First job was to solve the windscreen problem by carving a wood former and plug-form a new one. After a few attempts I managed to produce a useable, though not perfect windscreen. Not too bad for my first plug form.

Next step was the interior. The four (civil) kit seats were replaced with two more suitable seats from the spares bin, with belts added from metal foil. A radio stack behind the seats was fashioned from some scrap plastic and a rear wall was added too close of the interior. It was painted light grey, with the instrument panel black and some details picked out.

Next the fuselage halves were cleaned up, a cutout for the roof windows was added and the rear air intake was opened up. The cabin windows were installed, leaving all kinds of gaps around the edges, followed by the interior. I added a spacer below the rear of the floor to allow the main landing gear legs to slide in from the outside later on. I opened up the front cowling propeller mounting and added a backing plate to mount the propeller on. This created the open look around the propeller seen on the actual aircraft. The fuselage halves and front and rear cowlings were then assembled. The fuselage halves are not exactly the same length and they are deformed in places so lots of filler was required on all the joints.

After some test-fitting I decided to mount the tailbooms on the wings first so that I could work more easily on the horrible joints. Once these were cleaned up wings and tailplane were mated to the fuselage. This sequence worked out much better than expected because it highlighted that the wing sweepback had to be reduced to get parallel tailbooms. I also had to shorten the tailplane to make it fit. After lots of fiddling and comparing to photographs I was satisfied with the alignment. More filler had to be mobilized to clean up the resulting mess around the wing root and cabin roof area until a smooth finish was achieved. Finally the roof window, made from a piece of flat clear plastic, was added, as were the wing struts, which were a bit too long and had to be trimmed.

As I had by now grown a bit tired of the kit it took a while before I got around to painting it. Although there are a surprising amount of paint scheme options for O-2’s I chose to finish it in the standard grey paint scheme with white upper wing surfaces. Most of the details where going to come from a Superscale OV-10 sheet I had lying around and I surfed the net until I came across a photograph of an O-2A with a serial that could be made from the various numbers I had available on this sheet. As a bonus it had red wheel hubs, adding a nice color touch. The only thing I couldn’t be sure of was the configuration of the white on the upper wing. In the end I decided to use the most common configuration.

I sprayed the kit with Modelmaster 1731 Aircraft gray and then masked off the top wing, which was sprayed white. I masked the front cowling anti glare panel and sprayed it black. Smaller details were brush painted. As the finish was semi-gloss I put the decals on without adding a gloss coat, which worked out fine. Getting all “ones” of the serials lined up was interesting to say the least, and though I never managed to get them exactly right it was close enough for me. Last touch was some highlighting of the panel lines.

This kit is not the easiest one to build, but with a bit of effort and replacement of the transparencies and propellers a decent model can be build, with lots of scope for detailers in the well visible cockpit area. It looks nice on the shelf sitting next to the Bronco and the Bird dog, which shows well how surprisingly small the O-2A actually is.

As for accuracy the span is almost spot-on at 161 mm, but the length is a good 7 mm short at 119 mm. To me though it certainly looks like a Skymaster.

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