Special Hobby continues its series of American "X planes" with the Navy's ultimate speedster, the Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket. First designed with a jet engine for conventional takeoff, the three Skyrockets evolved from jet-and-rocket power to rocket-only craft dropped from a modified P2B-1S (B-29).
Special Hobby's kit is fairly simple, with only 29 plastic parts, resin wheels, and photoetched-metal details. The decal sheet provides markings for Ship No. 144 in three guises: Navy markings from 1950; Crossfield's 1953 Mach 2 flight in NACA livery; and later NACA 1954 markings.
Construction of the cockpit is optional; if you intend to close the lid, you won't see much through the tiny windows. I opted to install the seat, harness, controls, and instrument panel, but didn't bother with the photoetched-metal side panels and rudder pedals. If you choose to show all that interior detail, you'll have to invent a way of attaching the clamshell canopy in the open position.
The landing gear needs extra work. It appears the mold makers cast the stub axles for the wheels on the wrong side of the main-gear struts. The instructions would have you cut them off and make new axles from wire or styrene stock; I simply super glued the wheels to the struts. The struts don't fit into anything; just glue them to the corner of the wells.
Like most Special Hobby kits, the wings and stabilizers attach with simple butt joints - no tabs, slots, pins, or holes. This is further complicated by the vertical stabilizer, with its long leading-edge fairing, which also butts the fuselage. Extra care is needed to align everything.
I painted the model with Testors Model Master classic white and waited a week for the gloss enamel to cure. There aren't a lot of markings on the Skyrocket, but the large X decals on the fuselage proved troublesome; they were so thin they flipped under the decal paper when I tried to slide them off. I ruined two in the process, so I made new ones from black decal stripe. I used Bare-Metal Foil on the instrument probe.
Nevertheless, the finished Skyrocket is a little doll. The kit is superior to other recent kits, and we're likely to see another boxing of it (probably in the jet or jet/rocket version).
With few parts and a one-color paint job, only 17 hours was needed on this model. So, Special Hobby, how about an X-2 and X-3?
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