ACADEMY 1:72 FAIRCHILD A-10A THUNDERBOLT II

 

Reviewer: Mark B (SMAKR Webmaster)  (smakr1@optusnet.com.au)
Kit Built + Review Submitted:  13 November 2008

Kit Details:

Academy #1652 - FA046-6000 - 1/72nd Scale - A-10A Thunderbolt II

Aircraft History:

The A-10A is renowned for it's ruggedness and heavy armament capabilities that pack a tremendous punch.  It's main role is to be a close support airplane and has earned the affectionate apt nicknames of "Tank-Buster" and "Warthog".  It provides really close support to ground forces using its impressive array of weaponry to take out hostile ground forces such as tanks, barracks and infantry.  It also possesses STOL capability that enables it to take off from unprepared airstrips and is able to absorb a heap of punishment that can be thrown at it.   The pilot is protected by Titanium Armour and all aircraft systems are duplicated or triplicated to make it harder for them to go off-line.  Perhaps it's real bite is that of its Vulcan Avenger 30-mm six-barrell gun capable of firing more than four thousand rounds per minute, that can be found jutting just off-centre of the nose.  A very nasty adversary to say the least.

The Kit:

Produced in 1987 this kit is found in a sturdy top opening box with seven sprues of around 80 medium grey injection molded parts which are cleanly molded and have a nice amount of surface detail and engraved panel lines.  Probably the most glaring issue is the amount of ejector pin marks on the pieces, most prevalent on the stores and whilst mainly on internal areas and out of sight, at some stage you will have to work on fixing these up.  Sprues are generally bagged in pairs to protect them and a clear sprue containing half a dozen parts and a small decal sheet come in their own bags.  For an 80's engineered kit it looks excellent in the box.

Instructions:

This comes by way of a fold out booklet, 8 pages long, just smaller than A4 sized pages.  A brief history in Korean and English is followed by 9 assembly diagrams.  Each assembly features a small bit of text commentary on the side and in most places some generic painting information for the interior parts.  Small inset diagrams provide a bit more detail assembly for the cockpit, ballast needed, underside rear pitot fairings, bombs and so forth.  After the assembly diagrams there is another page of A-10A data, specifications and a couple of B&W photos of the aircraft.  A large spread across two pages then provides a good detailed paintings and markings four-view diagram for the one version the kit produces.  FS Numbers are also quoted for the external paint scheme.  The final page provides a breakdown of all the parts in the kit by way of sprue map and also parts number and name listing.

Construction:

The cockpit is made up of a tub with a three-piece replica of an ejection seat, control column and already molded centre console and presumably rudder pedals which are nothing more than plastic foot rests.  No pilot figure is supplied in this kit, but a main instrument panel is supplied to be affixed as the dashboard inside the fuselage halves.  The seat was a little problematic to put together for some reason but once done it fits in the tub well which is then affixed to the topside of the ceiling of the nosewheel bay.  The interior wheel bay wall is then glued to its ceiling which is then subsequently glued to an underneath forward fuselage panel (obviously with the hole for the nose wheel bay).  Perching the cockpit/nosewheel bay on top of the under forward fuselage panel did require some care to ensure it dried at the correct angle.  I painted the cockpit in FS36231 (Hu 140) in the absence of much help from the instructions (which just say gray) but they do provide direction on best places to put in ballast to prevent a tail sitter.  Kit decals were used for the main, centre and side instrumentation consoles which helped busy the interior up, along with tiny strips of masking tape for seat belts. A clear part in the kit is also supplied as a HUD.

The fuselage halves are long and thin, stretching from nose to the rear point of the aircraft but with big gaping holes and cut outs for panels, wings, engines and wheel bays in between.  In otherwords, the fuselage halves were not particularly easy to put together!  The main issue is surrounding the underforward fuselage panel with the cockpit that sits on top, and the instrument panel dashboard installed in the upper halves - a tight fit.  Best advice here is to do plenty of test fitting first - in fact in hindsight, perhaps affixing the underforward fuselage panel to one fuselage half, then installing the cockpit and nose bay interior might be a better option.  Anyway I followed the instructions and with patience and perseverance everything fitted very well in the end.  The fuselage halves needed some serious rubber band and masking tape to hold together to dry overnight but in the end the result was worth the effort.

The wings are made up of one lower wing piece and two upper halves and not surprisingly these went together very nicely.  I fitted the gear doors for wheels up modelling which were nowhere near as nice a fit.  The wheels come reasonably detailed but overly thick, however I decided to leave them as they were and install them into the wheel bay for in-flight mode (ie: a bit of the wheel sticking out).  I was quite happy with the depth of the bay here, you can install the whole wheel in and it will jut out almost right to scale.  Needs just a bit shaved off and the wheel itself should be thinner.  Of course I painted the wheel bay and the tyres etc before installing them.  I wasn't feeling particularly historical or realistic, so I transferred the same H140 interior colour to the wheel bay.  

