Build Review - Eduard 1/48 Bf110C

I haven't make a Bf110 for a while, and so was very pleased to land this one as a commission build. I love making the Eduard ProfiPak kits, they have everything you need in the box, right down to the canopy masks. And this kit is arguably the finest available of this aircraft, avoiding as it does the inaccuracies associated with the older tools from other manufacturers. I'm also looking forward to doing a nice Battle of Britain era mottle pattern, it's what makes Luftwaffe modelling so rewarding!


So what's in the box? Well there are a LOT of parts. One sprue (G) seems to contain about a hundred empty lugs. No, wait, there is a tiny part on the end of each one. This could be interesting....


So we start, as ever, with the cockpit. On the 110, this is very large and very visible, so it needs to be good. It is made up of two separate sections, and each one involves a very large number of parts going together. This was a truly fiddly exercise. I cannot fault the quality of the mouldings nor their accuracy but it quickly became apparent that this kit is seriously over engineered. There seems to be a philosophy of "why provide one part when ten will do?" Many, many pieces that could quite adequately be single parts in the kit are made up of several smaller items each needing to be glued together. This was to haunt several elements of the build. Some manufacturers seem to think that a large overall parts count somehow makes their kit superior and more impressive. WRONG!!. You are just annoying the modeller. We enjoy creating models, not performing endless precision engineering. And what is more, there is more risk of losing these tiny bits and also of having integrity issues in the build.


But I finally got through the cockpit sections, giving them a base coat of RLM02 and picking out the details as necessary. This brings me on to my second rant. Eduard provide a lovely pre-painted etch instrument panel which looks great, going on as a two parter with dials underneath and surround on top. Brilliant, works great and looks fantastic. But why only the pilot's instrument panel? There are many other panels in the Bf110 cockpit and I defy the best of modellers to be able to paint them up to look as good and clean as the Eduard etch! So you are at risk of ending up with a mismatch in the look of your panels - I think this is a bit thoughtless on the part of Eduard. But I did my best and in the end I think they came up pretty well, I hope you agree.

The whole "office" slotted pretty nicely into the fuselage, subject to a few more tiny pieces needing to be secured to the fuselage walls. (If you make one of these, study the instructions carefully else you will undoubtedly miss something!) The cockpit section also includes the belly cannon array, which takes a bit of putting together, and I only realised afterwards that it would not be seen at all, once the fuselage is closed up. Why do they do this? "Modelling for God", is what we call it (i.e. only God knows it's there...). The fuselage halves went together with no real problems, only requiring minimal seam clean up.


The next task was to put together the nose section, which is separate. It contains the nose cannon array, which is lovingly detailed and I spent a fair amount of time getting this right since I was determined to leave the top nose cowling detachable to show off these guns. When it came to attaching the nose section to the fuselage, this took some doing to get it lined up seamlessly. I carefully slid the top cowling on (quite tricky to get the cannon through the cowling holes, but perfectly do-able) and secured it with Blu Tack to hold it in place for painting.

The wings went together very well, and Eduard have thoughtfully left the trailing edge on only the top half with an internal seam for the bottom to fit into. I have seen this on a few kits and it is great, avoiding problems with thick and/or "double leaf" trailing edges and leaving a flat seam that it easy to fill if necessary. The engine nacelles (which also incorporate the wheel wells) were a little trickier. You have to build the wheel well interior within the two halves of each nacelle and this can be a little tricky to get right. Once attached to the wings, there were also noticeable seams that had to be filled.


When it came to attaching the wings, I found that the wing lugs are far too large for the slots on the fuselage and a fair bit of filing and scraping was needed to get them attached. And even then there were significant seams needing to be filled, although that is not uncommon with many kits of this type. The tail sections, however, slotted on neatly with no problems whatsoever.

I masked up the canopy sections using the supplied pre-cut masks (what a life saver, especially on this plane!) and attached the fixed sections. I filled the movable sections with wet tissue to mask the interior for painting, and would attached these afterwards.


