The Corsair II has always been a favourite of mine with its menacing gaping maw. This one of the Ohio National Guard is something a little different.
The Ling-Temco-Vought A-7 Corsair II is a carrier-based subsonic light attack aircraft introduced to replace the United States Navy's A-4 Skyhawk, initially entering service during the Vietnam War. The Corsair was adopted by the United States Air Force, as well as the Air National Guard, to replace the A-1 Skyraider, F-100 Super Sabre and F-105 Thunderchief.
I really like the Italeri kit. It has shallow jet intake, the cockpit detail is 'not there' and incorrect but this is one of those kits that always just seems to work for me.
The kit features nicely done panel lines, very little flash and a great fit. Cockpit details is non-existant with decals provided for the details so you might want to either sratch build (like I did) or get some after market stuff.
The kit includes are really nice arsenal of weapons with :-
The decals for the kit include options for three aircraft:-
Which is a pretty good mix of paint schemes for the D model.
Construction began in the cockpit where the rear bulkhead needed to be remade. The horribly shallow intake also had to be hollowed out and an extended intake was created from plastic card, which was rolled into a tube a fitted into the fuselage.
Instead of using decals for the cockpit I scratch built some detail with (very) small bits of plastic off cuts to simulate dials, levers and switches. The finished product was painted in a dark grey and dry brushed with a white to pull out some of the detail.
Getting the fuselage sides to fit together with the new extended intake was a bit of a pain but some clamps, superglue and a little time soon fixed that.
Intake, gear bays and landing gear was sprayed white then coated with future while the wings and remaining features were added to the kit.
I opted to do the 180th TFG mostly because I liked how this kit looked when made up. Looking around the net, there are some guys who have really done a great job with this one.
The kit was pre-shaded with black then I sprayed the entire model with the lighter shade of grey. Once that was dry I got to business rolling up all those blue tac sausages to get a nice feathered look between the two camouflage colours.
Once everything was masked up (which takes freaking ages by the way) I proceeded to spray the darker grey.
Masking removed revealed everything seemed to go well however the kit looked a little simple with just the two-tone camo at this stage.
Italeri decals are my friend, for some reason they always seem to work well for me. They are a little thick but they always respond well to a few dabs of Micro Sol and Set.
There were in fact, very few decals to apply. Once the large bee was applied to the tail it was only a few national insignias and few other bits left to apply.
Once the decals were dried I sprayed a little future to hold everything in and applied a wash of Tamiya X-19 Smoke to bring out the panel lines. Then I applied a few dark greys of pastel to simulate dirt and general wear on the aircraft. I think I went a little overboard here.
If I did the same scheme again I would add some more chalk weathering in the middle of the panels to give the paint job a bit more depth but as it was the end result wasn't too bad.
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