HobbyBoss 1/48 Grumman A-6A Intruder

with Furball Aero Design decals, AOA decals, Hypersonic resin exhausts, seats and fin tip, Master metal pitot and ResKit resin wheels

VA-35 ‘Black Panthers’, US Navy, USS Coral Sea 1969

Hot on the heels of finishing the Hobby Boss 1/48 A-6E Intruder, I completed this initial release of the kit, the A-6A Intruder. Given the differences between the A and the E were relatively minor, one might be forgiven for thinking the builds would be correspondingly similar. And one would be wrong.

The basic Hobby Boss mouldings are a mishmash of A and E features as the Intruder slowly morphed from one into the other. On the E, the main issue was the incorrect location of the wing fences. On the A the issues are less absolute and more to do with features that changed on the airframes as they evolved from the 1960s into the 1970s.

First order of the day was dealing with erroneous surface details. My guide for this process were the excellent instructions on the AOA decal sheet ‘Intruders from the Sea’. This is a truly wonderful set, with many pages of instructions and accuracy notes. However, as I shall mention in due course, I ended up modelling a scheme provided by Furball Aero Design. In any case, the AOA instructions are so good I kept the set and removed the vent on the starboard side of the canopy, all of the slime lights, and the recessed detail aft of the fuselage airbrakes, along with various location devices for parts not relevant to the A. This was all accomplished with black CA mixed with VMS filler powder.

Quite a lot of surface detail needs to be removed, some of it marked here in brown.
These lines (all shown in black) were filled and removed, as were the circular features.
On the front of the fuselage intake trunking, mounts for lights were filled (the black rectangles) as these were not fitted on the A model.
The kit represents A-6E wing tips (shown right). A triangular wedge needs to be cut out for the A-6A-style wing tip lights (left).

Next in order were the wingtip lights. The E had slime lights on the wingtips with a single navigation light on the leading edge corner, and this is what Hobby Boss cater for. The A, by contrast, had no slime lights and an extra triangular-shaped light ahead of the wingtip airbrakes. I cut out a wedge from the plastic and filled the gap with UV clear resin, subsequently sanded down and polished. It’s an interesting correction which I rather like.

The wedge filled with clear UV resin (left) and sanded down awaiting polishing (right).
The fuselage is littered with minor mould defects, as indicated here, which need careful removal.

It pays to examine the surface of the plastic parts carefully, and then polish away the rough sections (such as those towards the front of the intakes) and remove moulding artefacts from the slide moulds (such as in between the exhausts and the fuselage airbrakes). These areas are not very visible at first glance, but do stand out under magnification.

In these artificially darkened images, the very patchy and rough surface textures can be seen.

With surface preparation out of the way, I could embark on the many different areas of the kit that can be worked on simultaneously. It’s always good to get intakes out of the way as early as possible since making them seamless is tedious, and this kit was no exception. When they were all finished, I masked and painted the red lips before adding the intakes to the fuselage, as access is much easier at this stage. This did not go well, and the masked edges were very poor. I abandoned masking and used the decals from Furball, which gave a far neater result. With that done, the intakes can be added to the fuselage halves, along with the airbrakes (the items with holes were suitable for this airframe) and the nose radome halves. The fuselage airbrakes are a bit of a pain as there are no cut outs for the hinges. Hobby Boss recommend cutting the slots out (they are marked on the inside of the fuselage), and I did this on one side before realising it’s much easier to cut the hinges off and just rescribe them, which is what I did on the other side.

Masking the intakes for the red lips. This did not go well.
The masking didn’t produce a clean demarcation.
I decided to use parts of the Furball decals instead to represent the inner red sections. Much neater.

As with almost every subassembly on this kit, adding the intakes was not problem-free, especially as I was modelling the steps closed on both sides. This left many, many seams that required multiple rounds of filling, sanding, rescribing and priming. Eventually I managed to level everything off across the various parts and get an adequately smooth surface.

The intakes take a lot of effort to fair in seamlessly to the fuselage. This is the second application of filler.
After filling and priming, the surface is nowhere near smooth enough where the closed ladder is located.
Back to more filling. This time I covered a larger area and used some tape to minimise where it went.
After another round of sanding, the intakes are hopefully more successfully blended to the fuselage.

