Trumpeter | 1/32 A-7E Corsair II
Reviewed by Menelaos Skourtopoulos
I was very happy to read that Trumpeter would be make the A-7 in the big 1/32 scale. And I was much happier to have 2 of those kits in my hands!
The curiosity was very high, after the first reviews that came up on the Internet. Now I have already started building that kit and I can saw you some of the goodies but also problems of it. With the following review I'm not going to make a general inspection but I'll try to show you some details of that kit.
First Look
Opening the huge box is not easy…The box is closed too tight and I had to cut it of to get it open. But the first impression is great. A big box full of "thousands" of parts! The quality looks great at the first look., but looking closer there's some flash here and there, but that's not a serious problem..A smaller box with some photo etched parts (harness, canopy inlay etc.), clear parts, landing gear in metal, and rubber tires makes you more interested to look further…One more thing that seems amazing is the huge collection of weapons that included inside and this is a kit of it's own.. You have almost everything you need… free fall bombs, snakeeyes, mavericks, HARMs, FLIR pod, sidewinders TERs, and many more…
At the bottom of the box there's a huge decal sheet and a smaller one. The big one has the general decal for two USN A-7E from the 70es. The smaller one is full of decals for the weapons! And under those sheets a booklet with the building instructions and a huge color sheet with profiles and drawings of the two aircraft and all the weapons in the kit!
The instructions booklet has 24 pages full of building sections (there are over 678 parts!)
Dimensions/Parts
I was very curious to see how accurate this new kit will be. I've reed a lot of horror news about the intake and tail section, so I copied the 1:72 plans of the Detailed & Scale book and scale them up to 1:32.
The intake is indeed a bit flat… It looks like the intake of the old Aurora Kit in 1:48…but the mistake is not a big one. With some work it can be done looking really good. The kit gives the hole air intake tube in two parts. There's no turbine at the end of the intake, but you can barely see it if the hole thing is fixed. To fix the intake you have to press the two halves in the region under the windscreen. I used Milliput to fixed the gap between the pressed halves and the intake tube. The intake lip have to be formed with hot water. A procedure, that is not impossible.
The dimensions of the front fuselage is OK. Looking the profile, there are no big differences to the original plans.
The tail region is somehow wrong too. Too petty for such a big model. The Fin sits too low on the fuselage, but otherwise the Fin almost correct, if you measure it alone.
Same story for the landing gear doors: Just beautiful.
There are many parts for the canopy even a big photo-etched one. The clear part is very clear but with a line in the middle of it (a common product in the latest kits) and you have to polish it away. Otherwise is the front part well done. The "metal" part of the canopy is protected in the kit with some foam for nor breaking…
The cockpit situation is good enough. No big surprises here. There are 3D side consoles and side walls and a beautiful front Instrument panel in 3 parts sandwich type. The film for the instrument is very good but the one screen on the right hat to be paint over with green…
The landing gear struts are also given in metal. I don't use them because the plastic one are strong enough and there's no differences in the detail level. The tires are all in rubber, and are highly detailed.
The Kit offers extra parts only for the E (NAVY) version. There are other type of main wheels, the catapult strut and some other minor details.
The external stores as I written above is a kit of its own. There are also two external fuel tanks inside.
The decals are well done with an extra sheet with many warning stencils for the weapons and pylons. That's good, but I prefer some of the basic stencils (e.g. panel numbers etc.). You can build one of two NAVY planes from the 70s:
BuNo 159289 VA-82 AJ/300 USS Nimitz 1978
BuNo 157530 VA-192 NH/300 USS K Hawk 1972, both of them CAGs.
Last but not least, the huge sheet with the painting instructions for the aircraft and the weapons is a nice future.
Conclusions
All in all a very good Kit of the A-7. There are some serious problems inside and I hope that Trumpeter will correct them in the future A-7D kit.
Recommended
Many Thanks to Stevens International and LSP for supplying the kit for review.
© Menelaos Skourtopoulos 2006
This review was published on Saturday, July 02 2011; Last modified on Wednesday, May 18 2016