1:48 A-10A/C Thunderbolt II wheel bays for GWH kit

An aircraft built around a gun and protected from itself

The Fairchild Republic attack aircraft was given a pair of General Electric TF34 turbofans set high on the sides of the rear fuselage, between the vertical tail surfaces. The position was not an aesthetic decision: the hot jet stays shielded from above by the tail and from below by the wing, which makes it harder to guide an infrared homing missile onto it from behind or from the side. At the same time the engines do not ingest dust from the ground when operating from field strips, and when they are changed they hang low enough for the ground crew to manage without tall scaffolding.

Bays that are always visible

The main landing gear retracts forward into pods under the wing, but it is never fully retracted: the lower part of the tire stays outside, so that the machine survives a belly landing. That means you can look into the bay even on a model with the gear extended, and a smooth surface from the molding immediately gives away that the space leads nowhere. The casting brings the spars, the hydraulic lines and the wiring that actually fill the shape of the pod.

• the roofs and sides of the bays with the texture of ribs and skin panels
• the runs of hoses and wiring bundles cast directly into the walls
• the inside of the nose bay including the bulkhead behind the nose leg
• shaped seating surfaces for the parts of the kit named above

It is worth spraying the inside before gluing it in, because once it is seated in the pod you will not reach the corners well with a brush or a nozzle. The castings keep the crisp edges of the ribs, which could not be drawn out of an injection mold without a slide core.