1/72 Esci A-7D Corsair 

by John Green

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In common with the great majority of their products, especially those in 1/72, the Esci A-7D kit is extremely nice, being nicely moulded with fine recessed panel lines, a decent level of detail & thin, well-moulded clear parts.  Nothing's perfect however and the kit has 3 main problems - the standard Esci problem of inadequate cockpit detail with decals for the panel and side consoles and two problems specific to the kit, namely a total lack of intake trunking, with the intake blocked off just behind the intake lip, and an equally total lack of nosewheel bay, just a hole in the fuselage with a shelf to locate the nosewheel.
Fortunately, help is at hand - when they reissued the kit, Italeri modified the tooling to incorporate a nosewheel bay and an intake blank.  A friend sent me a spare intake blank (thanks Mark), which I gave to my fiancée, who's building the same kit, and a copy of the instructions for the Italeri version and I then made a phone call to The Hobby Company, the Italeri importers in the UK, who were happy to sell me another intake blank, a replacement for a missing intake piece & the Italeri decals.  Once all
this was sorted, I was finally ready to make a start.
Having no desire to start scratchbuilding cockpit detail, I simply painted up the cockpit bath & applied the decals as supplied.  The ejection seat was beyond redemption though, so I planned to replace it with a Neomega resin item later in the build.  At this point, the lack of intake trunking proved a distinct advantage - unlike most A-7 kits, there's absolutely masses of room for noseweight, so I just superglued in place a good chunk of lead , actually an old cast lead .45 calibre bullet .  The rest of the
basic airframe went together pretty painlessly , requiring just a couple of fill/sand/prime cycles, and it was into the paintshop.
First off, I sprayed the gear wells & the inside of the gear doors in Halfords gloss white, having previously removed the location pegs from the doors so that I could fix the gear doors into the wells using Blu Tak. 
However, it soon became apparent that the gear doors were actually too big the fit into the wells in the closed position so I had to mask the wells with tape & Blu Tak & then hand paint the doors.  I'd chosen to build the Ohio ANG bird finished in the 36270/36118 scheme, so sprayed an overall coat of Humbrol 126 & then set out to mask up for the darker grey.
Fortunately, I realized soon after I started that the camo pattern on the Italeri instructions is just plain wrong as they've merely copied the pattern from the grey/green birds & this totally failed to tally with photos I'd seen of the grey aircraft in Rene Francillon's ANG book.  Consequently, I dug out the appropriate issue of Scale Aircraft Modelling & found the camo pattern shown in the "Aircraft in Detail" article seemed a decent match for the various pics.  Strangely, however , it showed a wraparound pattern on the fuselage, but the underside of the wings in plain 36270.  It wasn't that easy to tell, but in the end I found a pic in the ANG book where it could be seen reasonably clearly that there was indeed a camo pattern under the wings.   Not having any details of this pattern, I simply masked up as a mirror image of the upper surface pattern, which may not be accurate, but certainly looks ok & then sprayed Humbrol 125 to finish off the camo.
Once the main camo was painted, it was pretty much all plain sailing.  I glossed up the paintwork, applied the Italeri decals, which were thin, nicely printed & went on flawlessly, then painted & fitted the various detail parts & the stores, which were a mix of kit items (droptanks, Shrikes & Shrike adaptors) & Hasegawa weapons sets (Sidewinders, TERs & cluster bombs.  A final coat of Humbrol Mattcote & it was time to demask the windscreen, wipe it over with WD-40 on a cotton bud (Q-tip to those of you in the States) & touch up the inevitable paint chipping round the edges of the masking.  Once this was completed, I attempted to fit the control column & ejection seat.  Both turned out to be too big, the stick being so tall it was level with the top of the instrument panel & the seat sticking out well above the canopy line, so I cut down the stick & attacked the base of the seat with an engineer's file until everything fitted, then fixed the canopy in place as a final step.
Whilst the foregoing sounds like a real catalogue of problems, nothing was too difficult to resolve & the end result was a model with which I'm very pleased.

John

Photos and text © by John Green