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Last Updated: Aug 15th, 2010 - 11:13:50 |
After opening the rather scruffy-looking box (which is typical of High Planes) one is confronted with a mixed bag (ha!) of components. A beautiful looking canopy (unfortunately only one), a bag of cast metal parts - undercarriage legs and struts, which look quite nice - a lovely looking if relatively thick (by modern standards) sheet of decals, a bag of resin rocket projectiles and rails (pretty good), and of course the lurid blue injection moulded major components. It was quickly decided to separate the plastic parts and clean up the mould parting flash and ?blobby? bits. I will tell you here and now, this is a pretty good-looking set of major mouldings, BUT they will very likely end up unmade, or worse still in the bin, if one does not A) take more time than appears necessary on clean up, and B) quickly realise that you need REFERENCES! Because the kit instructions sure as hell don’t help much!
I will assume that the guy that runs High Planes must be a pretty good modeller to do what he does (believe me, he is! Ed.), however he also probably does not realise that items such as butt-jointed wings, an amount of clean-up similar to vac-forms, and no detailed diagrams with regard to fitment of interior and other parts, will make average modellers and reviewers mark his products down to the point where they may be avoided by punters. Which would be a shame, as when I found THE reference, it was obvious that with a little care and a lot of fairly advanced modelling, you have the starting point for one hell of a nice model!
THE reference is the nine pages of drawings, sketches, photos and general information by none other than Arthur Bentley. I found it in ?Aircraft Archive Vol 1 - Fighters of WW2? but it originally appeared in Scale Models. Ed.). Don’t even THINK about proceeding past the clean-up stage without this reference!! You will then realise how good the basic parts are, and how poor the H-P instructions.
A very nicely printed decal sheet is included which provides markings for three aircraft - MN659, 440 Sqn 1945 (a fairly mundane-looking service aircraft); SW417, MR*X, 245 Sqn (blue and white chequered band around the tail - very popular, I think); RD382, BR*M, 184 Sqn. (red edged white bands around fuselage and spinner - very smart). Unfortunately the green used for the code letters is decidedly odd to my eyes, but provided the rest will go on and settle down nicely, then I would think they will be fine.
I have decided that I am going to take my time with this kit, and hope that it will turn out the way I would like! Will report on progress later. PS: this is a bubble-canopy aircraft, supplied with the later style wide chord tailplane assemblies.
Richard Macer
As a rule, Greg Meggs of High Planes produces superbly accurate kits of desirable aircraft, but as with all too many ?cottage? producers neglects to provide the instructions needed by the average modeller. A great shame, considering the top-quality research and pattern making that goes into his kits. He is not alone, as even Aeroclub fall into this trap at times! Ed.
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