Review by: Geoff Coughlin
Price: £24.99 approx (UK – April 2011)
Our thanks to Revell Germany for supplying our review sample: www.revell.de 
A little bit of Inspiration
What a stop!! Short and sweet!
The Revell Kit
1:144 scale has always been very popular, especially for large scale planes, airliners and, increasingly, fighter aircraft. It’s hardly any wonder then that this very nice new-in kit from Revell is also offered in that scale. The model is perfectly proportioned and ideal for the scale with good levels of detail.
We certainly plan on building this model in your SMN so keep a beady eye on Build Now.
Click on Image to Enlarge/go back.
Box and Content
Revell persist with rather flimsy boxes that are doubtless cheap to produce but not so good in protecting the contents or proving useful during construction. Having said that, the artwork is usually impressive enough and that’s the case here. Let’s go inside…
The light grey sprues are packaged well and no damage is apparent. Taking the main components first, they are well tooled, mainly recessed panel line detail and having a quality feel. No distortion was apparent and a dry fit of the fuselage promises a decent fit; certainly a dry-fit of the fuselage and wings showed a good clean fit.
An impressive and ingenious idea I can’t remember seeing before in a kit of this scale is the whole interior lining for the main cargo hold is provided as two separate left and right side inserts – ingenious. I am sure that this makes the moulding process easier and should work well; we’ll see in due course when the model is built in SMN.
The main cargo floor is detailed too and will look good when painted and weathered with some suitable wash and pastels.
Moving to the wings, they are an inevitable feature of the C-17A Globemaster – in fact the whole thing is wings and body, a bit like a German Shepherd dog is all paws and head! I imagine in-order to keep costs down no dropped flap option is available, but something tells me that in this scale the look of the aircraft might have been spoiled anyway had that been possible. I’m not sure, but it’s always nice to have the option.
The cockpit is simple yet plenty detailed enough in this scale – you won’t be able to see too much when it’s finished.
The whole lower fuselage comes as a separate section and so I hope that it will all line up ok. It should do, looking at a rough test-fit.
Engine/undercarriage sprues
Four separate sprues house the massive engine assemblies and fan blade detail is fine. The wheels have decent hub detail moulded in.
Clear Parts
The clear parts look clear enough, although the main windscreen does have quite heavy frame detail moulded onto the surface that may need reducing to look more authentic, but I suspect it’ll look perfectly ok when painted.
Instructions and Decals
Click Image to Enlarge/go back.
The Revell instructions follow their usual exploded stages format. Location of parts is clear but colour paint coding is for Revell paints only. However, the colour names are provided and this will help you to match your own choice of paints. This is a basic model and so should present little difficulty in working out where all the parts are located, even for inexperienced modellers.
The decals seem good quality – certainly 10/10 for subject choice – I mean, just look at that QATAR option – wow! Certainly colour saturation and register is good and all markings are accurate and sharp in their detail. This is probably the best part of the package; good quality decals will make a world of difference to your completed model.
Conclusion
This is a great subject and will undoubtedly sell well. The inclusion of QATAR decals is a real bonus and of course the model itself looks to be well-engineered at first glance and from the dry/test-fit. The novel inclusion of separate internal cargo hold ‘liners’ is inspired and I can’t wait to see how it all goes together.
Highly recommended for all scale modellers.
Geoff C.
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