Unfortunately primer showed problems still present, so another round of filling and sanding ensued.
Finally, I was satisfied with the surface being level across the intakes, boarding ladder cover and the fuselage. Now to rescribe all the panel lines!
This is my first attempt, using the Madworks DLC 0.1mm scriber and some Madworks scribing tape as a guide. The small strips of Tamiya tape help prevent overruns in the scribing.
As you can see, the vertical lines are not parallel around the boarding ladder cover. Back to more filler!
I’ve applied the filler (black CA mixed with VMS filler powder) as carefully as I can to the wonky line.
The filler gently sanded down. Note the gap where the wing meets the fuselage.
I filled that gap with some Mr Surfacer 500.
Wing to fuselage gap all filled and the panel lines on the intake now rescribed so everything is square enough.
The red lines show where all the seams are that needed to be filled and rescribed.
Compared to the photo above, everything is much smoother now over the boarding step area.

Alongside all of this I could work on the cockpit. The seats provided are not suitable for the A I was modelling, and resin replacements were from Hypersonic Models. These are lovely and come with the straps moulded in place. Seat covers were usually orange, and I seized the opportunity to make them really stand out by airbrushing them and mixing in yellow to get a lot of contrast. Realistic? No. Cool? Yes. Everything else is from the box, and I wanted to try something new on the instrument panel. Like many modellers, I have dutifully been adding little blobs of gloss over the dials to ‘replicate the glass’. But I don’t think this has ever looked ‘realistic’ (although it does look cool!) and decided to try punching little discs of acetate to glue over the instruments instead. Given the canopy would be closed, this worked much better than I expected and I’ll definitely do it again in future. Each disc was glued in place with a small blob of Deluxe Materials Glue ‘n’ Glaze.

Lovely resin seats for an A-6A from Hypersonic replace the inaccurate kit parts.
The panel is brush painted and decal dials from Airscale added. Punched acetate discs were used to cover each dial face.
Here the panel has been angled so the acetate reflects the light. The orange radar screen is not covered as I don’t have a punch big enough to make the disc.
The completed panel. Understated, but very satisfactory.
The completed tub – this is out of the box.

Painted up seats ready for installation. Decals came from the AOA sheet.
The completed inner left wing compared to the right wing with the control surfaces still separate.
The kit is designed to display the RAM turbine extended on the port wing. The detail is wrong and unwanted, so the panel can be glued shut. It fits well.

Before the cockpit can be installed, more work is needed elsewhere. The wings are complicated and don’t fit well, and I made life infinitely more difficult by spilling a lot of cellulose thinners over an outer wing. For those who don’t know, this is an excellent way to melt plastic and lose all the surface detail. I had to fill a lot of the melted areas with CA and filler powder, sand it all down, and then reinstate all of the recessed details. The rivets were most annoying to restore, and this would have provided a good reason to eliminate all of them from the entire airframe. I wish I’d done this, as the final rivet-festooned model is very unrealistic, but I didn’t want it to stand out too much next the already-completed-and-rivetted E, and it would have taken ages. So rivets there are.

To fit the flaps closed, I found I needed to adjust the actuators with a file.
The same was true for widening the slots on the flap covers which fit on the upper surface of the wings.
This model was turning into a handful. I tipped cellulose thinners over the starboard outer wing. This stuff just needs to touch plastic and it melts. This is after the plastic has re-hardened.
Once hard, I filled all the pits and troughs caused by the thinners with black CA and filler powder.
The outer wings all fixed and control surfaces added. Note the amount of filler required (in black) to blend the flaps into the main wing.
Resin exhausts are from Hypersonic and need a fair amount of material from inside the fuselage halves to be removed. They are lovely, though.
The fuselage around the exhausts is complex and formed of multiple parts. All joints require extensive rework with filler and careful rescribing.
The fuselage halves are first united around the cockpit tub and required a lot of clamping to get the nose gear well to cooperate. From here, the rest of the fuselage can be joined together section by section.
With the outer wings united to the inner wings, the covers (the stadium-shaped insert in the centre) were blended in with more CA filler. Again, you can see the same used to blend the flaps across the fold line.
The kit parts for the doppler radar cover (left) and the tail hook (right).

Once the exhausts had been installed and the top of the vertical tail replaced (again, both superlative resin items from Hypersonic Models), the fuselage halves could be closed, and the next major modifications made. Early A models had covers for the tail hook, and no chaff dispensers behind the doppler radar cover, just forward of the hook. The cover itself was extended to form a complete teardrop shape. Hobby Boss don’t provide the cover (and I don’t blame them), and only the later truncated doppler radar cover with the chaff dispensers. The latter are easy enough to deal with (just fill the detail), but extending the radar housing was a little more involved. I found the nose of a spare drop tank that fitted the bill and blended it in with superglue filler.

