It has been a long time since I started a scale model project, and I haven't built a plane since I was a little kid. I decided to build the A6 from Flight of the Intruder, and I think I'll build it just-landed from Cool Hand and Tiger's flight "Downtown", so including some SAM and small-arms damage.

So I got the 1/32 A6E kit from Trumpeter. I knew it was going to come in a big box, but I didn't expect this much plastic. To be fair, a lot of those sprues are ordnance, and since I'm building the plane fresh from blowing their wad over Hanoi, I won't need to assemble any of the bomb load. Still...

1/32 scale! Oh hell that's gonna be BIG!

I started work on the engines of my A6. I did what I could to hide the seams, but some of them are still pretty bad - and I learned that sanding down the putty and seams on the engines leaves patches that are visibly *too* smooth, as you can see in the last image.

Hopefully some oil washes on the silver metal parts will obscure, and not emphasize, the seams.
emphasize, the seams.

Next step is to put them all together, do a black oil wash an (...? If there's a good way to do this, somebody let me know)d some rainbow filters for heat discoloration.

These engines are going to be sealed in the fuselage and will mostly disappear, never to be seen again. I'm using them as sort of a test-bed for some techniques I'll use again elsewhere. And with the SAM damage I'm planning, maybe small patches will show through the fuselage after all.

Alclad has some burnt metal colours, or you can try thin sprays of Tamiya clear yellow, orange and blue.

Most of the time, engine parts are not so shiny. Perhaps a bit of flat clear can help make them look more used.

I got a small amount of work done on the Intruder this weekend. I started cleaning up and assembling the cockpit:




The dashboard of the A6-E has some boxes and wires (TRAM equipment?) molded in that don't appear on the plane in the movie. The few glimpses of that area you see in the movie look like it's covered by black fabric or something, I assume to hide the extra TRAM gear while they were filming. I may or may not replicate that - despite how it looks in the photo above, I was able to trim and sand the bits off and it came out pretty clean.




I'm calling the engines done for now. I decided that painting heat discoloration was probably more trouble than it was worth, given that these are going to be entirely inside the fuselage when I'm done. I did a thin pass of brass colour close to the exhaust, so that end is a bit more yellow than the straight silver of the rest.

More progress:




The cockpit is more or less done - I have to re-install the HUD panel and landing gear lever that broke off in the process of painting, but otherwise it's ready to sit in the plane. I had planned to do this as an out-of-the-box build, but the resin seats and photoetch panels were too nice to pass up, much better than the kit parts.




The landing gear was like a small kit in itself. I only have photos of the nose gear, but the two rear parts are done as well. The main strut is metal, so for the shiny shock absorber areas I just filed and buffed the original metal, then masked it to paint the rest. I plan to add some dust to the tires and more pin washes to the gear, but it's 95% done.