Kit Ref: A02058
Review by Tom Potter
Our thanks to Airfix for supplying our review sample. Get this impressive little kit here now at: www.airfix.com
Introduction
This build will be a slight deviation from my preferred scales of 1:48th or 1:32nd, the mince pies are a bit long in the tooth for things this small! I’m going to be building this straight from the box – with the possible exception of a different serial number, but more of that later. Anyway, on with the build.
The Build
So, in the natural scheme of things, the first step is the cockpit – no change there, then.
This builds up quite nicely and I only added some seat belts and ejection seat handles to the otherwise bare seats. Also, I blanked off the rear of the seats which is just a large gap, with some plasticard. PIC 2 The whole thing was then painted with Revell 78 Anthracite which is really an extremely dark grey – just right for representing black in this scale. For the seat belts I was fortunate to find in a dark forgotten corner, some Reheat seat belt buckles from my old 1:72nd days. This also provided a piece of fabric for cutting into strips for the belts. I also went around the cockpit with an HB pencil to bring out the moulded detail and to show some wear and tear. The decal for the instrument panel is adequate in this scale and the whole builds up to a pretty reasonable representation of the cockpit.
Adding the cockpit
Once the cockpit is complete it’s simply a matter of trapping the assembly between the two fuselage halves and then, after adding some nose weight, the instructions call for 7grams, I used 9 – there isn’t room for any more, gluing it all together.