1/48 Monogram EA-6B Prowler

by Karl Sander

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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.

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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 

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Photos and text © by Karl Sander