Time to close up the cockpit for the puttying stage. The HUD is attached with white glue while the front canopy is masked off and cemented onto place. I used a mix of masking tape (in yellow) and liquid mask (dries blur) for this. The rear canopy is glued in place with white glue as I need to pose the canopy open later.

I also quickly hand painted the landing gear. It's a matter of qhite for the base color then giving all the parts a wash of black grey. Then a light drybrush is done by silver grey color pencil.

Time to close up the cockpit for the puttying stage. The HUD is attached with white glue while the front canopy is masked off and cemented onto place. I used a mix of masking tape (in yellow) and liquid mask (dries blur) for this. The rear canopy is glued in place with white glue as I need to pose the canopy open later.

I also quickly hand painted the landing gear. It's a matter of qhite for the base color then giving all the parts a wash of black grey. Then a light drybrush is done by silver grey color pencil.

To keep my mind off all the chopping and sanding required by my F-16D Barak build, I decided to start this project and keep it strictly out of the box (OOB). The only aftermarket portion is the markings, which comes from TwoBobs. So it's OOB with non-OOB markings and camouflage. It's going to be my sanity build. Heh.

Back when the US Navy ran the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School aka 'TOPGUN', it operated A-4 Skyhawks in the role of the adversarys, ie. the bad guys. This particular Skyhawk took that role to the extreme by having an actual silhouette of a MiG-17 painted on it.

This project is heavily reliant on the excellent article by David Aungst at Hyperscale, who did all the research required to do up an accurate Top Gun #56. In fact, the TwoBobs decals are also based on this same research. The kit itself is the excellent 1/48 Hasegawa A-4E/F kit.

As with all aircraft kits, I began with the cockpit and I must say this kit's cockpit is nicely detailed enough that I won't consider an aftermarket resin set at all. Even the seat is reasonable detailed with molded on buckles.

I tried something new for this kit. I did the normal aircraft grey for the tub, then black grey wash over all the crevices, then black grey for the control panels. For the highlights though, I used a silver grey color pencil to go over. I really liked how it turned out as the color pencil gives me more control over drbrushing with a paint brush. I think I'll use this method from now on. The main screen in the center of the control panel is given a wash of red color to simulate a turned off TV screen.

To make things even more challenging, the fingerprint appears over (or under) the 'rescue' decal. Meh. So anyhow, I haven't decided what I'm going to do with this. Most likely though, I will live with it.

The exhaust is made of 3 parts, the fan and 2 half-cylinders to make the trunking for the engine. The instructions called for the inside of the trunking to be painted in steel but I decided to leave as is because after putting the whole exhaust together, the inside can't be seen. Less work. Heh.

The fan in the intake however, is more prominent, so this was handbrushed the same way as the cockpit. Steel for the fan, given a black grey wash, then highlighted with silver grey color pencil. The scoop itself is handbrushed white.

The instructions called for 8 grams of weight for the nose but I decided to overdo this a bit since if I didn't weight it enough, I can't go back and add more weights. It's now suitably nose heavy.

With that done, all that remained was to cement both halves together. I slowly ran cement through the joints, inch by inch and worked around both halves of the fuselage, making sure the fit was good all round. With the cockpit sealed up, very little of the inside can actually be seen.