The engine assembly is next and is a nice part of the kit I enjoyed doing.  Basically you have the outer large cowlings which are affixed together with the intake fan at one end, then inside are smaller separate engine exhaust nacelles, attached to a mini pylon.  Effectively an engine inside the engine if you get my drift.  The fit here is excellent, perhaps only the intake fans having just a tiny bit of work to blend in properly.  These were painted aluminium, the exhaust interiors flat black and I chose to paint the rest of the inside of the engines and the external sides of the exhaust nacelles in polished aluminium, being a little darker given the interior context.

All the wing, engine and fin assembly then occurs next with these components added to the fuselage shell.  The main wing fits quite well but couldn't escape a step at the roots which had to be sanded back.  The engine assembly was a tight fit but with a bit of trimming of the tiny seam lines eventually went in very nicely.  The one-piece tailplane was a similar story and removing the seam lines on the edges to accept the twin tail fins was also needed to achieve a nice fit.  It was then left to dry over night.

Decisions about wheels up, wheels down and how you want to depict the aircraft are pretty much the next challenge.  As already mentioned, I went for wheels-up and had already installed all the wheel bay doors.  However, there is canopy which can be opened and also the option of a boarding ladder.  I installed the closed panel over the boarding ladder area which was a nice flush fit and then affixed the nose.  This was probably the worst part of the kit - easy to install but the nose slightly less in size than the fuselage, so a fair amount of rigorous but very careful sanding followed to blend fuselage to nose!  The gatling gun has a separate nozzle and barrel to install in the nose.  Probably a good thing in hindsight given the amount of sanding that I had to do on the nose.  These were painted gun metal (der!) and left off until the end of assembly.  There's also a pave penny to affix to the starboard side under the cockpit, again fits beautifully.

There is a good array of stores provided in the kit but surprisingly there are also a few empty pylons!  So here is what you get for each wing:

And all of these take up hardpoints as supplied.  Because this leaves a couple of empty pylons I raided the spares box and pulled out a couple of extras like an ECM pod from a Matchbox A-10 kit and a sidewinder... just for fun!  So while there are stores, I thought we could have received a bit more in both supply and options!  The main issue with the stores is that they are riddled with ejector pin marks which I filled with quick dry putty and sanded back.  The task was actually less than a chore than it sounds.  I found that also the holes and cut outs for affixing stores to pylons were a bit on the big side, meaning you had to have a steady hand and hold the missile or bomb in place until it tack-dried enough to allow it to dry on its own (and not suddenly lean and fall over!).

The canopy, small detail bits and the forward fuselage ventral strakes finished off the assembly of this kit.  These all went on without any problems, although be aware that the strakes are left and right handed (if you know what I mean) so care should be taken to ensure they are installed on the correct side. 

Overall this kit went together very well - took a little while longer than other kits probably partly due to the engineering of parts in areas (particularly the fuselage and forward fuselage section), amount of stores (even though there are less than I would have liked), fixing up the ejector pin stubs and a couple of minor fit issues to overcome.  Really only the nose and main wings caused some headaches but nothing most intermediate modellers would feel hard pressed to overcome.   No filler needed anyway in wings or fuselage.

Colour Schemes:

The exact example provided by the kit is not clearly identified in the text, as it is written in Korean.  The one example is finished in typical Euro camouflage - aka "lizard camouflage" (FS34102 Olive, FS34092 Dark Green and FS36081 Euro Grey wraparound scheme) with a warthog's mouth on the nose, BD AF 79143 - presumably based in (West) Germany in the mid 80's.

Decals:

For an aircraft of this ilk, the decal sheet is rather small, lacking in a range of stencils that would normally be found on the aircraft.  The sheet does have around 30 decals so there is a bit of stencilling provided along with the cockpit consoles.  Colour register is sharp, but as everything is dark grey low-viz apart from a couple of greenish lemon coloured badges, one suspects that would not be hard to achieve.  There are a pile of small "US Air Force" stencils which are not covered in the instructions and presumably not used (as this appears to be a US Air Force Reserve example) - after extensive consultation with photos and art profiles I decided to omit these, but all the other decals were used.  They went on without too many dramas, they were thin and conformed very well to the surface of the model.  If anything, they were prone to wanting to stay in place once on the model.  The decal setting solution also made them crumple very slightly, so this was used very sparingly.

Overall Recommendation:

Having been obsessed with the A-10A from my latter days in my youth, I have whacked up a few A-10 kits including Revell, AMT, Matchbox and Airfix (reboxed by MPC) in my time and this Academy kit was clearly the best of them in my humble opinion.  It was a touch fiddly at times (and nothing was easier than the Matchbox kit) but the end result looks pretty convincing and overall the build was relatively straightforward.  The lack of stores to fill up all the underwing hardpoints as well as stores choice is probably the only real negative of this kit, which is easily overcome from the spares box or a weapons set purchase.  Other than that I would highly recommend this kit to model builders with at least a few kits under their belt.

 

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