While
Hasegawa has a pretty good representation of the Prowler in 1/72, in 1/48
you have your work cut out for you. Both Monogram and Airfix have
1/48. I haven’t done the Airfix offering myself – I’ve only
found them on E-bay and not at competitive prices. But here is my
first crack at the Monogram kit.
While
generally accurate in outline and shape, the kit suffers from some raised
panel lines (others are nicely recessed) and some inaccurate
“carry-overs” from the A-6. For this project, I added a Black
Box cockpit, Paragon wingfolds, and the Cutting Edge correction set. The
Cutting Edge set instructions include all the things that need removing or
modifying in correcting the kit, though modelers will probably also find
Bert Kinzey’s Detail and Scale volume on the Prowler to be
helpful.
Not
surprisingly construction began in the cockpit. Black Box’s
offering is nicely done with clear instructions. The castings are in good
shape and nicely detailed – the quality of the four seats over the ones
offered in the kit, let alone the rest of the cockpit, make it worth the
expense. The aftermarket cockpit accurately represents an ICAP II
aircraft. Anything much earlier than that, or the new ICAP III
version of the Prowler, will require varying degrees of work by the
modeler and you may want to consider using the kit instrument panels as a
starting point. But for any Prowler used since about the mid-late
80’s up through the present (only three squadrons have the upgraded ICAP
III version), I’d highly recommend the Black Box cockpit.
Kinzey’s book has lots of helpful photographs. Several hundred
hours in type also helped calibrate my sense of
“that-looks-about-right.” With the resin in good shape, most of
the time spent with the resin was spent painting. Note the color on the
ejection seats’ rocket motor – they’re color coded to make sure the
right seat gets put in the right place for the command-eject sequence to
work as advertised: brown for the pilot, purple for ECMO 1 (right front; I
had to custom mix a bit on the spot, it’s not part of my normal
palette!), orange for ECMO 2 (right rear) and white for ECMO 3 (left
rear).
I do
recommend thoroughly test fitting the Black Box tub in the Monogram
fuselage halves. While, as I said, the castings are nicely done, my
example of the cockpit tub turned out being a bit wide and I was a little
too expeditious here, causing some minor fit problems later on when the
time came to mate the two fuselage halves. Next time, I plan to do a
more painstaking job of test fitting the cockpit tub before getting
carried away with painting it. There’s plenty of room to sand it
down so that it will fit better without damaging the details.
While
paint and glue on the cockpit were drying, I turned my attention to the
parts on the Monogram casting that needed removing. Relying on the
Cutting Edge instructions plus a combination of Kinzey’s pictures and
some of my own, I first marked plastic to be removed in permanent marker,
then started the surgery. The easiest one, yet possibly least
important, is the HF antenna along the spine. There’s a
replacement part in the Cutting Edge set – the difference is a subtle
one. I cut off the cast-on part with several light passes of a fresh
#11 blade and cleaned it up with light sanding. You’ll have
to do this twice – once on each fuselage half. I put off
installing the replacement until the halves had been joined. I also
sanded off the extraneous armor plating while the fuselage halves were
apart. This is perhaps one of most glaring examples of A-6 Intruder
features that Monogram included on their Prowler that didn’t belong
there. The plating goes around the compressor stage of the engines
– it’s easy to spot on the fuselage halves: it’s the raised area
around the belly of the plane starting just beneath the main gear well.
I started removing this with a coarse sanding drum in a motor tool to take
most of it down, then sanded it smooth. Lastly I removed the cast on
ram air scoops just behind the boarding ladders – they’re a bit thick
and over scale and Cutting Edge gives you replacements. While I
already making a dusty mess of my workspace and myself, I rescribed the
fuselage halves. My technique here was to lightly scribe along the
raised line so that there would be something to start with after the
raised stuff was gone. After lightly sanding off the raised panel
lines, I used a pin chucked in a pin vise, with a metal scribing guide
(from Eduard, I think). I use fine sandpaper Q-tip soaked in lacquer
thinner to clean up the new lines. This combination knocks down the
furrows and debris you make when rescribing. I’m reasonably
certain I read about it on ARC.
Now I
joined the fuselage halves, and as you can see in the picture, had some
gaps to fill. Again, a little more care in checking the fit of the
resin cockpit would have prevented this. I also preemptively cut off
the inflight refueling probe at this stage. I suspected it was only
a matter of time before I broke it off – this way, it would be a clean
break and I’d know where the part ended up! I also added the keel
at this point, after painting the nose wheel well areas white.
With the
fuselage halves joined, it was almost time to move on to the wings but I
decided to make things more, um, “interesting” than they were already.
Careful examination of the opposite sides of the fuselage reveals that, as
molded, you’ll have the left ladder down and the right ladder up.
