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We've come a long way since Top Gun competitor Barry Raborn gifted me this A6, the last surviving (? :^) model from the film version of Stephen Coont's novel,
"Flight Of The Intruder." Having a passion for the Grumman A6 Intruder for nearly 40 years was and has been a challenge from the get-go. A bad case of "Beauty of the Beast"...(pardon the misspeak) "Fanatics"...not many remember the late Bob Kress, VP of Grumman's Fighter Division. One of Bob's claims to fame was management of the Grumman A6A, E, KA, EA, F, and the F-14 family. The later shares many attributes with the A6.
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I asked Bob if it was a possible to purchase 1/10th plots of the proposed A6F on 3 in.centers. Two or three weeks later Consolidated Freight stopped in front of my house. Out rolled a paper "log"...and this began. As hard as I worked at delivering enough recip power to justify beginning construction...it was not in the clouds much less the cards, or stars....until creator of JetFan,
Rainer, an Austrian engineer, delivered on his promise...
Finally everyone is back to reasonably good health. Our Houston and Kentucky facilities are "making" instead of designing. Everything done thus far has been to create and resolve mechanical challenges to fill the inside of our A6. Because we have had to work from the outside in multiple data points had to be created...principally a measuring tool.
You see this in the above drawing:
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MAC 6's have a 28" wing chord at the side of the fuselage. Everything on and within the 6's is sized and arranged using this 1/28th or 1"
:1" scale. Everything shown in this thread was created by the measurement of wing LE to TE or the distance from the TE @ the fuse and the out most edge of the fuselage rear mounting flange.
With a fuselage this large doing a mirror measuring audit is a PITA...but symmetry had to assured. Vic Catalasan (Vic R/C) squared our plug (lay-up from the movie molds) as well as it could be. In our opinion Vic is "the premier" glassman in this industry...and no stranger to giant scale models. Vic does most of Jerry Bates glass fuselages. We owe a great deal of the accuracy to Vic's corrections of what in a movie model filmed from 30 feet originally had.