Once upon a time there was a guy named Rob Ferreira and he was a TreadHead. Unfortunately, unlike most TreadHeads, Rob just didn’t enjoy building a military vehicle and weathering it. Nope that was too easy. What Rob liked to do was take a military vehicle to it’s final resting place. Be it as a monument on display in the open, an old forgotten wreck sitting in some wooded area all but forgotten about, a vehicle destroyed by some catastrophe, or a vehicle sitting in a vehicle track park in Afghanistan.

This last scenario is what actually got the engine compartment started. Rob wanted to create more than one vehicle with this empty engine bay. He chummed up to his friend Steve Reid of Celticwerks and after much back door shenanigans and blacks ops dealings there was some magical agreement that got Rob to do the masters and Steve to create the molds for the rest of us lowly TreadHeads to benefit from this teaming.

The line of Supermarine racers, designed to attack and eventually acquire the Schneider Trophy for Seaplanes, actually began with the S.4, a mid-wing cantilever monoplane with amazing aerodynamic form for its time, 1925. This floatplane racer was sent to the United States for the eighth Schneider Cup races at Baltimore, where it suffered a number of mishaps before it finally was wrecked when the pilot lost control, fortunately with no injuries. The race was won by Lt. Jimmy Doolittle, with the backup Gloster III placing second.

Every so often as a reviewer, you end up with a product that wasn’t quite what you thought it was. Thus was the start of this, where I had volunteered to review this new set from Aires covering A-7 landing gear bays in 1/48. However I thought they were for the Hasegawa kit, but alas, they are for the Hobbyboss kit! Knowing this occasionally happens to us as modelers, where we walk out of store with the latest aftermarket treasure only to find it’s for the other manufacturer’s kit, I set about to see how this set would fit in the Hasegawa 1/48 A-7E.