The whole model got a good coat of RLM65 lightened with a little sky grey (this appears much more authentic to my eye). I then masked off the underside and sides and proceeded to apply the splinter scheme in RLM02 and RLM71. When done, I then removed the masking and applied the mottling to the sides freehand using the same colours, ensuring that the mottles blended with their appropriate solid colours. Once done, she was sprayed with two coats of Klear and left aside to dry.


Decaling followed, and one thing that Eduard always get right are their decals. Thin enough to settle nicely but not to break apart, in perfect register and with nicely done stencilling. The only tricky part, as ever, is applying the tiny panel numbers along the side. If you've ever built a large scale Bf109 you will know what I mean, except in this case there are twice as many and they are on both sides! I applied another coat of Klear to seal them in.

The next stage was to apply a panel line wash using Lamp Black oils, which brought the details out really nicely. This was followed by a couple of coats of matt/satin combination varnish to give a very slight sheen whilst still being predominantly matt, which is how these should look. A little panel bleaching with pale grey and some oil and exhaust stains added a final touch to the weathering.


The undercarriage went on next. The Bf110 undercarriage has long been a tricky one for us modellers as it contains no rigid thick struts, but Eduard have engineered this fairly well, providing an almost invisible ledge piece inside the wheel bay to load the wheel braces on and this works very well with some careful gluing.

That left aerials, the rear gun and the engine exhausts to go on. The latter parts are a good example of my previous complaint. Almost all kits of any piston plane with a non-radial engine provide exhaust stacks in one piece. Not this one. Each exhaust pipe (and there are 24 of them all together) has to be individually attached to one of four base plates and carefully line up with its neighbours before attaching to the engine nacelles. Sorry, but this is totally unnecessary and very annoying.


Finally, I attached the rear gun to its mount and glued the remaining glazing parts in place, representing everything open to show off that cockpit assembly as clearly as possible.


Don't get me wrong, this is a great kit. It's accurate, well moulded, and the fit is good other than those points mentioned. And I am thrilled with the end result. But PLEASE, Eduard, stop trying to impress us with the parts count - it does not wash. Your Bf109 kit does not do this, and it's a joy to build as a result! This over engineering is unnecessary and adds risk to the build, and that's not just the risk of a nervous breakdown on the part of the modeller. Rant over.

www.bowemodels.com

Build Review - Hasegawa 1/48 RF-4B Phantom II

I just love the Phantom II. Of all the military jets produced this one just looks like it means business. Decent kits of it in 1/48 are few and far between, Hasegawa is really the only choice for the discerning modeller. I had this kit in my stash for some time and thought it was time to put it together. What really caught my eye was the El Toro all-black deactivation scheme offered in the kit. I don't normally go for "special" paint schemes but this one just looks so cool!

I had built a couple of Hasegawa F-4s before, so knew what to expect. The cockpit tub is nicely presented with well detailed sidewalls and control panels. They came up really well with some careful painting. I had a couple of resin F-4 seats in my stash so I did not bother with the kit seats, although I have to say they are not at all bad and would look perfectly acceptable if used, perhaps with the addition of some harnesses.

Being the "R" version, before closing up the fuselage there is some work to be done in the nose section. Specifically, some very nicely moulded camera hardware that can be clearly seen through the glazed sections of the nose so I took my time painting these up carefully. I also added some lead shot to the nose cone section, since although F-4s are not generally a problem when it comes to tail sitting, I never like to take any risks. The cockpit tub sits on the nose wheel bay, in common with so many jets, and this took a small amount of persuasion to sit snugly in the fuselage but it was nothing compared to the camera hardware in the nose. Since it sits astride the nose area, getting it lined up when putting the fuselage halves together was quite a chore, but I got there in the end.

I then spent a little time and effort cleaning up the fuselage seams, which are a little troublesome on this bird since there is so much real estate on the spine. It would be lovely if Hasegawa had taken a leaf out of Tamiya's book and done an "over and under" fuselage to avoid this problem.

