Sea-going Sunday PUNCHER

René van der Hart creates beauty from HobbyBoss’s 1/48 ‘Double Ugly’

- Rene van der Hart

A-6E TRAM Intruder

Grumman A-6E TRAM Intruder Kit No: 81710

Scale: 1/48

Type: Injection Moulded Plastic

Manufacturer: Hobbyboss www.creativemodels.co.uk

A few years ago, I built the Hobbyboss A-6AIntruder and it was a pleasure from start to finish, being, in fact, one of the best kits I've ever built. The fit was good and the details are great, with several options included like folding wings and poseable flaps. Based on this experience, I decided to build their A-6E TRAM version in the low-viz colours of VA-75 ‘Sunday Punchers’ and without folding the wings. To help with things, I purchased a pair of resin seats from Wolfpack and a set of pre-coloured instrument panels from Eduard.

The build started with the cockpit and although the area behind the seats is well detailed, I still added a few copper wires to simulate electrical wiring. The parts that make up the cockpit were primed black and the cockpit tub was then airbrushed Dark Gull Gray. Small details were picked out by fine brush and the resin ejection seats were brush painted and given a light weathering. The kit instrument panel detail is nice, but I replaced them with the photoetch panels from Eduard anyway as I think it just provides better detail. There are several separate parts to the photoetch set and these were glued in place with thin CA glue. In my opinion, this is one of their better-looking precoloured sets.