I honestly can’t think of an occasion where I’ve seen that
combination… either they’re both up, or they’re both down.
While I was ruminating on the boarding ladders, it also occurred to me
that I couldn’t remember the forward boarding platforms being up with
the ladders down and canopies open. More importantly than what my
beer-assaulted memory could or couldn’t come up with, I didn’t find
any pictures showing it this way. So, I had to make a ladder well on
the right side, and figure out how to show the front boarding platforms
opened.
I turned
to the right ladder first. The way the intakes mount to the fuselage
conveniently enough makes for my first cut. So it was a matter of
cutting at the top, bottom, and trailing edge (left as you’re looking at
it). Again, several light passes with a fresh #11 blade. To
completely free it, you need to cut SOMETHING on the front edge, but this
area will be hidden once the right intake is in place so precision here
isn’t essential. I cut sheet styrene to build the new ladder well,
using the right side as a guide. I faired all this in with putty.
While cement and putty were drying here, I started work on the boarding
platforms. These are above and in front of the intake, under the
front canopy rails – it’s how the pilot and ECMO 1 get to their seats.
In retrospect, this little adventure would have been easier if I had done
it before putting in the cockpit. I just would have had to open up a
hole, use sheet styrene inside to make a false back, then scratch build
the steps. Another lesson learned for next time. Having lacked
such foresight this time around, I started by carefully cutting along the
kit’s correctly located lines. I used a small grinding bit in a
motor tool on a relatively slow speed to remove most of the plastic.
To get in the corners I used jeweler’s files. I sanded as best I
could, softened and smoothed things with drops of lacquer thinner as much
as I dared, sanded some more. Soon, I had an opening on each side
that would fit the bill, with only a little bit of putty needed to fix
things up around the edges.
Done
with major surgery around the nose and with the beginnings of the right
side ladder well dry, I mounted the intakes after painting and assembling
the ducts. Yes, Seamless Suckers or something similar would have
been an improvement but I couldn’t find them at the time and the kit
intakes aren’t THAT bad. With the right side intake completing the
ladder well framing, I cut the ladder steps again more or less matching
the left side. Not that the left side was perfect – there is
an-impossible-to-miss gap between the cast-in ladder well detail and the
intake. This was fixed easily enough with a piece of sheet styrene
cemented in place and sanded to match the profile of the intake trunk.
The last thing to do on the intakes is to cut a small, rectangular hole in
the right side in front of the ladder. I drilled four small holes
and cut between them with a #11 blade, then filed everything square with a
jeweler’s file. This is for a small cover that springs out when
the ladder is opened and covers the angle of attack probe, protecting it
from clumsy aircrew feet – namely mine. Later on in the project I
cut a piece of styrene stock to the right shape and superglued it to the
side of the intake forward of the hole. Any picture of the right
side ladder/intake area will show this feature.
Things
being more or less copasetic up front, I turned my attention to the
arresting hook area. This is a single piece that also includes the
ALE-39 expendables (i.e., chaff and flare) buckets. The expendables
are molded, inaccurately, as raised dimples. So I sanded them
smoothed and rescribed the outer edges. I couldn’t find any
photo-etched or decal representations of the expendables, so I (briefly)
debated drilling them. Seeing as how there’s 60 of these, I
quickly determined that would be outright insanity. It was not
entirely unheard of for a blank plate to be mounted over the dispenser if
we weren’t carrying any expendables (training flight, FCF, etc), so I
decided that would be the look I’d go for.
Forward
of the expendables bucket, Monogram has a large, molded-in hump.
This was another feature of the A-6 (pulse Doppler radar for terrain
following flight) that doesn’t belong on the Prowler. I removed
it, though the plastic wasn’t QUITE thick enough to make this as easy a
job as I would have liked. It left a hole, but after everything else
I’d already done it wasn’t THAT hard to fill the hole with sheet
styrene and putty. There’s an antenna that will go here later, but
because I didn’t want to break it off I decided to wait to mount it.
In an
effort to make things easier later, I shot white on the part of the
tailhook that would be striped later. It’s debatable how helpful
this was, as once I got it installed I had to do a little filling and
sanding to make the joint clean and had to put a few more coats of white
on the area later anyway. It clearly didn’t hurt but I’m not
sure I’d bother doing it next time. While I was back here I
installed the Cutting Edge resin HF antenna just forward of the tail and
blended it in.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Now
I turned my attention to the wings. First, there’s some extraneous
molded-on plating on the underside of the wings that needs to be removed
and replaced with parts from the Cutting Edge set. When it comes to
folding the wings or leaving them spread, modelers have a few different
options here – but doing nothing isn’t one of them. Even if you
leave the wings spread, there’s some work to do as the wing fold
mechanisms Monogram molded into the top of the wings are inaccurate.