Next the wing section goes on. The wings are put together "Spitfire Style", i.e. a single under plate with two top sections for each wing. This is not a problem, but there are a couple of large moulded blocks in the centre of each wing (I am sure someone could tell me what they actually represent) which need to be removed for this version. There were similar requirements for other protrusions on the model elsewhere and this does annoy me. It's all very well including a little "cut this off" symbol in the instructions but this is a big lump in the middle of an otherwise perfectly smooth wing section and cleaning up the mess afterwards is a right pain and I defy any modeller to make a perfect job of it. This is just lazy on the part of the kit manufacturer, I feel I am doing their work for them.

Anyhow, rant over. The tail planes go on with minimal fuss, although as always with F-4s, getting the correct angle is a bit tricky. I then gave her a good rub down all over ready for painting. I masked the canopies with Tamiya tape and a steady scalpel hand, and sprayed the undercarriage bays white in the first instance. These were then masked off using their own kit doors on Blu-Tack, always a good way to do it if you can as you have a ready made mask and you get the doors painted with the rest of the model.

Since this was an all black scheme, I took the trouble to give the whole plane a good coat of primer. This revealed a few blemishes which had to be dealt with. Next I sprayed her all over with black with a small amount of brown mixed in. Pure black is TOO black for this kind of scheme in a scale model and the brown just gives it a more convincing hue. Once this was done I had to mask out the tail and exhaust sections which are silver and steel, and used Alclad Polished Aluminium for the shiny bits and Dark Aluminium for the exhaust sections which gave a nice contrast. A couple of good coats of Klear later and she was ready for decals.

Decaling this scheme was a surprisingly simple affair, with one exception - see later. Since these "special scheme" planes are rarely, if ever, used operationally they don't tend to bother with many of the minor stencils and warning symbols that take us modellers forever to put in place. So only major markings are required and this job was a pure pleasure. However, "user error" came into play with the U.S.A.F. roundels. Hasegawa supply white "blanks" for these partly to mask the black and also to provide a white border around the roundel. Even with my years of building such planes I never actually realised that these are not quite symmetrical vertically. So the first blank one I placed on the wing went on upside down and until it was dry and I was ready to place the roundel over it I never realised. Fortunately this was the only one I had done so far but the only solution was to place it as best I could and then touch up the border with paint, which took me ages to get right. Beware! But otherwise the decals are very usable and bedded down beautifully.

Decals on and another coat of Klear later I considered my weathering options. Black colour schemes are very difficult to weather but it is also true that as previously mentioned, this plane would not have had much use since it was painted, and so weathering should be minimal. So in the first instance I gave the metallic areas a black oil wash which brought out the detail nicely. Some modellers treat the panel lines on a black aircraft with a grey wash but that looks unrealistic to my eye - just look at the photos of the real plane, you cannot see any panel lines against the black. So the only panel lines I treated were where they intersected the decals to help blend the markings in, and I was very happy with the result.

I then sprayed the whole plane with satin varnish. The actual plane is gloss black but in 1/48 scale a full gloss finish just makes it look like a Dinky toy, so this was toned down accordingly. Scale gloss is actually more like satin, for your reference. I then applied a minimal bleaching to the centre of the panels using a highly thinned sky grey mix. Again, less is more here since the plane should not look too weathered, but this really helps to make it look more realistic.

It did not take too long to construct and paint the undercarriage and fuel tanks, which again, got minimal weathering, and slotted nicely in to place. Fortunately, the undercarriage structure of the F-4 is rather more straightforward than many of it's contemporaries and thus presents relatively few headaches to the modeller.

The final task was to paint up the resin ejector seats and slot them in to the cockpit, before gluing in place the raised canopy hoods. This is a bit of a precarious operation that needs an incredibly steady hand, but when one has so much lovely detail in the cockpit it would be a crime not to show it off to its best advantage.

And so there we have it, a real beauty of a model if I say so myself. The kit is the best you will find in this scale (despite it's minor faults) and I will certainly be doing more "special" schemes in the future as they really do make a change from the norm. I hope you enjoy it!

www.bowemodels.com

Build Review - Italeri 1/48 Ju-87B Stuka

Italeri are a hit and miss kit manufacturer in my experience, often reboxing less succesful older mouldings from other companies. But when they make their own they are generally pretty good and all the promising signs are there with this one. Its a brand new tooling and looks to be of excellent quality from an initial inspection, including a brilliantly tooled engine. The Stuka is one of those planes that is so ugly its beautiful and I am really looking forward to putting this one together.


