1/48 Italeri A-10A

Gallery Article by Philipp on Apr 26 2011

 

Because there are so many 1/48 A-10´s in here, I won't write anything about the history of the real plane...I think others have said enough!  This A-10 was an all time favourite for me and I always wanted to build one.  In the early days (6th grade oor so...) I used to build 1/72 and I always looked for the A-10.

Now, with the age of 27 I started this nice hobby again, after 11 years of abstinence ;-)

I purchased this baby over the internet because there are very poor shops in my city...I built it (almost) out of the box with some scratchbuilding from styrene, some old magic markers and stuff from my "trash-box".  The weapons were taken from various sources.  The Hasegawa weapons set provided the LGB´s.  I took the JDAM´s from an Academy F-15E Strike Eagle which also provided the sniper Pod and the AIM-9X´s.  Finally the CBU-87 clusters were modified from the Rockeye's that the Kit came with.  I know, I know ,some of you may say that this armament was never used in action and something like that but I always was fascinated by the big load of weapons this tank killer could (theoreticly) carry and I wanted a full load of ammo on this one.

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The build itself went without bigger problems, the fit was overall really good.  I liked the engine section of the Italeri kit because it could shown open.  The only problem was that I didn't want to spend money for the detail set with the GAU-8 and the engine itself.  So I build the engine from scratch.  Most of it was build from an old pen and unused parts I had from the F-15.The wiring were from an broken wireless router.  I tried to pimp it with some colored accents here and there.

This baby was my first paint job with a good airbrush pistol and I tried my best.  I used thinned Revell enamel color for painting.  The decals were out of the box from the Italeri kit.  I like the sharkmouth look of the A-10, but as I saw that almost every model has this shark mouth I chose the clean look.

The guy working on the engine stands on an scratch built ladder cut from thick styrene.  He came with the Italeri ground crew set I bought a while ago for my F-111 (Rest in Pieces).  I had to brake his leg to fit him on the ladder...sorry for that.

I washed the model with thinned acryl color and gave it a dry brushing with soot.  Works perfect!

Overall I think it is a nice build and it was much fun.  This kit was worth every cent.

Philipp

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Photos and text © by Philipp