Kit Reviews

Here are some of my impressions of the kitbuilding experience. I am not a professional, so take these reviews for what they are...an opinion. My best work, of course, is done in my mind ("virtual modelling") so nothing I actually produce measures up to the expectations I have for it at first. Having said that, however, I still derive a ton of enjoyment from the assembly process.

I'm not going to focus on historical background or a potted history of the type, since I don't like that kind of review. I'll get right into how the kit actually fits and any problems I had while building it. If you like the historical type of review, might I suggest "Scale Modeller" magazine. (grin!)

Current reviews:

This page was last updated on July 21, 1998.

 

AVIATION USK FIAT RS-14 FLOATPLANE / 1/72 Scale/ Kit # AV-1020

I don't normally build Italian warplanes, but this aircraft appealed to me for some reason. Maybe because it is sleek and sexy, maybe because it doesn't look clumsy or over-engineered. Maybe because the box copy shouts "Famous Italian Warplane!" across the box-art!! (NOT)

This kit is marketed by Aviation Usk but appears to be done in the "MPM" style of short-run kits. The majority of parts are on two identical sprues, with parts oriented radially from the center. Because the sprues are identical, there are some duplications among the smaller parts...no great bonus, though, because the smaller parts are pretty crude. A third sprue contains the two fuselage halves and the wing sections. Several vacuform clear pieces are in a separate bag, with a photoetched fret and a film instrument panel in another bag. A nicely-printed decal sheet for two schemes rounds out the package.

The instructions consist of a single double-sided sheet of yellow paper, with a short history of the aircraft taking up one-third of one side. The remaining two-thirds of the first side is taken up with several exploded assembly drawings. The other side illustrates the two marking schemes with painting notes. The positioning of several parts is vague, but trial-and-error will show how most parts fit together. However, there are no assembly drawings for the floats at all.

Detailing consists of lightly-recessed lines. The interior comprises a trio of seats, a cockpit floor that extends to the nose compartment, a rear cockpit bulkhead, the instrument panel (for which you can use the PE/film parts or a plastic part with the instruments molded into it), and a pair of control sticks. A gunner's floor locates in the mid-fuselage, with two machine guns mounted on PE gun mounts. The upper turret has a turret ring, gun, counterbalance, and canopy. All guns have PE ring sights.

The exterior surfaces of the parts look to be very smooth, but sliding a finger along the surface reveals a slightly rougher texture than meets the eye. Briefly using 600-grit sandpaper removes the roughness and you are left with very smooth surfaces.

I assembled the cockpit area first, and noted that the seats needed a lot of cleaning up, as did the control sticks. If you assemble the seats to the location shown in the exploded drawing, they will be too far back. Instead cement them with their forward edge touching the location shown for the control sticks, and mount the sticks a little farther forward. Test-fitting the assembled floor/bulkhead unit into the fuselage halves revealed that the unit is slightly too wide, so I sanded the sides of the unit down until it fit. I also had to remove the prominent ejection-pin stubs from the cockpit area to allow the unit to fit properly. Actually, you must do this to all the large components, since these stubs intrude on all the interior surfaces and make assembly difficult. After sanding down both fuselage halves on a sheet of 400-grit sandpaper taped to the table, they fit together very well with most panel lines matching up across the seams. Even more important, the turret and canopy openings matched up. In fact, with the exception of the engine cowlings, all the major parts fit together exceedingly well (for a short-run type kit). Note that I used a method I always use on short run kits, which is to sand all the mating surfaces of major components on a sheet of 400-grit sandpaper taped to the table. This evens up the mating surfaces and ensures that they are flat. I used no putty on the wings at all (except where I gouged out a chunk of plastic while removing the wing from the substantial sprue) and the floats required only a touch of filler along the top of one float.

I cemented strips of styrene in several locations around the edge of one fuselage half to aid in alignment, since there are no locating pins and the fuselage is awkward to assemble without some sort of alignment aid. Even so, the fuselage went together pretty well, with some filler being needed only along the top seam where there was a 'step' that I couldn't eliminate with sanding and filing.

The cowlings presented quite a challenge, since they don't match in section. In the end, I matched up the upper surfaces as best as possible and used filler on the lower intake sections. I still had to use filler to "round out" the top surfaces on one cowling. I cemented strips of styrene across the top of the lower intake sections to blank off these areas, then filed out the openings so they matched side-to-side. I drilled out the float-mounting holes in the lower nacelle area, using the molded "flats" as a guide but was careful to match up the floats as I went along to avoid removing too much plastic. The floats themselves are molded with mounting pins along the top, but these need to be cut down somewhat to minimize the size of the hole to be carved into the lower nacelle.

