Reviews : HobbyBoss A-6E Intruder

After reading all the hype, I was excited to take a stab at this plane. It would be my first A-6 and I was ready to dive in. Starting with the cockpit, I was delighted to see how well things were moving along. The detail in the cockpit is incredibly nice, and the fit went together with almost no issues. However, the rest of the model has me a bit the. The nose is grossly undersized, which left me to do some major reshaping with superglue to fill the gross step. I tried to evaluate how I went wrong but the nose is a simple two piece buildup, and it's kind of hard to get that wrong. It took tons of work to get it back in track, and for that, I was highly disappointed. Follow that up with the fact that the refueling probe and windscreen also have to mate to the nose section, then you can quickly see how this one engineering mistake causes lots of additional headaches further down the road. I finally did enough surgery to get the windscreen to at least seat properly along the newly structured nose, but there was still a minor step that was noticeable. Also had to reshape the base of the refueling probe in order to make it seat properly. Another issue I wasn't happy about was the area in which the intakes and fuselage mate. The fit was spot on, but the resulting seams that come of it are in an area with lots of minor detail that has no choice but to be tampered with if you're to fill and sand the nasty gaps that are evident. I'm the end, you can pull it off, but I have a hard time k long that we pay such high money for kits for the detail, only to turn around and destroy it while trying to properly model the subject. The weapons have a nice selection, however the MER was a bit of a lost cause if you're wanting to glue stores to them. They've got a funky layout for the ejector feet to mate to the weapons and the rack. In the end, I wound up just drilling through them, and adding safety wire so that I could essentially just plug them into the mer. This helped tremendously with the alignment. Also, if you plan on using the cluster bombs, be ready to redrill the mating holes as they're nowhere near where they need to be to mate with the mer. As for the decals, a real shame there too. The quality is nice, but there's some real blunders as far as spelling. For example, walkway is spelled out karkray . What is that? Hate to say it but if I had to build another one in probably reach for the revell offering.

Very interesting build. Lots of detail and options. Fit and engineering were very good. Large aircraft that looks great on the shelf.