This time construction does not start with the cockpit. Since this is a ‘drop-in-affair’, I directly  started with gluing the main parts together. At least I wanted to do so. Test fitting revealed the largest shortcoming of this kit. Although the fit promised to be excellent, due to some simplifications in the kit design there were gaping holes in the engine area. Inside of the intake trunk is a gap between fuselage halves and lower wing. The aft end is even worse – no jet pipe is supplied - so the shape is not round and you can look down to the small ‘firewall’ which is near the position of the compressor faces. At least no see trough-effect. One option to solve this problem would be the use of engine covers, another one to mount the FOD screens from the Eduard PE set in the closed and the thrust deflector shields in the deployed position. This would at least partially obscure the view to these problematic areas. I chose the hard way and built jet pipes from ¼” Evergreen plastic tube.

First the upper and lower wing halves were glued together. Don’t forget to drill out the mounting holes for the underwing pylons and aerials if you wish to install them. The gaps in the intake areas were filled with sheet styrene which was cut and sanded in shape. The intake area was painted flat black and the PE compressor faces were mounted. The jet pipe assembly made some modifications on the fuselage halves necessary. I had to remove some material to get everything to fit. Then it was time to paint the inside of the pipes in metallic black and to mount the wing on the fuselage. Due to my modifications the fit was not as good as before, so I had to do some filling and sanding. The next step was to mount the horizontal stabilizers and wing tip tanks. At this point I also removed the fin tip antenna and pitot tube as well as the navigation lights on the tip tanks, since I planned to replace them with scratchbuilt items.

Then it was time to start with the cockpit construction. Since the opening is large I decided to mount the seats and control sticks after painting and decaling. The kit lacks the sidewall padding found on the real aircraft so I simulated this using thin (0.1 mm)  aluminum sheet engraved in the diamond pattern with a sharp needle. To get a good effect this should be done on a somewhat soft surface (some layers of an old newspaper). The same technique was used for the seat cushions. After painting the sidewalls and cockpit tub in different shades of light grey, the tub was completed with scratchbuilt throttle controls and mounted inside the fuselage. Since I intended to mount the model on a base, I did not use weights to keep the nose down. The raised detail on control panel was sanded down and it was glued with the decking. After painting the assembly in grey and flat black the painted Eduard instrument panel (PE/film type) was mounted. Everything seemed to fit nice so I glued the whole instrument panel subassembly to the fuselage. When I held the windshield in place for a test fit, I realized that the decking sits much to high so that there is only a very small gap between decking and windshield. The only way to correct this fault at this stage was to sand down the decking as far as possible and to repaint it. The windshield was glued in place and the small gaps were filled with my favourite fine filler Mr Surfacer 500 from Gunze. Now it was time to mount all the small parts. I started with the underwing pylons. Next were the gun fairing and the ducting for the refueling probe. The probe itself was cut off since the Chilean version of the A-37 uses a short single point refueling probe instead of the long air-to-air refueling probe found on most other A-37. For the exact antenna layout you should carefully study your references since shape and locations of the used antennas can vary. I mounted all antennas found on Chilean A-37 and modified the shape of the dorsal blade antenna. The rod antennas right behind the cockpit and on the small stubs on the leading edges of the horizontal stabilizers were left off at this point.