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Having just enjoyed building the Revell 1/144 Airbus A380 in British Airways livery, I thought I'd stick with the subject of commercial airliners and have a go at this: On opening the box its certainly much bigger than I anticipated, being 86cm, or around 2 feet 10 in old money, long. As I understand it this is the former Airfix/Heller kit reboxed by Revell, and having read other build logs, can be a bit of a pig to build, allegedly with lashings of filler required. Even Revell seem to acknowledge that a modicum of filling may be required as can be seen in their instructions.... not sure about the trowel symbols, though, hopefully one of those won't be required! No matter, one can only try one's best, so let's have at it and see how we get on! I will be building it in flight with the nose up, especially since the kind folks at Revell have supplied us with a substantial stand in the box. I always thought Concorde was a beautiful bird with the nose up, whereas she looked a bit snooty with the nose down, so nose up in flight it shall be. It also means I can ignore all that infamous and fragile "working" nose-drooping mechanism that the kit comes with. Now, one thing that a plane in flight can't do without is a crew to fly it. I looked around the web and the only suitable commercial pilots that I could find in 1/72 scale are those produced by PJ Productions thus: Out of the bag they look like this: Painting those will be a real test of the eyesight! So, on with the office! The kit's cockpit is a very simple affair...3 seats, a "dashboard", a centre console, an engineer's console and two control sticks. There are decals for the control panel, centre console, engineers console and overhead panel. Reading other build logs I've gleaned that some folks have learned the hard way that if the control panel is fixed in its intended position it will not allow the inner canopy to fit properly within the forward fuselage. In anticipation of this I sanded of the locating lugs and positioned the panel a couple of millimetres aft of where the kit would have you put it..... I hope that will suffice - time will tell. Lots of eyestrain later, here are three shots of the completed cockpit and crew. Not much of this will be visible once sealed up other than the pilots - they will be seen and i think are a must for an in-flight pose. To be continued......

She sure does, Mike, especially when she's competing for shelf space with my 1/72 A400!

I liked this so much I've just bought one!

Agree...got me some. Very quick delivery from Canada too.

Superb....well done! Do the blades come pre-drooped in the box?

Slipped again, then.

Excellent Telboy.....my favourite plane! And you've got that anti-glare panel perfect!

No, they were Parkes682 decals. Good.... but I had to be very careful with them.

Impressive, Dann.....are those decals out of the box?

Why, thank you Canso65, nice of you to say so. I do try and research my projects (mostly using the internet) before and during a build and, as you say, try and pick up on the smaller details. An example with this Tornado GR1 would be the inside of the canopy, which from photos I've seen (including the walkarounds here on Britmodeller) in real life has a lighter grey coloured frame that is slightly thicker than the outer canopy frame. This inner frame has a few small semicircular patterns. Revell have accurately reproduced this in their canopy moulding for this kit so I have tried to incorporate the lighter grey colour on the canopy interior of my model, which hopefully can be seen in some of the images.

I finished this kit a little while back, but haven't shared these images before. It was built straight out of the box, except for the decals (which were German air force in the box). I wanted to create the aircraft ZM402 that was at one of the recent RIAT airshows at Fairford (even down to the open pilot's window). The aftermarket decals were a pain...extremely delicate and tore or dissolved easily, which is why some may look a bit rough around the edges! The yellow and silver stripes on the propellers were all hand painted (since the kit's yellow propeller decals looked awful once applied). I also had to make the white decals around the doors. A huge and impressive model once built....but you'll need plenty of space!

They weren't too bad....painted them all black on the sprue then used a tiny circle stencil template to spray the wheel centres

In a word........ superb! A prize winner if ever I saw one!

Indeed...... just had to be a Dambuster!

For those that may be interested, this kit is actually a bit of a bargain on eBay UK at the moment considering the amount of plastic for your pound.....it's currently available for less than £22 with free delivery in the UK.

I used the decals out of the box.....they were well behaved and actually went on very well considering the size of some of them and the curves that they have to wrap around....some of the best I've used.

I think it may be a newer tooling than the 1980s.....but it's not a brand new tooling by any stretch. Still a good kit, though, and Revell are about to reissue have just reissued it again as the Gulf War Mig killer version.

The nose was more or less ok....required a bit of sanding and rescribing. The tail end was slightly worse....more substantial sanding to blend in the contours followed by more rescribing. Having said that, nothing insurmountable....just requires a bit of patience.

Yep.....they are all the results of using Flory washes.....good stuff - as you can probably tell I use it a lot!

Without a doubt - it's a great kit... Go on......you know you want to!

Actually, no.....I just used Flory Dark Dirt wash for all the panel lines and fasteners.

A lovely kit from Airfix, goes together very well. Built out of the box other than an Eduard cockpit PE set, although I do wonder why now!

I've just started Revell's 1/72 Concorde, so, all being well, will post that up when I'm done.

Just finished this kit, after having travelled on this very plane (G-XLEK) a few weeks back. An out of the box build. The landing gear is extremely delicate so I had a simple stand made. Apologies for the photos...I don't really have any "studio" facilities, so a cupboard top has had to suffice!

Really enjoyed building this after a fairly recent return to modelling, although it did take me ages! Built out of the box other than a pair of pilots from P J Productions, some after-market decals and a pitot tube set.....oh and I had a simple stand made. Apologies for the photos...I don't really have any "studio" facilities, so a cupboard top has had to suffice!