Battle Axe 1/48 Bloch MB.174 A3

www.bowemodels.com

I must confess that this kit manufacturer had escaped my notice before I was presented with this project. However I soon discovered that my life was not missing much. Truly one of the worst kits I have ever had the pleasure or doing battle with.

Whilst the basic aircraft exterior is reasonably well represented, all of the smaller parts look like they've come out of a cheap Christmas cracker. Additionally, my customer was after a 175T - the naval version that was used for maritime operations. Fortunately, the particular aircraft required was an early "T" and as such the only significant difference from the 174 is the shape of the stabilisers. These I ended up building from scratch using plastic card and much sanding.

I didn't put a huge amount of effort into enhancing the internals as they are not that visible, restricting myself to filling ejector pin holes and adding a few control levers. Otherwise the kit was built pretty much out of the, er, "bag".

Suffice to say that much filling, sanding, shaping and cursing was involved in putting this together and the end result was never going to be quite up to modern standards but I hope you will agree that the end result at least "looks" like it's intended subject.

Progress photos can be found here.