Review by Geoff Coughlin
Price Under £20.00
Our thanks to Revell Germany for the review sample: www.revell.de 
A little bit of inspiration here – short and sweet! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LvQOl-71hs&NR=1
A useful reference video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhINk4FSkpA
The new Revell Kit…
Wow! Who’d have thought it (again…) that we’d have a 1:32nd scale Arado 196A-3 seaplane? Well we have and I for one am seriously impressed from you can see in the box. I’ll try and highlight what Revell has produced so you can decide what to do – but I think the decision will be easy. Read on…
Box and contents…
Revell persist with rather flimsy boxes that are doubtless cheap to produce but not so good in protecting the contents. Having said that, the artwork is usually very good and so it is here. Let’s go inside…
The light grey sprues are packaged well and no damage is apparent. Taking the main components first, they are very well tooled with a soft texture that should look good under paint. No distortion was apparent and a dry fit of the fuselage promises a decent fit. Moving to the wings, they are very well detailed and this detail compares well when compared with the walk-around video that features at the head of this review. The fabric effect of the control surfaces looks authentic and well done allowing some rib detail to show through. This is also the case with the fuselage – a real feature of the type and I can’t wait to get into it and the weathering stage to try some subtle dry-brushing to emphasis this detail.
The inclusion of a wing-fold is a great idea and as with my recent Airfix de Havilland Sea Vixen, the folded wing option can add greatly to your finished model. I think this time I may just go for the straight wing option, but we’ll see.
A stand?
Err, no, in fact a deck turntable that doubles as a stand. I thought, surely not a stand… when I opened the box, but it quickly becomes apparent that the large round disc is an ingenious way of displaying your Arado 196 – clever stuff Revell, nice one.
Detail sprues…
When you start to examine the sprues that contain all the smaller parts you start to get an idea that this release is something special. Take the engine for example; the cylinders are simply stunning with very fine detail moulded in. The fuel injectors and pipe work is equally impressive and delicate, so I can’t see any need to add anything here. Worthy of note is the thinness of the trailing edge of the engine cowl collector ring – superb tooling.
The cockpit looks very detailed with full internal framing, seats and instrument panel. The latter doesn’t have dial detail moulded in (a bit strange) so you’ll have to find your preferred solution to that. I will try and locate an old decal sheet with 1:32 scale dials on it and so that shouldn’t be too bad. Alternatively, you may have an old Reheat instruments and bezels etched set that had decal dials included – maybe even a sheet of dials on its own from the same manufacturer.