The tail hook painted and ready to be covered, and the drop tank sacrificed to extend the radar cover.

Scratch building the hook cover was more complicated. Only the forked end of the hook had a cover, and it forms a complex ‘Y’ shape. My plan was to install the hook bay, cover the area with Tamiya tape, and then use a pencil to mark out the shape. I stuck this to some thick plastic card, cut it out and added it into the bay recess. This did not work brilliantly, but well enough, and I filled all the edges with black CA and filler powder and then sanded everything flush. The shape of the cover was later reinstated by scribing.

The hook bay is installed and the area to be covered marked out on Tamiya tape.
This was then stuck to some thick plastic card and the shape cut out.
It’s not a brilliant fit, but good enough, and everything could be filled with filler.
This is everything sanded down and awaiting a primer coat.
Rescribed and under primer, this is looking quite promising.

Towards the end of the project, the hook cover turned out like this. I confess I was rather happy!
One side of each tail plane is poorly moulded, and the panel lines need to be rescribed in. Here, the top one is done; the lower is waiting.

Cockpit installed. The black areas were all dry-brushed with ever paler shades of grey to highlight the detail.

Installation of the clear parts came next, and was the challenge I thought it would be. There were gaps galore around the windscreen, and throwing caution to the wind I simply threw a lot of black VMS CA and filler powder at it. I’d covered the inside with Johnson’s Klear to prevent fogging (which worked), and blended the windscreen in before adding the sliding section. This took several rounds, and involved plugging some larger gaps with thin plastic rod. For this area I preferred to use bits of Infini sanding sponge and some high-grit Tamiya sanding papers.

Lots of gaps at the front of the installed windscreen. Initially I glued it in using Tamiya Extra Thin.
Plenty of CA filler slathered over the gaps. The fogging is only on the (uncoated) exterior surfaces of the clear parts and can be sanded off later. Note the green masking fluid plugging the hole for the refuelling probe to try and prevent debris entering the cockpit.

After dealing with the windscreen, I installed the main canopy section, which needed some modification to close up properly with the windscreen frame. I eliminated all the joins with filler in anticipation of rescribing the shut lines later. Using CA as a filler meant the outside of the clear parts did fog up, and this was removed by polishing with Tamiya compounds (coarse, fine and finish) applied with a cotton buffing wheel in a Proxxon motor tool. For the latter I find a flexible shaft and foot pedal invaluable.

After several rounds of filling and sanding, I’ve polished the clear parts. The rear section has also been blended in.
A coat of primer is essential to monitor the seam removal and provides a good base for rescribing the shut lines for the sliding section and the nose to fuselage join.
My first attempt at the nose gear leg resulted in everything being crooked. A replacement was sought.
For some issues of their Intruder, Hobby Boss provided metal parts for the main gear legs. Later boxings have these parts in plastic.

A quick word on the landing gear. Early boxings of the kit came with metal cores for the three undercarriage legs; later issues replaced these parts with plastic. The metal parts don’t fit that well, especially in the nose gear, and after I’d forced everything together with glue I realised the nose wheel axles had been skewed out of alignment with the plastic leg. I could not fix this, and it was very visible, so I put out a plea to John Colasante (who runs the amazing Matters of Scale company) who I knew had made this kit wheels up. He did indeed have the nose gear parts, and although assembled, they were square and true. After they had winged their way over the Atlantic, they were an excellent replacement and a nice way of mixing up the DNA of the finished model.

There were a host of other minor modifications for accuracy. A large blade antenna was sourced from the spares box to go under the rear fuselage, the kit PE antennae were reconfigured to match reality (one large under the starboard intake; two small under the port), and another small aerial was added to the front nose wheel door as was a teardrop shaped clear part provided in the kit but not mentioned in the instructions. The ALQ-100 booms from the outer pylons were removed and a small section cut off part F8 (probe refuelling light) so a clear red light could be added at the front from clear UV resin. One of the fuselage intakes (M22) needed to be omitted from the starboard fuselage by the canopy. I can’t claim to have caught everything, but it was heading in the right direction.

