History

The North American T-28 Trojan was a piston-engine military trainer used by the United States armed forces beginning in the 1950’s and into the early 1980’s. The largest single concentration of this aircraft was employed by the U.S. Navy at NAS Whiting Field in Milton, Florida in the training of new student naval aviators. The last U.S. Navy training squadron to fly the T-28 was VT-27, based at NAS Corpus Cristi, Texas, flying the last T-28 training flight in early 1984.
 

The Kit

The kit consists of 3 sprues. The first two sprues are molded in bright yellow and contain all the parts from propeller to tail rudder and everything in between. There is the usual flash that will need to be removed and ejector pin marks here and there. The wings and fuselage have raised rivet detail that the builder will have to pay special attention to when building the kit. The third sprue is clear and holds the front windscreen and rear sliding canopy.

Also included are a 7 page instruction manual and a decal sheet for 1 airplane. The Instruction manual is basically 10 steps in the construction of this kit and is very easy to read and follow with nice illustrations as well as painting guide and a decal placement page.
 

Construction

Construction of this kit is fairly straight forward. It begins a rather sparse cockpit consisting of two seats (one molded with pilot), one control panel, a control stick and two decals. The kit provides the builder with adjustable landing gear from the up to the down position and back. The usual amount of sanding and filling will be required to clean up small gaps and misalignments but nothing the average builder should have any trouble with.

There were only two major points of concern I encountered with this kit. One is the fit between the rear stabilizer and the tail fin. There is a gap of about 1mm here that will either have to be filled with putty or as I did, with thin strips of evergreen. The second and more important error is that this plane is a TAIL SETTER. The instructions don’t say anything about having to add weight to the nose but I ended up adding nearly half an ounce to make this girl sit on her tricycle landing gear. With all major construction done I added the canopy and was ready to paint.
 

Painting and Decals

Since this build was going to be completely OOB I went with the single aircraft markings on the decal sheet which depicts a trainer from ATU-800. Paint was Tamiya Lemon Yellow with a single drop of Gloss Orange. This is close the orange-yellow color of the real plane. With the yellow applied I then sprayed the black sections on both sides of the fuselage where the exhaust stains are contained. The olive drab anti-glare was painted in front of the windscreen last.

After a coat of Future the decals were applied. The kit decals appeared rather thick on the sheet but went on beautifully with the help of Micro-Sol. Even the rivets posed no threat to these decals which was a nice surprise.
 

Final construction

With the paint layed down and the decals in place one final coat of Future was applied to seal everything in place. Tamiya smoke was sprayed along the panel lines and a wash of ProModeler wash was applied to give it a slightly weathered appearance. The last step was a coat of flat clear over the entire airframe. The wheels and prop were installed, tape removed from the canopy and she was ready for a photo shoot.
 

Conclusion

This is not an award winning kit by any means. There is a sever lack of detail in the cockpit and there are actually no wheel wells at all. That being said, I spent a grand total of $15.00 on this kit including paint and had a lot of fun building it. The very minor fit problems, few parts, easy to read instructions, and colorful paint scheme would make this kit a great candidate for the younger modeler or someone who is just getting back into the hobby from a long absence. Would I build another one? Absolutely!

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