The kit starts, as ever, with the cockpit and overall this is of exceptional quality. The Stuka has a large and very visible "office" and so this is important. The kit includes etched parts for the instrument panel and (God bless them) seat belts but the plastic is also very finely moulded. I gave the whole interior a coat of RLM02 grey before picking out the details with other colours. There is some controversy over the interior colours of Stukas since so few examples remain but RLM02 is a good bet for any WWII Luftwaffe plane and looks right to me. 

The instructions also make the perennial mistake with the cartridge basket calling for it to be grey but these things were made of fabric and were usually cream or yellow in colour. Otherwise, I painted some detail onto the radio consoles and also the kit includes a lovely etched coping for the instrument panel that adds a great element of realism. Once put together, the whole cockpit basin fitted pretty seamlessly into the fuselage halves. Once the fuselage was together I spent a relatively small amount of time smoothing out the seams since the fit is pretty good overall.


The wings go on next, and they consist of a single underwing part and two over wing parts (similar to most Spitfire kits) which is great since it helps avoid seams and dihedral problems - the only issue I had was that there is very little purchase area when attaching to the fuselage to get glue onto but I did my best and it seemed to be secure once set.

Next the engine goes together. Italeri have really done themselves proud here, it is very finely tooled representation of the Jumo and is virtually a model in itself. The kit also includes some flexible plastic hosing for the pipes that it fits and looks so much better than the usual rather suspect moulded plastic efforts. I painted the engine black and used gun metal on the grills, before picking out the wires and leads in silver and brown. A burnt umber oil wash then gave it a "used" look.


The engine housing is made up of separate mouldings that need to be fixed around the engine and attached to the front of the fuselage. Also, and mercifully, the top cowling is designed to actually fit seamlessly with the full engine installed so that your model can be displayed with or without the engine visible. So many manufacturers so not bother with this and expect you to take one option of the other, so well done Italeri! However, this is the one area of the kit where I ran into some problems. It may have been my fault, but once the engine housing was fixed to the front of the fuselage, the top cowling was a couple of millimetres too short and left a noticeable gap in front of the canopy. My solution was to perform a little surgery on the cowling so that it would move back to fill this gap, but of course that then leaves an equivalent gap between the front of the cowling and the spinner. So I used some spare plastic and filler to extend the cowling by a couple of millimetres so that everything lined up. I'm pretty sure this a fault with the kit, so watch out.

Tail elevators and rudder went on with no problems, and I also put the undercarriage together (but did not attach) at this stage since unlike most planes the fixed wheels and large spats would need to be included in the spraying session. Needless to say, the canopy masking was a long, tedious and frustrating task - next time I shall invest in the Eduard pre cut masks which I only found on line after I had started.


So now for painting. I had chosen the StG77 scheme that demanded a yellow nose and tail so these got a coat of yellow first since generally I find it much easier to mask off the extremities and then paint the main colours. So this duly done, the underside was sprayed with RLM65 lightened with grey - all existing RLM65 paints are ridiculously bright blue and do not match reference photos. So I tone it down and it is probably closer to RLM76 but it looks much closer to the original sources to my eye. After masking the underside I sprayed the top surface RLM71 (dark green) and then masked out the splinter pattern which is done with RLM70 (black green). Once the masks were removed I had the usual reaction to the 70/71 splinter scheme, which is "why did they bother?" the colours are so similar it can be very hard to see the demarcation, but there we must go. A couple of coats of Kleer and she was set aside to cure.

Decaling next - the Italeri decal sheet is very good and includes a number of stencils which you don't often find in Stuka kits. However the decal placement instructions are, unfortunately, woeful. Other than the large markings, they contain no visual image of the in place marking and this means a combination of guesswork and reference photos is needed to make sure everything is going in the right place and with the right orientation. This is a bit annoying and should really be addressed.

