FAA Skyhawk - near Cuba 1962 FINISHED!

[Weaver]

Okay, nose on:



That was surprisingly troublesome.

Firstly, when you cut the original nose off, you lose the front edge of the nosegear bay, which means there's very little to positively set the width of the fuselage, i.e. it can very easily crush in.

Secondly, I couldn't get the Freightdog nose to fit on straight. I carved off various bits of plastic and resin until I eventually sussed the problem. The nose gear well/cockpit floor project slightly beyond the panel line where you vut the original nose off. To accomodate this, the Freightdog nose has a recess in it's rear face, but unfortunately, the walls of this recess are way too thick and irregular, so they force the nose off-centre. The eventual solution was to carve the recess deeper and wider with a Dremmel until the walls were the same thickness as the kit fuselage. Even then it needed a bit of sanding, which was helped no end by the presence of the moulded-in hockey-stick aerial just in front of the windscreen.

The crack in the cockpit coaming keeps springing open no matter what I glue it with, so I'm going to wait unti the wing is glued in (which fixes the fuselage spacing) and then fill it. I also had to fill the panel line right at the tip of the A-4C nose which defines the smaller dielectric area seen on most of them. The line is perfectly correct, but I wanted the earlier, larger radome, because I'm going for the fibreglass-nose-on-white-fuse look of the Buccaneer S.1. I filled it with superglue (cheers Jon) and it sanded smooth very nicely.

[Old Wombat]

 

[PR19_Kit]

With hindsight, the world's ONLY exact science, would it have been a better move to install the wings first to fix the fuselage spacing and then do the basal work?

I have one of those Airfix Scooters but have yet to open the box so my input may be a load of old cobblers of course.....

[Weaver]

With hindsight, the world's ONLY exact science, would it have been a better move to install the wings first to fix the fuselage spacing and then do the basal work?

I have one of those Airfix Scooters but have yet to open the box so my input may be a load of old cobblers of course.....

Yes but...

I wasn't sure whether it would need any additional nose weight, and there isn't much room between the solid nose, which has a half-section plug that fits into the fuselage, and the dashboard. The only other place you can put weight is between the cockpit and the intake trunking box, and that's accessed via the wing cutout.

[PR19_Kit]

Ah yes. 

What a pain this Whiff modelling can be at times, the manufacturers never seem to take our ideas into consideration. 

[Weaver]

More "interesting" bits.

The intakes:


First off, these are numbered wrongly on the instructions, with left and right numbers exchanged. Next, there is no way the intake location lips would fit between the fuselage and the trunking without carving a whole lot of material off both. Lastly, the joint line between the intake and the fuselage comes out too big because the two faces are not at the same angle - more fettling.

I wanted to find out if it needed extra weight before fitting the wing, since the lower wing covers the only place to add it (behind the cockpit, since the new nose is solid. This required the use of my super-high tech computerized laser balancing as follows:



Inclining trials on an aeroplane eh? Well it is a Navy aeroplane.....  

[Weaver]

As a result of the inclining trials, I decided that it needed a little more weight behind the cockpit, but not as far as filling the whole compartment, and I was also worried about PVA seeping through the gaps at the corners of the cockpit bulkhead, so I made a ballast bucket and stuck it in place with a load of sprue:




Wings and tailplanes are now on:

[Captain Canada]

Looking good. Sorry to hear about the troubles, but that's half of the fun eh ? Looks like she took a hard landing in the pic 

[Thorvic]

Coming along nicely that cockpit coaming is a common problem as the cockpit is a little tight on tolerance to say the least. I reacall filling mine once it was assembled as it just wouldn't stay together.

BTW  did you factor in your underslung resin red beard when establishing ballast as that may help somewhat if mostly ahead of the main gear

[Weaver]

Getting near to the point where some paint can go on....

I'll give Airfix this: the fit of some parts is superb. I dropped the airbrakes into the wells with no trimming and needed a scalpel to tease them out again.

Loadout question:

My FAA Skyhawks have five pylons. On a nuclear strike mission like this, with Red Beard on the centreline and drop tanks on the inners, what woulld be a good loadout for the outer pylons? My original thought was a pair of AIM-9B Sidewinders, but I'm now wondering if some combination of chaff dispenser pod, chaff rocket pod, early ECM pod and/or Sidewinders would be more appropriate. Thoughts?

[rickshaw]

Do you know how well the A-4 performs carrying a Red Beard?   If not, it might be safer to assume that it's terrible and it needs all the help it can get so I'd go with nothing except the two tanks and the bomb.   ECM pods were pretty well unknown at that time except on the bigger bombers.

[Weaver]

An A-4E (closer, performance and pylon-wise to my whiff aircraft) had, with two 300 gal tanks,  a disposable warload of 3,386 lb. The centreline station was rated at 3,500 lb and the outers at 1,000 lb each. Red Beard only weighed 1,750lb so it should have been no problem on the centreline (A-4s routinely carried a heavier Mk.84 there) and that leaves plenty of margin for a couple of light stores on the outers.

[rickshaw]

An A-4E (closer, performance and pylon-wise to my whiff aircraft) had, with two 300 gal tanks,  a disposable warload of 3,386 lb. The centreline station was rated at 3,500 lb and the outers at 1,000 lb each. Red Beard only weighed 1,750lb so it should have been no problem on the centreline (A-4s routinely carried a heavier Mk.84 there) and that leaves plenty of margin for a couple of light stores on the outers.

How much do the two 300 gallon tanks weigh when loaded?

[Thorvic]

I would still go with clean outer Pylons or not even fit them, as the FAA didn't have the ECM pods and wouldn't carry Sidewinders on a bombing mission as it is 1962 after all. Its got guns for self defence and other aircraft would provide the CAP and possibly an Avenger might do rudimentary ECW.

[Weaver]

I've been thinking about the markings on this one and there's a bit of an issue. Normal FAA practice for the underside of the wings was to have a medium-sized roundel outboard and then a really big serial number inboard of it, with one of the latter being reversed so it was readable from the front. The problem with the Skyhawk is that the wingspan is short and very obstructed by pylons, big drop tanks and the undercarriage fairings. Assuming that the roundels take up all the space outboard of the outer pylon, then to fit the serials in between there and the wing root, they have to be pretty small, they're largely obstructed by drop tanks on the inners, and they're messed up by the undercarriage fairing and doors.

A few other options occure to me:



1. The "by the book" version, but split around the u/c fairings. This would still be blocked by the tanks.
2. Single code, small enough to fit between the u/c fairings.
3. Same as 2, but much larger, to the point where the first and last digits are outboard of the fairings.
4. Single code but on the flaps. This is least likely to be blocked, but the size is limited.

What do you folks think?