2 days off work and not 1 minute spare to start my He 111 kit
Me, it's otherwise beautiful kits that have one unredemable flaw
Like Spits with no gull-wings, or short-nosed Merlin Spits without the re-enforcing strakes where the wheel wells would otherwise fail, causing the plane to shed a wing in combat maneuvers. (oddly enough, the original Hasigawa Spit I had these, even though the kit came with prop, canopy, and markings for one of the very few Spits (until the VII) that didn't have these.Kit had other, serious problems, but this they got right.)
Or the worst general offender, the B-17, in 1/72 scale.
As far as I can tell, no mass-produced '17 has been produced with the outer skin properly done.The early Airfix model had raised rivits in about the right scale and position, but had raised panel lines that were almost impossible to clean up whilst still leaving any of the near-by rivets
The Revell model of the same era, while not bad for the time, was similar, but had bigger rivets.The Matchbox kit--no, I don't want to re-trigger the PTSD it gave me....Trench warfare at its finest!
Hase put out a better one, but the panel lines....and now,
NO rivets.
If you've ever seen a real one, it is literally covered in the d*mn things. big ones. proud ones. On a polished nat-met one, you can see them in an image where the entire plain os only 3 inches long. (Alas, I no longer have that particular pic to post.) Note that most
'nekkid' Forts
were polished, to reduce drag, and add a few knots in a business where speed is life....
Then came the Academy version, which had incised panel lines, a better interior, and a wider variety--you could find a kit of almost every production version, if you looked hard enough... but still no rivets--and the panel lines were a problem.
The '17 doesn't have butt-joined plates. They are lapped. More drag, but stronger, and lighter. The rivit/panel lines on the old A-Fix model clearly showed that arrangement; I don't know if it was because they were aware of the lapping, or they just put the rivets in the right places. Anyway, while they'd be not much thicker than a sheet of printer paper, it that, you can see the effects in clear sunlight in that same picture I had, showing the rivets.
So, a few years ago, I saw an article in a magazine--I think it was online, but --what was I trying to say about my memory? Anyway, the pic clearly showed that the bird was covered in rivets, in what appeared to be the right places.
So when I saw the kit on sale at half-price at a local hobby store, I forked out quite a few buck, trotted on home, and eagerly opened the box.
Oh, the rivets are represented, all right, about the right size and place.
As tiny pits! Thousands of them. Right next to incised panel lines. Everything else about the kit was great--almost perfect interior, both type of tail-gunner positions, beautiful transparencies, magnificently done interior, nice decals--and about ten times as much time to fix the rivets and panel lines that the entire rest of the project! I've thought of getting that old AirFix B-17G, fix the panel lines, detail the interior of the fuselage, and use all the other parts from the Revell to detail it. Should only take me about 250 hours, less than half the time it u/g the Revell hull.
I hear that AirFix is releasing a new Fort, but haven't seen any pix, but, unless they used that Lidar point-cloud system that gave us their new and excellent he-111, I 'm not not holding my breath, or buying the Pig while it's still in the Poke....
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