1/72 Special Hobby FMA IA-58A Pucara

by Chip Jean

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This is the 1/72nd scale Special Hobby FMA IA.58A Pucara, built out of the box. I've come to love limited run kits, of which, this is one. You get  subjects you wouldn't normally see and while limited run kits are vastly improved over years past, they
 provide a bit more of a challenge. The shake-and-paint ProAcdadamiyagawa kits are great and I love them too, but finishing a limited run kit and doing a good job
 on it gives one more of a sense of accomplishment. If it sometimes sounds like I'm slamming this kit, I'm not; I enjoyed the build and I love the finished product. So, what's in the box? A mix of injected plastic parts (including the canopy), resin, photo etch, and acetate (what? no vacuform?). The fuselage, wings, and horizontal stabilizers. have very fine, recessed detail. Fuselage and wing breakdown is slightly different than usual. You get left and right fuselage halves (ok, maybe they're not quite half), split vertically, and you get a bottom insert that includes the bottom of the fuselage from the nose,
 back to and including the area just behind the wing, and outwards to the inner quarter of the bottom wing.  It also includes part of the fuselage side forward of the wing. This setup practically guarantees wing alignment. There are two upper wing halves, and two
 more pieces to complete the wing bottom. Main gear well detail is injected plastic inserts instead of the resin inserts that come with many limited run kits.  While not as detailed as resin inserts, the injected plastic is easier to work with. The smaller injected parts, such as the landing gear struts, are not as finely molded, but hey, this is a limited run kit, right?

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Since I generally build my aircraft models from the inside out, construction begins with the cockpit. Out of the box, it's not wonderful, but adequate. The seats are resin and are dressed up with PE belts and ejection ring. The instrument panels are acetate
 sandwiched between an PE face and plastic backing.  Side consoles are plastic with a detailed PE strip glued on top. Other cockpit bits include plastic joysticks and PE rudder pedals. All of this sits on a strip of plastic that fits into the fuselage insert. I didn't get creative with painting the cockpit; dark gull gray, with black instrument panels and consoles.  Before I glued the cockpit to the fuselage insert, I put as much weight as I could into the front of the model; there's a lot of thick, heavy plastic aft of the main landing gear.
 Once the cockpit was done, I started with construction of the airframe, which went surprisingly quick and well, even considering one little glitch and two fit problems. First the glitch. Remember I said having the part of the wings molded as part of the fuselage
 insert practically guarantees wing alignment? Well, that assumes that the fuselage insert isn't warped, like mine was. The left side had an anhedral, while the right side was flat. Hot water, a hot hair dryer and gentle persuasion fixed that problem.

 Every model of a multi-engined propeller airplane with the engines in nacelles that I've built had fit problems around the nacelles, so why should this one be different? The back half of the nacelles are part of the wings, and thus, are split horizontally. The front half of the nacelles are composed of two plastic pieces split vertically and a resin face. Every one of those joints required filling, sanding, and subsequent rescribing.

The other fit problem was the canopy, which was significantly narrower than its attachment point on the fuselage. This took several rounds of careful filling and sanding, but I stuck with it until the canopy and windscreen were blended in to the fuselage to my satisfaction. A side not here: I've been using CA glue to blend in my canopies and windscreens for about 15 years now, and I've never had a problem with fogging on the inside. I just take precautions. First, if there is a gap between the clear part and the fuselage, I fill it with Elmer's glue first, and second, I apply small amounts of CA over the dried Elmer's.

 Decals are included for four Argentinean aircraft.  Options include two aircraft in overall aluminum, and two in a tan, light green, and light blue camouflage scheme, one of those being an aircraft with yellow ID bands on top of the wings and on the vertical stabilizer. I chose the one with the yellow ID bands.
 I found some pictures of a well-worn hanger queen Pucara in the scheme I wanted to do, then set about to find the right colors.....or a close approximation. At the local hobby shop, I found, to my utter amazement, that the Model Master paint rack didn't have a section for Argentinean colors. Oh noooo!! What to do, what to do! The bottom color was an easy choice; Model Master RLM 76, but the top colors were gonna be tough, or so I thought. I started scrounging through my paint stash, and found Tamiya Sky, XF-21 and Buff, XF-57 were almost exact matches for the pictures I had. No mixing of colors...YeeeHaaa!!!

 Since my reference was a heavily weathered, beat-to-snot, hanger queen, I tried to go for that same look. I first pre-shaded the panel lines with black, then sprayed the bottom with Model Master RLM 76 and the yellow ID stripes, then masked off the yellow. For the top, I very lightly penciled in the camouflage scheme then freehanded the tan and green using the XF tip on my Badger 150. Unfortunately, I was concentrating so hard on getting sharp demarcation lines between the tan and green, I didn't notice until too late that I had completely covered the pre-shaded black. No problem, there's always Tamiya smoke.

 Several coats of Future and the model was ready for decals. The kit decals were great, being very thin, in register, and responding well to Micro-Set. If I have any complaint at all about them, it's that they stick too fast. You better get that rascal in place right quick, or it's gonna stay where you left it. After the decals, I went over the panel lines on the top and sides with a dusting of Tamiya Smoke to make up for
 the pre-shading I lost while painting. This was followed by another coat of Future, an oil/turpanoid wash, and finally, a finishing coat of Testors Dullcoat. Another side note: except for Alclad II over bare plastic, I get away with spraying anything over anything else. I spray lacquer over acrylic and enamel; enamel over acrylic and lacquer; acrylic over enamel and lacquer. I just take several precautions if I'm doing one type over a different type; first, I make sure the base coat is totally set by letting it sit for several days and second, I lightly mist on the dissimilar coat.

 After the finishing coat was dry, I added the landing gear, wheels, gear doors, propellers and antenna wire, and my Pucara was done. Sometimes when I look at it, I
 think I overdid the panel lines, but then I look at my hanger queen reference photos and realize I'm not that far off.

Chip

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Photos and text © by Chip Jean