After decaling and another coat of Klear, I used a black oil wash all over. The panel lines on this kit are "just right" and give just enough detail without being overbearing. A final coat of matt varnish finished things off nicely.

Finally, the "furniture" needed fitting. The undercarriage goes on very nicely and aligned itself perfectly. There are a multitude of "bits" on the Stuka and it did take a while to get everything on, including those frustrating dive brakes with their decals, and all the aileron linkages. Finally I put the rear gun in place and she was complete.

This is a fantastic kit despite those couple of niggles. I particularly like the placeable engine cowling so you can show off that engine, and the canopy is fully positionable as well, allowing a good look at the excellent cockpit interior.

Well done, Italeri - a desert version would be nice next!

www.bowemodels.com

Build Review - Airfix 1/48 E.E. Lightning F6

This is undoubtedly one of the very best kits that Airfix have ever produced, and belies their rather low end image these days, even though the kit was designed over 15 years ago. It builds well, is accurate, has lovely detail and what is more is the only practical option for this ever popular aircraft in this scale. The kit is cleanly moulded, very little flash and has relatively few parts compared to some similar modern offerings. 

I'm going to take the plunge and go for an aluminium finish. Wish me luck. But having finally tamed the impetuous beast that is Alclad II, I shall hopefully be able to do it some justice.

As ever, we start with the cockpit. I skipped the construction of the seat since I had invested in the rather fine QuickBoost resin offering that is made for this kit, and I would drop it in later after the rest of the work was done. The cockpit tub actually consists of only a handful of parts, but is nicely detailed, if not quite up to the standard of some of the very latest toolings. Decals are offered for the control panels, although for some reason they seem to bear no relation to the moulded detail. I rarely used these kind of decals, certainly in this scale, so proceeded to paint and detail the interior with my very finest brushes. Considering how much is visible in the final model, it came up very nicely.

We then move on to the air intake which consists of a very cleverly engineered system of ducts, incorporating the radome section in one go. However I was sure to fill the radome with lead shot before sealing up, as this plane will need a lot of nose weight to sit on its wheels properly. The tail pipes also need painting and construction at this stage since they sit deep within the fuselage. So far, everything was fitting very nicely with very little finishing required. But the acid test of fit is when you try to get everything in the fuselage, which was next.

I fitted the cockpit tub, intake housing and tailpipes inside the right hand fuselage half and to my relief it all clicks into place very nicely. Locating lugs help here and they are spot on in their positioning. Before closing up the fuselage, however, is peppered every unused hole in the nose area with more lead shot to be certain of avoiding a tail sitter. The fuselage then went together with very little pain in the end, just a little adjustment to the cockpit tub alignment.

Since I was planning a metallic finish, I then spent a lot of time smoothing down the fuselage seams since although Alclad produces an excellent finish, it shows absolutely no mercy when it comes to showing up your seams. The wings and tail went on with no fuss at all, only a small bit of thick primer being used to clean up the wing roots. I did, however, inadvertently use the wrong tail fin (there are two in the kit) and did not realise my mistake until it had largely set, so I had to very carefully remove it and replace with the correct one. My own stupid error, but look out for that if you are building this. Also, the elevator fit to the fuselage is not particularly intuitive, so best of luck with that as well. As usual, I left off the undercarriage and other surface details until after painting. I masked off the canopy and other orifices and turned to the paint booth.

Although I often don't bother with priming, when covering a large area with Alclad is it to be advised, so the whole plane got a good coat of gloss black. This is the best finish to use to prime for Alclad, it seems to enhance the metallic sheen very nicely. I then sprayed over a coat of Alclad Polished Aluminium as I was thinking that I would go for quite a shiny finish and I had not used this particular colour before. However the end result, whilst indeed coming up beautifully shiny and clean, had a very noticeable greenish hue which looked very wrong indeed. And after checking some more pictures, it was clear that Lightnings were never actually this shiny except in museums so I then covered it in another coat of normal aluminium and this toned down the shine and got rid of the nasty green as well. I did, however, leave the nose fairing untouched since this needed to be differentiated from the rest of the body.

