The Grumman OV-1A Mohawk is an oddity in U.S. Army aviation; it was brought into being in the 1960s when “combat” fixed-wing aircraft were supposed to be the responsibility of the U.S. Air Force. Designed primarily as an observation and reconnaissance aircraft, for a short period in the Vietnam War, it was used in the close-support role and armed with rocket launchers. Once the U.S. Air Force balked, the Army had to defang the Mohawk.
Clear Prop’s new 1/72 scale OV-1 is a real gem with beautiful details and excellent fits of the plastic parts. Build options include, armed or unarmed, gear up or down, flaps raised or dropped, speed brakes deployed or retracted, and cockpit hatches opened or closed. Decals offer markings for one JOV-1A (J stood for “temporary special test” — the armed version), and three unarmed OV-1A. These early aircraft featured a short-span wing and the instructions have you cut off a portion of the kit’s wingtips.
The photo-etched copper (PE) fret is something to behold, with more than a hundred parts representing seat harnesses, control knobs, seat cushions, console surfaces, shrouds, pull rings, tie-down rings, drop-tank fins — you name it! But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s the holding and attaching of some of these parts that defy the practicality of their use. Some parts are smaller than 1mm in any dimension, and some parts are supposed to be attached on edge, leaving surface for adhesion. For me, a few of the cockpit and landing-gear details were too small to handle and too small to be missed if they weren’t installed. So, I left them out.
Another problem with the PE parts is that many need to be folded before installation, but the instructions do not clearly show how to fold them and sometimes don’t show how they look when installed. You only get one chance to fold the thin copper. Try to unfold or fold it in the opposite direction and the parts will sever at the fold line.
Some of the cockpit’s plastic consoles receive PE covers with shallow relief that then get covered with a decal. In Step 12, you are supposed to shave .2mm from the top of the overhead console. Anybody got a micrometer I can borrow? I spent three hours detailing, painting, and assembling the two-seat cockpit.
Once I finished the cockpit, the rest of the assembly went well. The instructions tell you to place 9 grams of weight into the small nose cap to balance the model. There’s no way that nose cap would fit even 9 grams of uranium! I ended up stretching clear styrene rod for a tail prop instead.
There are a few more things to watch out for in the instructions. In Step 21, the wing spar through the fuselage is missing its part number (E29). In steps 24 and 25, you’ll need to bore small holes in the wing lower surfaces to fit the drop-tank and rocket pylons. The options for the gear and flap positions can be vague, with A and B used to differentiate them. In Step 49B, they show both the opened and the closed outer main gear doors being installed; they are differently shaped — parts F16/17 are closed and parts F24/25 are open.
The decals went on without trouble, but there are hundreds of tiny stencils and the diagrams for their placement are small, dark, and inadequate. Again, I left many of them off the model.
The wingtips are molded in clear plastic, and the instructions show the front corners to have colored covers for the red and green navigation lights. I couldn’t find photos showing this arrangement, so I painted the tips olive drab and added tiny dabs of UV-cured “laser glue” to the tips and painted them for the lights.
I can’t complain about the look of the finished model, even with the details I omitted. I spent close to 30 hours on it, a bit more than usual due to the small parts and assembly corrections. I hope Clear Prop! adds a gray Desert Storm OV-1D to its lineup!