The engines are molded in half-relief on a mounting plate, which then is cemented to a tube made of two halves that cements into a hole in the nacelle forward surface. The cowling then slides over the engine assembly and cements to the nacelle. I had to test fit the tube carefully to make sure the engine got mounted the correct distance from the nacelle, otherwise the engine was too far back and the propellor would not reach the crankcase. In fact, I did something wrong here and cut too much out of the nacelle mounting holes, thinking the the engine mounting tube slides /into/ the nacelle. In retrospect, it appears that the tube should mount /on/ the forward vertical surface of the nacelle. I had to add some .020 sheet to the front of the nacelle to make the engines slide far enough forward in the cowling. Speaking of the props, there is no mounting shaft so I had to drill out a hole and use paperclip wire to mount them into the crankcases (which also needed a shaft hole drilled into them).

I used a wooden dowel as a spar when attaching the wings to the fuselage. Be careful, there is considerable dihedral and I had to crack the dowel a little (in the center) to allow this to be added. After cementing the wings in place, I was dismayed to notice that the wing roots on the fuselage are considerably deeper in height than the corresponding area on the wings. I matched the bottom surface as well as I could, and elected to do all my filling and sanding on the upper surfaces.

More info will be added as I finish out this kit.

 

 

ITALERI DOUGLAS B-66B DESTROYER/ 1/72 scale / Kit # 149

I used the Airwaves conversion set #SC7207 to convert this kit to the EB-66C version. I'll build the second kit as a standard B-66B in natural metal. I planned to use the Almarks decal set #S-7 for the electronics bird.

The first thing I did was cut off the tail gun installation using the instructions in the Airwaves set. I used a new #11 blade to score the panel lines many times and eventually snapped off the tail area. All I needed was a little cleanup of the cut area with some sandpaper and I was done. Test-fitting the conversion tail showed that it was very slightly undersized vertically, but if you align it with the bottom of the fuselage,the problem in minimized since it moves the space to the area under the rudder, so it just appears to be a little extra rudder clearance.

There are a couple of puzzling molding flaws with the Italeri kit. On the right fuselage half there are two mold imperfections; one at the base of the vertical fin, and the other on the bomb bay door. Both appear to be where the mold cracked or was damaged at some point during the tooling process. The one near the fin can be sanded away quite easily but the one on the bottom of the bomb door is more serious. I cut vertically through the defect and allowed this area to "float" a little, then used some .020 plastic sheet to create an alignment tab on the left-hand fuselage half. By doing this, I had something to press against when sanding down the putty I applied after assembly. Which brings up another problem; the fuselage is very thin-walled and the plastic is fairly "springy" so I applied tabs in several places around the fuselage to help in alignment. Otherwise there is not much gluing surface and the edges slip out of alignment easily.

The landing gear has the torque links molded solid so I drilled and cut and filed them out to be hollow; the Airwaves conversion kit supplies a photoetch sheet that has the links but they look too thin to me. I only used the nose gear PE torque link because the plastic one molded on the strut was too small to drill out. I also cut out the "solid" area on the nose gear strut above the torque link; this is supposed to be a support strut not a massive triangular metal area.

The cockpit is very well detailed and I spent a lot of time painting and drybrushing the panels and consoles. I used Prismacolor pencils to detail the navigator's and electronics officer's consoles, and used the Airwaves PE seat harnesses. I shouldn't have bothered, since once the interior is installed, you can't see anything but the pilot's area. Oh well, I had fun anyway, and I know that it's there....When you install the cockpit area you must trim off the uppermost box from the navigator's panel (the one on the right side of the cockpit, with a pin on the bottom) since it interferes with the roof and causes the cockpit assembly to sit at an angle. The cockpit floor should rest evenly on the top surface of the nose gear wheel well.

I weighted the nose because the resin piece for the electronics tail is stuck way back there and will definitely make this baby a tail-sitter if you don't put something up front to counterbalance it. I don't know what the amount was, I just rolled up some lead and stuck in in front of the nose gear well and tacked it in place with some superglue. I estimated the amount needed by taping the fuselage halves together, sticking the wings into their slots, and taping the resin tail piece in place. Then I rested the fuselage on my Xacto knife handle placed under the main gear mounting point, and dropped the lead into the cockpit opening until the fuselage rocked forward with the weight.

There are some ejection pin marks on the inside of the engine nacelles just forward of the intake fans that must be sanded out before you assemble the engine pods. While you're at it, you might want to reduce the ribs around the exhausts; I haven't seen these in my references. They may be there, but if they are they are not very prominent. They don't match up when you glue the engine pods together anyway.

More later when I catch my breath. ;-)

 

Back to Jeff's Modelling Obsession!

This page hosted by   Get your own Free Home Page