The Cutting Edge correction set includes resin parts so it wouldn’t be
too hard to remove the cast-on part and put on the resin bits.
Cutting Edge also makes correct folded wings which completely replace the
kit wings. I haven’t use those yet but I’m eager to try on my
next 1/48 Prowler. The third option, and the one I used, is Paragon.
The paragon wing folds are essentially plugs. The instructions are
pretty clear on how much plastic to remove from the middle of each wing.
Still, never having done this sort of surgery before, I thought it better
to start on only one wing first until I was reasonably sure I knew what I
was doing. Following the instructions, I cut a few millimeters from
either side of the cast wingfold joint. I also removed the outboard
flaperon (in the photo of the left wing, it hasn’t been removed yet but
is marked). This is necessary because when the wings are folded, the
top of the outboard wing is actually down and the flaperon hangs loose a
bit. Paragon includes both a resin replacement to install at the
correct angle, and a resin part to put inside the hole, representing the
front of the flap which is exposed when the flaperon hangs (you can see
this second piece in place in the second picture of the left wing)
After
cutting, I glued the wing halves together. Here’s another instance
where I could have been a little more careful and done some test fitting.
The kit wings wound up being thicker than the Paragon resin parts.
In retrospect I would have sanded the inside of the wings to make them fit
better with the Paragon resin – this would have left some filling to do
at the wing root but I suspect this would have been easier than all the
filling I had to do around the resin parts to get a realistically smooth
surface. It took quite a few rounds of filling, sanding, and priming
to check the quality of work but I finally got it done. A couple of
the finer parts of the wingfolds broke off as you can see in the picture
– one of them was easily found in the plastic bag everything came in and
replacing the other part with sheet styrene wasn’t too hard.
I decided to
start my painting at this point – again, never having done a jet with folded
wings before, it seemed to my mind to be as good a time as any. I put on those
details I was reasonably certain I wouldn’t break off (such as the scoop on
the right rear fuselage, and the v-shaped deflector in front of the tailhook
area – this keeps leaking engine oil from getting back into the bay where the
liquid oxygen and a lot of avionics are, and I scratchbuilt
it from styrene strip) and got to work. First I shot the white on the gear
bays, both on the underside of the wings and the fuselage (it’s definitely easier
to paint the fuselage portion of the gear bays at this point). For the paint
scheme I was doing, the rudder is also white, and the wingtip speed brakes are
white-and-black checkerboard so I painted those areas at this point too. I also
did the exhaust pipe interiors now since, again, it seemed as good a time as
any. Since the jamming pods and drop tanks are the same shade of gray as
the underside of the plane I prepped them for painting too. The last thing
I did before getting down to the serious painting was attach the inboard wing
sections – the white of the gear wells was done, and I wanted to be able to
clean up any fit issues at the wing root before painting. As it happened,
there was only minor work to be done at the wing root.
After
reattaching the inflight refueling probe and masking
whatever I didn’t want to be gray, I painted the entire thing in Model Master
Acryl light ghost gray. The first time around, this revealed a few spots
in need of touching up so after cleaning up those areas I painted again. I
soft masked (my preferred method being blue tack) and painted the upper surfaces
dark ghost gray but I must have had a bad batch, or didn’t wait long enough
(or both), because it cracked horrendously very soon after drying. Masking
off the lighter gray which was still in good shape, I sanded off the offending
paint with 800 grit sand paper, and shot again – this time with Polly Scale
acrylic, and all was well. Last was medium gray, sprayed around the
cockpit area, wing leading edges, and the top of the receivers on the tail.
For medium gray I used Model Master Enamel because, well, that’s what I had
lying around. The windscreen and canopies, previously soaked in Future, were
masked and painted separately – first black to represent the interior color,
then medium gray. My Monogram kit came with two transparent sprues
– one totally clear and one tinted. Use the clear one for the windscreen and
the tinted ones for the canopy. Now I quickly brush painted the inside of
the forward boarding ladder wells red. I purposely did them white first to
serve as a primer to check my work (seeing as how I carved them out myself).
The white also made for a pretty nice base for the red acrylic paint. The
leading edge of the flaps, now exposed on the outboard wing sections, also got
painted red.
At this point,
everything got a coat of Future. When that dried, the Aeromaster decals
for my old squadron went on fairly easily. Granted, the markings were from
two cruises before I showed up, but you can’t have everything. The wing and
horizontal stabilizer decals (representing nonskid) went on easier than you
might think, the one on the spine had to be sliced in two and had the clear film
in its center cut away to help it fit around the ADF antenna. Another coat
of Future protected the decals for some minor weathering. I wanted a more
or less clean looking airplane, but even a more or less clean Prowler is going
to have a bit of funk on the underside. Remember it’s a Grumman product
– if it’s not leaking, it’s not full. To simulate the staining on
the underside, I used Tamiya smoke and some old Testor’s
brown in the square bottle – old enough that most of the pigment has settled
out to the bottom but the stuff on top is just tinted enough to make a
convincing representation of engine oil flowing along the underside.
