Greetings from Cairns, North Queensland, Australia
I have always been enthralled by the A-10NAW since reading the article about it in flight magazine back in the early eighties. I normally work in 1/72 scale, but with an up-coming model competition, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and combine the
Trumpeter 1/32 A-10NAW with a in-club theme for 'what-if's'. I have to be honest and say that while
I was impressed with the size of the subject, I think Trumpeter needlessly over-engineered the kit in area's that were not totally and 100% essential, thus complicating the build to no good end.
I decided against opening the gun and engine bays, references I checked show that way too much work was needed for the time frame available (2 months of weekends and the odd weeknight), so I contented myself with doing what would have been a production standard OA-10B in RAAF service (yes I know, but it is a
WHIFF (flight mag pic). This required a fully detailed cockpit (aarrgghh!!) and new canopy as the the
production variant would have been a full clamshell instead of the two piece of the prototype (not so much arrgghhing here
(pic6)). I was quite happy with the kit seats, but the interior, egad!! That had to change big time so off with the scratchbuilding and parts modification we go. I think the end result was worth it (pic
4&5). I also extended the wheel sponsons as per the refferences to include the radar (port) and TV/FLIR LST/TD (strb).
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The construction, once all the fiddling around the office was out of the way, was pretty much straight forward.
However, I felt that the wing join required strengthening so I inserted aluminium tubing in both the wings and fuselage to provide for a mounting for a continuous tube spar, inserted at construction end. The parts
fit reasonably well with little need of filler barring the dreadful
underfuselage/wing join (fixed with card and filler and sanded to shape followed by the inevitable rescribing). The various di-electric panels, avionics bumps and whatnot were likewise scratchbuilt and fitted.
I elected to go with a variant of the 3 colour OZCAM light green/tan/black
(FS34102/30219/37038) by incorporating a dark green (FS34079) for a four colour scheme (again its a WHIFF)and airbrushed on over a week of nights. Decals came from the spares box and/or laser printed. The squadron
I chose to represent the operator was No12, formally a Chinook squadron until being disbanded in the late 80's, hence the waterbuffalo emblem on the fins.
I didn't want to hang too many stores and chose the ALQ ecm pod, 2 rocket pods, 2 mavericks, 6 snake-eye mk82's on TER's and 6 mk20 CBU's on an MER on the centreline (I did want to do a GPU-5 30mm geopod but ran out of time). Naturally the serial is completely spurious but just
couldn't get past the nose art of 'Raging Bull' (well it is a WHIFF) as well as Magnificent Obsession on the inside of the crew ladder door.
In all I was very happy with the result with what is a very large and beautiful, yet ugly (something only a parent could love), subject.
Mick Alderson
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