Special Hobby X-15A-2 1:32

Wheels, but not as we know them

The X-15 had a skid undercarriage, which made ground handling difficult, so someone designed a two wheeled hydraulic jack to drag it around on. The Special Hobby kit provides this as a resin kit within a kit, and it’s almost unbelievably delicate. It even bolts together with 1:32 scale bolts – I kid you not! I’ve counted a total of 72 parts in this dolly, 18 of which you have to make yourself, such as the hydraulic hoses, suspension axles, jack handle securing pins, etc. If you’re considering this kit, you WILL NOT be able to construct it without a set of micro drills and a razor saw – every bolt hole had to be drilled out, and the same goes for the axle mountings.

I took four evenings and over eight hours to produce the finished product. To tell you the truth, I was expecting the thing to be too delicate to take the weight of the finished model, but so far it seems to be holding up well enough.

Here’s the business end in bare resin and PE, with the white hydraulic lines made from plastic rod.

Then there’s the nose wheel bay. The kit gives you nothing but an empty box with a big seam down the middle – couldn’t have that, so four hours and 29 extra parts later, we have a wheel well which looks a bit busier…

First off, the internal structure was scratchbuilt from plastic card and rod, then it was added into the well with some other bits and bobs and wiring. The well is about an inch long, just to give some sense of scale.

The crumpled silver paper is meant to look like that, by the way – I assume it’s some sort of heat insulation to protect the tyres from the air friction heat. In any event, it was about the easiest effect on the whole build to replicate.

Rivet, rivet

I spent a lot of time messing about with the small details on this build, and there are a lot of them to attend to as the kit itself isn’t that detailed. On the one hand, that’s good because it gives you plenty of modelling for your money, one the other it makes you wonder what your money was spent on.

One area which lacks is the rivets on the tail surfaces and wings. After studying online drawings and making careful measurements, I broke out the Rosie The Riveter riveting tool and did the tailplanes. It took me about an hour and a half to do them both, top and bottom. The hard part is getting the lines of rivets parallel to each other and not riveting over things like the centre spar. I know the rivets themselves look a bit crude when they’re first laid down, but once they’ve been rubbed down and painted they look quite subtle.

…shows them under a layer of primer, rubbed down ready for painting.

Then I had a go at the wing, and after 45 minutes, this is what the result was:

Yes, that’s right – riveting both wings top and bottom, took a total of three hours!

Hot bits…