Further back, I used more Tamiya smoke to represent
engine exhaust. Not wanting to go totally overboard on panel lines (one,
because I wanted a more or less clean look and two, I didn’t want to highlight
any gaffes in my rescribing) I lightly traced those
with a mechanical pencil.
I then started
mounting gear doors, antennae and other details. The exact antennae
configuration on EA-6Bs changes over time, so it’s wise to have a reference of
the precise plane you’re trying to build. Cutting Edge gives you plenty
of antennae (way more than you’ll need, so you’ll also be able to stock the
spares box) but omits one – the USQ-113 transmit
antennae. This goes on the underside, in the same spot where the Doppler
radar bulge used to be, before I grinded and sanded
it off. I made the USQ-113 antenna from 2 or 3 laminated layers of
styrene. I measured off the dimensions from a picture, cut the pieces of
styrene, sandwiched them together, then sanded the
edges to clean things up. I also scratchbuilt
a GPS antenna by punching a disc out of sheet styrene then building up the
“dome” shape with applications of CA, sanded to shape. This goes
behind the rear cockpit.
After the
antennae, gear doors, scoops, etc went on, I turned my attention back to the
ladders and boarding platforms, having left them for as near to the end as I
could since I knew I’d break them off otherwise. Again using the part
for the left side as a guide, I built a ladder for the right side out of sheet
styrene. The outside surfaces were painted gray to match the airframe, the
inside painted red. I used a pair of dividers to take dimensions for the
boarding platforms and drew them out on a piece of paper. I put the piece
of paper under glass to protect it while I cut styrene to the right size and
shape. Each platform is made up of two pieces of sheet styrene. The
inner portion is just a bit smaller than the inner portion. Cement them
together so that they’re flush on the edge that goes against the airframe –
the inside piece should be a little short of the outer piece along all the rest
of the edges. Again, the outside surface is painted gray to match the
airplane. The inside surface is painted red around the edges, the inner
(smaller) part being painted black to represent nonskid. The step surfaces
of the boarding ladders also have nonskid on them so I gave them a bit of black
too. The ladders each have two “arms” that link the lower portion to
the airframe and provide a bit of stability when in the open position, and the
platforms each have a “strap” that provides added support when open.
On my model, these parts are small styrene strip cut to fit after everything was
installed, then painted red.
Now I gave
everything a coat of Model Masters Acryl flat. I added the lights (the top
and bottom anti-collision light came from the clear sprue
– I drilled a hole in the backside and put a drop of red paint in it – the
wingtip lights, probe light, and small white lights beneath the rudder and on
the back of two of the pylons were not so I represented them with paint to the
surface covered with Future). I installed the windscreen, which took a
little work because of the warpage to the fuselage
induced by my slightly-too-thick resin cockpit (did I mention next time I’ll
do a better job fitting the cockpit?). Since I had already painted and
didn’t want to do major blending work, I filled the gaps here with white glue.
It’s easy to make sure this dries more or less flush. When it dried, I
touched up the medium gray (I used a flat paint, so it blended in with the
overall flat finish). Next came the “remove before flight” tags: one
on each cockpit’s canopy lever, one on each of the landing gear downlocks,
one on the tailhook, then
one on each of the pylons. If you model the expendables bucket loaded,
there’s a pin for that forward of the left side boarding ladder. I took
a little artistic license in not modeling the ejection seat pins for two
reasons. First, it would have obscured the really nice detail on the Black
Box seats. Second, I would have had to make them from scratch since the
seat pin arrangement on the GRUEA-7 is pretty involved. There’s one long
flag with six or seven (depending on it’s a front or back seat) pins coming
off it, connected to it by wire of varying length. That seemed an awful
lot of work to go through to cover up some nicely molded seats…
There are at
least 3 more Monogram Prowlers in the stash, so eventually this one will be
joined on the display shelf. In retrospect this was probably not the best
project to mark my first attempt at wholesale rescribing,
but I think it turned out alright. All in all, an enjoyable project, the
only frustrating parts being one bad batch of paint – or bad technique in
applying it – and some lack of test fitting borne by excessive hastiness on my
part – all overcome without too much gnashing of teeth. The minor
frustration isn’t enough to deter me from doing more, and it’s nice to have
a larger-scale model of my warhorse, in my old colors, on the shelf in the
living room.
Karl
Click on
images below to see larger images
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