Now started the very tedious task of masking off individual removable panels and spraying them with darker aluminium to make them stand out from the rest of the body. This is a painfully boring process but is well worth it as it adds enormous realism to the end result.

The markings scheme I had chosen is from the XtraDecals sheet, representing XR769/B from its days with 74 squadron in Singapore around 1970. This called for a black tail fin so this was masked off as well as the cockpit canopy and glare strip and these got a good coat of black. There was also a need for a white spine panel on this plan and so afterwards this had to be masked and sprayed as well.

I then gave the whole model two coats of Klear. Conventional wisdom says Klear spoils the Alclad finish but I don't agree and it also is rather necessary to protect from the subsequent weathering process as well. She was now ready for decals.

I placed the main decal markings in place from the XtraDecals sheet and used the kit decals for all the stencilling. Everything went on without protest and settled down nicely with setting solution. The only difficulty I had was the walkway markers on the wings which do not match the panel lines at all (take note, Airfix) and needed some adjustment. Another coat of Klear and she was set aside to dry.

Meanwhile, I put together the undercarriage and ordnance. I decided to use the kit supplied Redtop missiles so these were built, painted and decaled according to instructions. The wrap around decals for the missiles need trimming to length, preferably before soaking as I found to my cost.

Once cured, I gave the plane a black oil paint wash which brought out the panels and rivets very nicely, before finishing the whole thing with a satin mix of my own concoction which blended the finishes of the metal against the painted sections very well indeed.

Attaching the undercarriage was a little frustrating, there are no proper locating lugs for the leg support arms and the instructions are very vague, so I used reference photos and a bit of guesswork to get those in. That said, the undercarriage aligned itself very nicely which was a relief, so often one spends ages adjusting and modifying to get the wheels and legs lined up properly. I then glued on the missiles and the few remaining probes and sticky out bits and she was almost done.

The last, and most pleasurable, task was to paint up the resin seat - I love doing this as it really comes alive with a bit of carefully applied paint. But first, check the fit. Even having been supposedly designed for this kit, of course the resin seat did not fit the cockpit tub properly. The main problem is that it is too tall and so I spent some time shaving slices from the bottom of the seat until it sat correctly. Once happy I painted the seat using Tamiya acrylics. I did not use the overhead emergency handles provided by QuickBoost, as I find I can never get the yellow/black stripes painted convincingly. So I cheated and raided my stock of Eduard pre-painted etch frames and glued these to the top of the seat. Dropped in to the cockpit, and she was finished.

This is a great kit, and I will be building another one very soon. It stands its own ground perfectly against the very latest Far East toolings and restores ones slightly shaken faith in Airfix as a serious player. They have also reinforced that feeling with their very latest new releases but unfortunately they still try and sell us other kits that were moulded over 50 years ago and these are virtually unbuildable by serious modellers these days. There is, of course, a nostalgia factor in this and I am as swept up in that as most others of my generation, but let's hope they continue to release new kits of the current quality and they will win many new fans.

But in the meantime, keep the 1/48 Lightning in production as long as you like, Airfix - its a beauty!

www.bowemodels.com

Build Review - Italeri 1/48 Hawker Hunter Mk 6/9

This is a rebox of the Academy kit, but with a stunning new sheet of decals. On inspection, the flaws of the original have remained, unfortunately, predominantly the ridiculously undersized cockpit. This will need to be dealt with. But it is the best you will find in this scale, and is indeed a fine kit of this timelessly beautiful aircraft. There are six schemes to choose from, and I decided to go for the Mk74 Singapore Air Force version as a welcome change from the usual two tone RAF schemes!


I had read many complaints about the cockpit on this tooling. I decided to keep an open mind and proceeded with the cockpit as per the instructions. The instrument panels are very well represented and came up really nicely with some dry brushing and blobs of colour and glass. But the real problem is the seat and the associated depth of the cockpit. The seat fits just fine, but it is plainly a 1/72 scale seat and the depth of the cockpit tub matches it. Often one can live with minor issues of this type but this is unforgivable. It just looks absolutely stupid. The rest of the cockpit is in the correct scale, however, and so some corrective work was necessary.

