Douglas AGM-78A Skybolt
kit no. M720606020

Review by Al Magnus - one72guy(at)gmail(dot)com


First of all, I have to mention that the box top artwork is incorrect. The missile was originally designated GAM-87A (not AGM-87A) by the US Air Force. This was changed to AGM-48 when the Joint Services Designation was adopted in 1963. The RAF also had plans to use this missile to give their bombers standoff nuclear capabilities. In any case the missile never saw production with either nation.

This kit is cast in a light greyish-yellow resin. There are twenty-two parts for the two missiles and two wing pylons intended for the Airfix Avro Vulcan. Since the parts are resin you will need to use cyanoacrylate super glue for construction. I have added part numbers to the instruction diagram below to aid with identification for this review. No decals are provided.

There are two options available for the missile. You can build either the early version (GAM-87A) with the pointed nose cone, or the later version (AGM-48) with the second stage upper. The resin casting is indifferent. The body parts (parts 2, 3 & 6) are cast as solid pieces. They are nice and straight but rife with pinholes. The fins (parts 4 & 5 - four of each per missile) are extremely thin (ergo fragile), with some being incompletely cast or warped. I elected to build one missile as the later AGM-48B version.

Because I wanted to display my missile on a stand, the first thing I did was saw off the aerodynamic housing (they greyed out portion in the parts diagram above) that covered the tail of the missile while being carried underwing.

Next the nose was glued to the body. Some sanding of the mating surfaces was done beforehand to ensure a nice straight join. The seam was filled with more super glue and baking soda, and sanded smooth.

I replaced the fins with copies made from plastic sheet and then glued them to the fuselage. The missile body has locating grooves (red lines in the above parts diagram) to aid with placement of the fins. Surprisingly the fit was excellent, probably because the thickness of the plastic matched with width of the grooves well. But I still had some other filling to do with respect to the fins. The missile has eight fins consisting of four long fins (part 4) and equal number of short fins (part 5). Unfortunately all of the grooves (long red line in parts diagram) are of the same length as the long fins, so I had to fill in the portion of the grooves that remained once the small fins are added (short red line in parts diagram).

Getting the missile ready for painting was a laborious process. As I mentioned above, the body parts were rife with pinholes. To remove them I went through a number of steps. First I identified what holes I could and filled them with thick grey paint. Then I sanded the missile smooth with wet-or-dry sandpaper moistened with some water. After sanding I inspected for more holes and repeated the process many times until I figured that I had most of the holes filled. This was followed with the first coat of light grey primer, which revealed more holes. These were filled with more thick grey paint and the kit sprayed with grey primer again. These two steps were repeated as often as required to eliminate the holes.

With the prep finished, final painting commenced with a coat of Floquil Reefer White as the base primer. The final coats, of which there were about seven, were done with Testors gloss white. I sanded between coats to get a nice smooth and even finish to the paint. As for markings I had to go to the spares box. I wanted to do a SAC version with the colourful blue star spangled banner. I had some Model-Aire International decals for the AGM-28 Hound Dog that looked like they would work but test fitting the decals showed they were about 10mm short. So I decided to make a British example. I applied roundels from a Blue Rider World War One RAF roundel sheet, and the other markings, which I believe are trestle locations, were applied using some spare black lines.


Conclusion

This is a very interesting modelling subject, but you will need to have a ton of patience to eliminate the numerous flaws in the resin to get an acceptable finished model.

Review Last Updated: 30 August 2019

© AC Magnus 2006