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Trumpeter by Menelaos Skourtopoulos I was very happy to read that Trumpeter would be make the A-7 in the big 1:32 scale. And I was much happier to have 2 of those kits in my hands! The curiosity was very high, after the first reviews that came up in the www. Now I have already started building that kit and I can saw you some of the goodies but also problems of it. With the following review I'm not going to make a general inspection but I'll try to show you some details of that kit. First look
Opening the huge box is not easy…The box is closed too tight and I had to cut it of to get it open. But the first impression is great. A big box full of "thousands" of parts! The quality looks great at the first look., but looking closer there's some flash here and there, but that's not a serious problem..A smaller box with some photo etched parts (harness, canopy inlay etc.), clear parts, landing gear in metal, and rubber tires makes you more interested to look further…One more thing that seems amazing is the huge collection of weapons that included inside and this is a kit of it's own.. You have almost everything you need… free fall bombs, snakeseyes, mavericks, HARMs, FLIR pod, sidewinders TERs, and many more… At the bottom of the box there's a huge decal sheet and a smaller one. The big one has the general decal for two USN A-7E from the 70es. The smaller one is full of decals for the weapons! And under those sheets a booklet with the building instructions and a huge color sheet with profiles and drawings of the two aircraft and all the weapons in the kit! The instructions booklet has 24 pages full of building sections (there are over 678 parts!) Dimensions/ Parts I was very curious to see how accurate this new kit will be. I've reed a lot of horror news about the intake and tail section, so I copied the 1:72 plans of the Detailed % Scale book and scale them up to 1:32.
Some detailed views on the parts I must say the detail level of the parts is very good. Everywhere there are ingraved lines and rivets and all of the panel have their inner surface detailed too. We have the same configuration as on the 1:48 Hasegawa kit, that means all the electronic, LOX and RAM bay doors are opened. The detail level inside there is very high, almost perfect. Only in the LOX bay there's no LOX bottle (?) and you have to make from scratch. By many A-7s siting on the ground that bottle is removed, perhaps that's the reason why…The landing gear bays are equal detailed with many parts and even with some major hydraulic lines as extra parts…
The landing gear struts are also given in metal. I don't use them because the plastic one are strong enough and there's no differences in the detail level. The tires are all in rubber, and are highly detailed.
The external stores as I written above is a kit of its own. There are also two external fuel tanks inside. The decals are well done with an extra
sheet with many warning stencils for the weapons and pylons. That's
good, but I prefer some of the basic stencils (e.g. panel numbers
etc.). You can build one of two NAVY planes from the 70s:
Last but not least, the huge sheet with the painting instructions for the aircraft and the weapons is a nice future.
Conclusions All in all a very good Kit of the A-7. There are some serious problems inside and I hope that Trumpeter will correct them in the future A-7D kit. Recommended Many Thanks to Stevens
International and LSP for supplying the kit for review. © Menelaos Skourtopoulos 2006 |
The
intake is indeed a bit flat… It looks like the intake of the
old Aurora Kit in 1:48…but the mistake is not a big one. With
some work it can be done looking really good. The kit gives the hole
air intake tube in two parts. There's no turbine at the end of the
intake, but you can barely see it if the hole thing is fixed. To fix
the intake you have to press the two halves in the region under the
windscreen. I used milliput to fixed the gap between the pressed halves
and the intake tube. The intake lip have to be formed with hot water.
A procedure, that is not impossible.
The
dimensions of the front fuselage is ok. Looking the profile, there
are no big differences to the original plans.
The
tail region is somehow wrong too. Too petty for such a big model.
The Fin sits too low on the fuselage, but otherwise the Fin almost
correct, if you measure it alone.
The
situation for the wing is much better. The dimensions are perfect.
That's the same for the ailerons and pylons.
Same
story for the landing gear doors: Just beautiful.
There
are many parts for the canopy even a big photo-etched one. The clear
part is very clear but with a line in the middle of it (a common product
in the latest kits) and you have to polish it away. Otherwise is the
front part well done. The "metal" part of the canopy is
protected in the kit with some foam for nor breaking…
The
Kit offers extra parts only for the E (NAVY) version. There are other
type of main wheels, the catapult strut and some other minor details.