I found a suitable replacement Martin Baker resin seat in my stash, but of course there was no where near enough depth in the cockpit tub. I know that after market cockpit tubs are available to fix this problem, but I was on a schedule and a budget! So I resorted to some major plastic surgery to remove the cockpit floor and build new side walls to lower the whole arrangement. The control column also needed extending but in the end this worked pretty well.


The next challenge is one that plagues all dual intake, single engine plane kits (e.g. the Harrier) and that is how to represent the intakes that flow into a single central duct. Italeri (or rather Academy, whose tooling this is) present you with an arrangement of duct panels that need to be glued into a coherent unit that sits between the fuselage sides. This took some care to get the individual parts lined up but I got there in the end and this piece then sits in the fuselage and the intakes stick out ready for the wings to be placed over them, which I suspected would be a recipe for some serious alignment and seam issues - and I was not wrong.

The nose wheel bay is a single part that sits under the cockpit and there are two versions, depending on the mark you are building. This, and the nose cone, were stuffed with lead shot before attaching since I know that the Hunter is a notorious tail sitter and I was taking no chances. I had to do some tricky adjustments to allow space for my newly deepened cockpit tub but there is just about room if you are careful.


The wing sections went together next with no problems, in fact the fit of the undercarriage bay walls is a magnificent piece of kit engineering. But now came the hard part - the wings are designed to now slip over the protruding intake sections. As expected, much effort was required to get the intakes lining up properly and the wing roots flush with the fuselage. If I was designing this kit, I would do a "top and bottom" fuselage rather than a side by side, this would eliminate most of these problems. But much sanding, wiggling and filling later everything was in place.

Flaps and ailerons are mercifully separate parts and I chose to display flaps down since I think it adds interest to any model aircraft. The tail went on with no complaints, as did the fuselage "under bumps" but as usual, I left off the small parts until after painting.


The only areas requiring significant filling were the wing roots although I gave all suspect areas a dribble of primer to be safe. The fuselage seams were particularly tricky to get rid of as well, and much re-scribing was needed after a major attack from the sanding sponges. Canopies masked and installed, and we were ready for the paint shop.


The instructions call for the underside to be painted light grey, but this is misleading. The actual colour is basically off white, so I mixed up a batch of white with a few drops of buff, and used that. Once masked off, then began the normally tedious process of Blu Tack masking the topside for the three colour camouflage scheme. In practice, this was not too onerous, the biggest problem was getting the right colours. I used dark earth for the brown, but I had real trouble matching the two greens used by the Singapore scheme and used two or three variants before I was satisfied that I had the right colours. A coat of Klear later and it was set aside to dry.

Once cured, decaling began. The decal sheet is superb, and contains some excellent detail but the down side is that it takes an age to get through them. Unusually, the Singapore scheme contains no wing markings. But the decals performed flawlessly and settled down with a dab of Micro Sol. More Klear to seal them in and another drying period later, I washed the panel lines with black oils. The panel lines are perhaps a little deep and wide but whilst it may not be totally authentic it does help to add interest to the final look. I finished the whole thing off with two coats of satin.


Next, on went the undercarriage. This is a rather complex and delicate part of this kit. The undercarriage details are superbly represented, but the pay off is a lot of careful effort required to get everything in place and strong enough to support the model. I also installed the air brake in the "deployed" position to add more interest.

Finally, the under wing stores went on. I decided to use the ubiquitous large fuel tanks on the inner pylons, these always seem to set off the Hunter's smooth curves beautifully. On the outer there are a number of options including a number of bombs and and seriously complex looking set of rockets but I plumped for the rocket pods in the end as I did not want too much going on to break up the clean look of this beast.

So there we have it, a kit with some flaws, and one huge one to boot, but with perseverance these can be overcome and it does indeed build into a beautiful model of a beautiful plane.

www.bowemodels.com