Grumman EA-6B

The oldest kit in my stash. I've had this since the late eighties. 

Verlinden seats before and after 

Had to remove a bit from the sides. 

Fit well inside the cockpit tub. Much better detail than the kit. 

Added a plasticard roof and strips to enclose tailhook opening. 

Fitted easily to fuselage. 

The enclosed tailhook area. Fear not, the black lines are not gaps but black GSI Creos glue. 🙂 

The seats after painting. Beautiful detail on the Verlinden items. 

ECM pods painted. Will add decals and weathering later. 

Few extra details added to cockpit. A little bit of gizmology goes a long way.  

Hasegawa instrument panel decals modified extensively using Reheat decals and etched surrounds for the monitors. The original decals had yellow monitor screens! 

The Print Scale decal sheet I will be using. The Scale Master decals I was originally going to use are a bit old and only include the unique markings. The stencils and national markings on the Hasegawa sheet are all yellowed to the point of being unusable. 

Nose, wings and tailplanes added. Almost ready for primer. 

The worst part of the kit so far has been the intakes. Very poor fit in terms of positive location of the splitter plate. And of course in trying to glue them I ended up with the dreaded thumbprints stuck on the plastic. Luckily I was able to sand it back and ended up improving the overall appearance as there were significant tooling marks on the middle portion. 

Intakes have been glued to the fuselage. I also glued the central and outer pylons on. The outer pylons didn't want to fit with both mounting pins in situ, so I cut off the rear pins and glued it on before painting. I feel it's better having a nice strong join. 

It's funny how the smaller parts can be the fiddliest. The area behind the intakes was primed and sprayed insignia white. The fit is so tight that trying to airbrush it afterwards would be difficult. I also added an extra step to both sides of the fuselage on the top. On the real aircraft the top boarding step is spring loaded and only moves up when the ladder is lowered. The kit of course allows for the boarding ladder to be open or closed. The closed option wouldn't work if the step was there. 

Rearmost third of the intakes was painted black as there is no detail inside. I then sprayed a fade coat of white towards the front so that it's full white at the opening and fades to black rearwards.