1/48 Hasegawa A-4K Skyhawk  

by Calum Gibson

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This is the excellent Hasegawa A-4E/F Kit, there's everything 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 from 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 for the exceptions below.

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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  ;-)

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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
:-) Now if only Hasegawa would do a T Bird. See more of my models at 
www.gibstuff.net/models
Calum 

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Photos and text © by Calum Gibson