As I’ve aged, I’ve become more nostalgic about colour schemes. I spent untold hours as a child tracing aircraft profiles from library books and recreating their markings, and this had a big impact on how I mentally view certain airframes. Intruders, in my mind, have huge black panthers in big white circles on the tail, and so that’s how the model had to be done. Accordingly, I selected a VA-35 example from the 1969 to 1970 cruise on USS Coral Sea, as provided by Furball Aero Design in the form of 502/152637.

I spent a long time looking for photos of this aircraft, but only turned up one from 1970, which was an acute rear view, and thus not much use. I therefore had to depend on photographs of other VA-35 A-6s to use as a reference. These made me pretty sure the tailhook was covered, the anti-glare panel a dark grey, that no corroguard was applied to the leading edges and that the tip of the fuselage dump should be red, along with the undercarriage door edges. 502 definitely had dark grey walkway markings, including along the fuselage spine, but the precise shape would be a guess.

With as much information as the internet (and loads of books) was going to provide, I primed it all in varying shades of Mr Finishing Surfacer 1500 Mahogany mixed with White. The undersides were simply Mr Color 69 Off White mottled with some MRP White, and the Light Gull Grey mostly from MRP with some shading with Mr Color 315. I took care to paint the fuselage airbrakes with Alclad Magnesium and the radome a mix of Mr Color 318 Radome Tan and 45 Sail. Over this went various washes mixed from ABT502 oils, mainly Dark Mud, Starship Filth and Sepia all lightened with greys as appropriate. After these were removed I had a very ‘quilted’ look as the rivet detail stood out far too much, but for better or worse, I’ve left it as it is. I freely acknowledge it is not realistic, but then, what is? I do wish I’d filled all those rivets though.

Priming was with various mixes of Mahogany and White shades of Mr Finishing Surfacer 1500.

With all painting completed, including the ‘502NL’ marking airbrushed in NATO Black, the model awaits some oil washes and decals.

AOA provide very comprehensive stencil decals, and whilst I’m sure this aircraft didn’t have them all applied, I just love stencils and the visual texture they provide. I added them all. The main markings come from the Furball sheet, and everything settled down beautifully over some Mr Mark Setter and under some UMP Extra Strong decal solvent. I took care to punch a hole in the port fuselage national insignia to ensure the metallic static discharge port wasn’t covered. I also noted that the ‘VA-35’ legends were incorrect, both in size and location, and substituted with the decals from the kit, which whilst not entirely accurate, were better. I will say that the Furball instructions were not great as the decals are not numbered, so knowing which decal to apply where (for example, the ‘02’ markings on the flaps and tail) was a guessing game, especially when multiple aircraft on the sheet carried very similar markings.

I find decalling on a horizontal surface essential, but to keep the model stable increasingly elaborate Lego jigs are required! The foam sleeves help prevent scratching the paint.

All decals applied and the model awaits a satin varnish coat and final construction.

Adding the decals revealed that Hobby Boss did not get the nose to fuselage geometry quite right (which AOA have mentioned in subsequent sheets), resulting in the ‘502’ being necessarily crooked, and the red lights on the leading edge of the tail are way too big. I wish I’d realised this earlier, as it would be an easy fix.

Whilst decals had settled beautifully, they were coated heavily with some Tamiya X-22 to try and further blend them into the surface. Once that had hardened, very wet coats of VMS Satin were airbrushed over the top to dull everything down. This stuff is very thick and dries on the airbrush needle very fast, so I blasted it un-thinned through my Iwata RG-3L with a 0.6mm needle, which overcame both problems.

Final detail parts were the metal turned pitot, refuelling probe and needle-sharp probe on the starboard intake from Master. The undercarriage fits quite well, but as with the E, the actuating arm on the starboard main leg doesn’t fit with its locating hole at all; since I’m two for two on this problem, I assume the error does not lie with me. The wheels are from ResKit and have some nice detail.

What a modeller never wants to see when the masking is removed: plastic debris inside the cockpit!

And then it was done. Most disappointingly, when the excellent New Ware masks were removed a substantial piece of plastic swarf was revealed, wedged between the inner windscreen and instrument panel coaming. I’ve tried tapping and jiggling, but nothing has budged it thus far. But aside from this, the rest has turned out okay considering how much effort went into just getting everything together. It’s an impressively sized model with plenty of presence, but with two now on the shelf I have no desire to build another!

Year bought: 2016 (Gift)

Year built: 2025 (New Addington, Croydon)

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