1/48 HASEGAWA DOUGLAS A-4K SKYHAWK

75 Squadron Royal New Zealand Air Force circa 1985

The Build
This is the excellent Hasegawa A-4E/F Kit, there's every thing you need to make a early Kiwi A-4K. The only mod you have to do is remove a couple bits on the intakes and change the lower anti collision light form the left to right hand side. I built this kit a few years ago. Except for the rocket launcher I used weapons from the Hasegawa weapons set a. A-4's always look better fully loaded, so I decided to load the aircraft with 6 MK82's on a MER, a AIM-9G and 2 300 gal drop tanks. It was built out of the box except the exceptions below.

When choosing the colours I used the Gunze Sangyo Acrylics for the Grey (FS36222), Brown (FS 30219), and Light green (FS 34102), for the Dark green (FS 34079) Gunze colour looked way to dark so I used Tamiya's XF58 Olive green. This just looked more like the green in the photos I had. As usual (for me) I airbrushed them free hand, As real aircraft are usually painted free hand I figure I may as well paint my models these way.

One think I noticed is the access ladder bends inwards just like the real thing. for the remove before flight tags I used red painted tin foil cut into strips. This was before I discovered after market RBF tags;-)

I used some of the Hasegawa decals but the RNZAF decals are the excellent Gecko Graphics (www.gekkographics.com.au) A-4 Decals. If you want to build a Kiwi A-4 these are the decals to get. I'll be using them on the other 3 A-4s I intend to build.  Overall though I think it has turned out OK. There is one glaring error I made, considering I worked on A-4K's I really should of noticed it. Still I'm not telling you lot :-) .

The Pictures

Click on the thumbnail for a better look

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