Oldbaldguy

Well, I think you are getting there. Almost all the production kits depict a rectangular cross section from the front pit to the radar bulkhead, but it’s not. It tapers in several directions as it tapers to the radome. Yours looks like it’s getting pretty darn close.

I swear I‘be seen a photo somewhere of an Intruder carrying a drop with a single fin on the center line. Seems I’ll advised, but it’s likely been done at least once.

I, of course, know that. But on a Corsair, these guys don’t seem to have as much travel as, say, the vents on the back side of a Mustang scoop and that set me to wondering if they are fixed or moveable. The crappy revell kit I just picked up cheap has only a couple of lumps under the wing roots with no openings at all. You’d think I’d have known better than to buy one of these things, but it seemed like such a bargain. Rule of thumb when buying a 1:1 airplane is that you buy everything you want or are looking for to begin with even if it costs more than you want to spend and never, ever, buy something cheap with an eye toward fixing it up because it will cost you lots more in the long run. With this kit, I probably should have taken my own advice. Already Passed the cost of a Tamiya kit trying to correct all the things wrong with it.

Thanks very much!

Quick question: Anybody know if the exit air vents under the wing roots of an early Corsair are fixed or adjustable. Next to impossible to tell just from looking at photos.

In my yoot, I never saw an operational F11F parked or taxiing with the nose strut flat/collapsed. The airplane’s stance was always a bit nose-up and there was always a good bit of polished chrome showing on the strut. The only Tiger I’ve ever seen sitting nose down/flat is part of a museum and not maintained. As I’m sure you already know, the F11F is pretty small and the gear is pretty short. But it sits pretty perky.

The Viggie is an enigma from the leading edge of the intakes forward to the tip of the pitot. It is all things to all people and no two modelers will ever see its shape the same. Other than somehow scanning the real deal and then committing that accurately to plastic, it is most likely that the best you will be able to do will have to be good enough. I guarantee that whatever you produce, no matter how accurate you think it is, there will be those among us - probably me included - who will say, “Dude, it just doesn’t look right. You missed it by that much!” Still, you are a better man than I to attempt one in this scale and I can’t wait to see how this ends. BTW, you are better of freehanding the front end rather then use the crap Trumpeter turned out as a guide.

The forward fuselage on this thing is nothing more than an entire regular airplane’s worth of structure cantilevered waaaaaaay out there in front of the rest of it with no visible means of support other than some stringers and a handful of rivets. There is no wonder at all that it is beginning to sag at the leading edge after all these years. Gravity is winning!

I have complete and unfailing faith that you’ll figure it out - look at all the other esoteric things you’ve pulled outa your butt.

You might want to do some research before losing your mind working on the tail of this thing. The butt-heinies on the bombers went thru a number of iterations before NAA settled on a production version for the A-5A, which may or may not be the same as that found on the RA-5C. I assume you are going to do one of the first three or four service and weapons test airframes because they are the ones that carried the funky red paint jobs while in testing. Those airplanes went straight to the RAG, VAH-3, when they were done testing and were immediately repainted. One - and the only one left - ended up at Pax River where it still lives on a stick. The only operational squadrons to fly the A-3J were Heavy One and Heavy Seven. Their history sites and cruise books would be a good place to start if you need shots of exhausts, fairings, tail cone and such on the later bombers.

This is wonderful but you shoulda made the crew a little more bug-eyed.

I did exactly the same thing!! Glad to learn I am not the only one. Such a stunning accomplishment. We Americans produced some pretty cool - and elegant - shite back in the day. Just look at NAA alone. One hit after another: P-51, P-82, F-86, Furies, B-45, F-100, Savage, Vigilante, X-15 and the glorious B-70. Then they got bought and the rest is history.

Uh, would that 146 be in money or stones? It’s all so very confusing.

Many thanks to all for clearing that up. My wife and are typical Anglo European Yanks in that our genes came from over there while our grasp of math and weights/measures is very much American. (My wife is part something or other European while I am proudly Scots.) We have lately found ourselves caught up in a plethora of Brit TV serial dramas and often are bemusedly confused when the actors talk about some dead guy weighing twenty stone and then later going out for a pint. Now, whenever we are flummoxed, I can log on to LSP, find this thread and quickly unflummox us. Ain’t technology ( and big model airplanes) grand? Ta (Whatever the hell that means.) OBG

Most extraordinary effort and accomplishment! I’ve never understood Brit weights, measures or monetary units where dollars are measured in pounds and weight is measured in stone. (What are model kits measured in - kilo boxes?) So how many stone is that?

What a wonderful effort in problem solving. You might as well be building a full sized airplane.

The airplane looks to be gray over white in which case I think there is precedent for painting the tires white like the underside. Seems like I saw a photo of a PBY with main gear painted the same color as the side of the airplane. Might have been something else or maybe I just made it up. Old farts do that sometimes.

Note the TB-58 flying chase. And what color is the inside of the intake - NMF?

Hmmm. Looks to be early in the program and you can’t tell if the Buff is taking off or landing. Somebody will know and it will probably be interesting.

Is it my imagination, or is that white paint on the wheels and tires and not suds?

Oh, baby oh, baby!!!

What a shame. No good deed(s) ever go unpunished these days.

Note the lack of the tall antenna mast in front of the windscreen. Seems all the rest have them. And the canopy frames look to be bare aluminum. Saw this on early Navy T-34s as well.

Seems to me most likely that the light under the nose is a red anti collision beacon. The requirement for those things was pretty much world wide by then. Good place for it.

Well, an A3J is just an RA-5C without the hump and canoe and with smaller flaps. If you can make it work, you’ll be limited to only three squadron colors: Heavy 1, 3 and 7 unless you go with the clown colors on the operational and weapons test birds. Heavy 1’s tail color was black, Heavy 3 was the RAG so their tail color was international red/orange and Heavy 7’s color was bright blue. There were ten RA-5 squadrons so their paint was a little more sporty. Either way, can’t wait to see what you cook up!