The parts are cleanly moulded with fine sharp surface detail and even the hull plating is looks fairly accurate (I’m happy with it), the only items out of scale are the plastic railings, ladders and inclined ladders, and armaments. The decks are nicely detailed with fine detail showing the Corticene coated decks (anti slip coating they also used Semtex as well) and wooden deck planking, although sadly they haven’t marked the butt ends of planking but this can be easily scribed in my modeller.
The one big issue for me at any rate is the open bridge, on Snowberry the deck areas were clearly wooden planked and for some reason Revell have done this surface completely smooth as if steel decked, this wouldn’t be too difficult to rectify but Revell have moulded the bases for the bridge wing 20mm Oerlikon gun mounts into the part, thus making it difficult to hold a straight edge to guide a scriber to scribe the missing wooden planking detail. Having tried and failed, I changed tack and decided to plank it myself using very thin plastic strip the same width as deck planking.
When Geoff, sent the kit no one had released any updates and as I was very busy with commission work at the time I waited to see if any updates would be forth coming, especially from Eduard, to replace all the over scale railings etc and hopefully an etched wooden deck sections for open Bridge area, the Eduard sets arrived everything was there except any replacement for the Bridge deck and strangely no hooks for the davits block and tackle, Eduard replace the kit example but don’t supply an hook, so had to make some myself from plastic strip and fine wire. Eduard produces three sets Part 1 Armaments, Part 2 Superstructure and Part 3 Railings.
The Hull parts are moulded in two halves split vertically with a third smaller section making up the rounded stern, a central bulkhead is provided at the step down from forecastle to main deck and the deck parts fit into place. You will have to carefully open up the scuppers along main deck area as Revell have moulded them into the hull parts as a solid section when they should be open. There are four each side – the rectangular panels are 5mm long by 3mm high and are easily opened up.
My intention from the start was to build the model as a waterline build and so trimmed some of the lower hull away leaving part of the rudder (held in place with a strip of plastic (will not be seen on finished model). As these vessels were terrible sea keepers, in a swell the lower section of hull below the waterline mark would be visible, hence why I cut the hull in this manner.
