

[basket]

@spejic : Airbrushing  ... still hoping to be able to airbrush one day  without my small evil on my shoulder telling me : " do you really think everything will work properly ? "  and I'm not even talking about gloss coat ...

 

Ultimately : you're gonna win !!!! The part that might defeat you is not even a sprue at the moment .... in fact it's not even been moulded yet and never will !!!!

[spejic]

14 hours ago, basket said:

Ultimately : you're gonna win !!!! The part that might defeat you is not even a sprue at the moment .... in fact it's not even been moulded yet and never will !!!!

 

I will because this particular aircraft is very important to me. It just might take until June 2022 to do it.

 

[spejic]

I'm adding coats of white to the intakes as work permits as I need to make them uniform (which they mostly are) and make them match the white of the inner intake part (which is too damn white). It's getting close, but I had a few pinholes I wanted to fix and using my dark putty would set me back. Thanks to a dream I had last night, I remembered I had some Perfect Putty somewhere which was white and smoothable by water. That would be the perfect putty for my needs. I had a free day today, so I expected to find it, fill the few small dents, and get a lot more work done besides. But I couldn't find it. I cleaned up my workstation and my painting station and my computer station and my kitchen and my wall of unfinished models and every other part of my apartment and late at night I finally located it. Now I'm going to sleep.

 

I'm counting that 14 hours as part of the build time.

 

[modelling minion]

Glad that I am not the only one that finds things when it is too late yo use them, glad that you found it though.

[spejic]

I'm back, baby.

 

I did what I promised and replaced the decals on the instrument panel sides. I added more buttons this time, but of a more subdued color. I like how it looks now. I was going to add some lines and hoses but in test fitting I saw how little could be seen inside so I don't think I will do that. The seat will come later - I'm still digesting what other people did with theirs.

 

 

I won't bore you with more of the unending saga of the intakes. All you need to know is they are done and the world can now bask in the glory of their smooth curves!

 

 

Frak.

 

Well, anyway, before I glued them in I took the opportunity to paint the edge in the Marine Skyhawk's topside 36496 light grey. I know you are thinking "spejic, those 47 coats of paint in the intake have made you loopy - that isn't what the tops of Marine Skyhawks are painted" and I would say yes for most of them, but the particular one I'm doing is overall light grey. I'm 95% sure of it. 85%.

 

 

Next step are the seams and the medium-level details. That should go quickly, I hope.

 

[modelling minion]

Your cockpit does look very good indeed, definitely worth the effort you have out in.

I am glad that you are happy with the intakes and you have done a good job on getting them smoothed in to the contours of the fuselage.

Very nice work that bodes very well for the final model.