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ACADEMY 1:144
CONVAIR B-58 HUSTLER
'INBOX Review'
Alternative Scale
Reviewer: Kevan Vogler (rec.models.scale)
The Convair B-58 Hustler is one of those aircraft that can’t help but grab your imagination and run with it. You look at pictures of it and wonder at all the possibilities of roles it could have had if its service life had been longer.
The history of the B-58 is documented in many places, but not always well. The worth of the design, its abilities in practical service and ultimately the cause of its very short (roughly 10 years) service life have often been subject to argument and conjecture when someone tries to tell the history of it. To this day, there is a great deal of myth and misconceptions surrounding the type.
No doubt it was an extremely ambitious design for an aircraft intended for the strategic strike role. It was small by comparison to others like the B-52 or Avro Vulcan, it was supersonic, capable of higher than Mach 2 speeds, and the three man crew were housed in cockpits more fitting to fighters than bombers.
In its day, the B-58 won design awards and set several speed records, some of which I believe still stand.
A few years back, if you wanted a kit of the B-58, you most likely went with Monogram’s venerable 1/48 kit. Its been reissued several times and considered a classic by many modelers. If you were into 1/72 and were quite lucky, you might have been able to get your hands on one of Italeri’s Hustler kits in that scale, I’ve heard they are good kits but very rare these days.
Then, in 2001, to many surprized modelers, Academy flew this gem of a B-58 kit in 1/144 onto hobby shop shelves. I have limited space for my hobby, so this meant I could finally have a B-58 in my collection.
Inside the box are two sprues of medium grey styrene and an individually bagged sprue of clear parts.
Its been ages since I bought a 1/144 kit and all I can say is that if the finely recessed panel lines, beautifully captured landing gear detail and lack of over simplification in engineering I see in this kit are any indication of the state of 1/144 these days, I will probably grab a few more kits in this scale before too much longer.
The landing gear parts alone put many I’ve seen in larger scale kits to shame. Not just because of the complex nature of the B-58’s landing gear in real life, but because of the sheer detail and engineering in them in this kit. The nose gear leg is composed of 5 pieces and each main gear assembly is 13 pieces, that's not mentioning the very well detailed gear bays. These are much more than rudimentary sticks and wheels for the plane to stand on.
The cockpits are spartan, but certainly workable for the scale. The pod style ejection seats that the B-58 was noted for are quite well done, there seems to have been a bit of an attempt to render sidewall detail into the cockpits but most of the instruments are in decal form. There is no control stick for the pilot’s cockpit. One thing in the cockpit area that does mystify me is why the roof parts for the navigator’s and weapons system operator cockpits are clear parts, there is no need to mask anything on them as the windows weren’t installed in those parts of the actual aircraft, but in the fuselage area below them.
The one thing that jumped out at me more than anything else when I opened the box was the wings. The wings, area of the lower fuselage between them and the main gear wells are all beautifully molded as one piece! To fully appreciate this, you have to know how complex the B-58’s wing was in cross section. The leading edge had a notable camber built into it, sort of like a permanent slat and there were also very noticeable bulges further inboard for the main landing gear to retract into. The B-58 wing was a thin, laminar flow fighter style wing rather than the thicker high lift wing typical to strategic types, as such, it would have been very difficult if not impossible to portray it convincingly in this scale had the wing been done in upper and lower halves.
A similar treatment was given to the vertical stabilizer, its molded largely in one piece to the right fuselage half and half of its root to the left fuselage piece. I wondered why, until I did a dry fit of the fuselage halves, they have very little strength and a lot of flex without the wing in place so this breakdown of the vertical tail parts will give the fuselage greater longitudinal strength until the wing is on.
The fuselage is split vertically and the cockpit parts, once assembled, seem to fit nicely into it when I did a dry fitting. However, the nose gear bay which is molded into the bottom side of the pilot’s cockpit floor may present a slight fit problem getting it to sit flush all around it’s opening in the fuselage.
Without the wing in place, there is a golden opportunity to strengthen the junction between fuselage halves from inside should you feel the need to do so. I did a dry fit of the wing to fuselage and while its a good fit, you won’t get out of a bit of filling and will probably need to do a bit of clamping while the cement sets. There is the potential for big gaps in the wing to fuselage joint if you don’t find a way to hold it all together.
The instructions say that about 2-3 grams of nose weight is required, I tested this during the above mentioned dry fit and must say I’m a bit sceptical of the need, there didn’t seem to be a balance problem. I will, however, probably put a bit of weight in just to be on the safe side. There isn’t much room in the extreme nose for weight, but there is a nice big spot between the first and second cockpits for a bit of weight.
The engine pods are, as the rest of the kit, very well done. Nice detail graces the afterburners and intake areas, which are molded separate from the main engine pods.
As for weapons, you get the option of the large belly pod (both fuel and weapon) and a smaller pod (just fuel). My understanding is that the smaller pod was used when the aircraft carried a batch of free fall nuclear bombs, but such bombs or their pylons are not provided in this kit.
The instructions are single sheet fold out style in English and Korean. They contain a parts map, the 10 step construction sequence and the painting and decaling guide. Most of the instructions are clear enough, but you might want to exercise a bit of caution on step 6, that's the installation of the main gear doors and the drawing takes a bit of deciphering.
In my experience, decals in Academy kits are a hit and miss thing. Largely the decals in this kit look alright, but you may want to find new national insignia as the red bar in the ones on my sheet seem to sit a bit low inside the white bars.
I’ve never had much luck getting Academy decals to adhere well. It usually requires boiling hot water to release them from the backing sheet and an incredibly high gloss surface to keep them from silvering. The decals in this kit appear to be Academy’s own, so unless they have changed their decal making methods since the last time I built an academy kit, I expect similar problems with these ones.
You get two decal options in this kit:
43rd. Bomb Wing, 1961
6592nd. Test Squadron, 1962
No mention is made of where either aircraft was based and both are in natural metal finish as all B-58’s seemed to be. Paint call outs are generic and no manufacturer’s range is specifically recommended.
The tail markings of the 43BW machine on the decal sheet conflict with the markings seen on the box art. According to the decals, there were two wide red bars on the tail above the serial code. According to the box art that features the same aircraft right down to the same serial code, the bars on the tail are black with thin diagonal red lines in them. However, looking twice at the box art will show a reflection of the vertical tail on the aircraft’s wing and it shows two solid red bars. Definitely do some research before attempting that decal option.
If memory serves me correctly, a few aftermarket decal sheets were produced for this kit when it first hit the shelves. If you don’t like what's in this kit’s decals, you do have some options.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I think this little kit is a winner plain and simple.
If you want a B-58 and don’t have room for the 1/48 monogram or the time (and often ridiculous money) to track down one of the Italeri 1/72 kits, this kit is for you.
Its a well thought out kit and contrary to my previous experiences with earlier generations of 1/144 kits, this has all the potential to be a convincing scale representation of this aircraft.
I can easily recommend this kit to any modeler with a few kits under his or her belt who is looking for their next challenge.
At the time of writing this review, there seems to be a trend in the hobby of building “What if” models. That is kitbashing or otherwise modifying a kit to show an imaginary or hypothetical variant of it. The B-58 is common prey for this sort of project, so if you have a hypothetical idea (or ideas) involving the B-58 but don’t want to risk messing up the big 1/48 kit; this kit comes at a good price so you could build an entire fleet of hypothetical B-58s and not put yourself into bankruptcy in the process.
SMAKR
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