tempestfan

There was another E/F kit to 1/87 that most recently was available by Roco, some 20 years or so ago. This appears to be an older mould, and may once have been available in an AHM boxing. Alas, no RF, I think. I fully agree re the A-6 as a gem - most of the Minijets were. Regarding 1/100 choppers, Revell once boxed a series of Hawks including an SH-60B. Those kits were also sold as Accurate Miniatures for a time and are possibly Ace (from South Korea) tooling. Many if not all of the Tamiya kits reboxed by Revell in the mid 80s had "Made in W. Germany" on their sprues. Can anyone confirm whether this was deleted or replaced on the later Ben and Tamiya (I think many of the Minijets were re-released some years ago by Tamiya) issues ? And on a final note - I understand Ben commissioned some new moulds, I think I have read about an F-15E and A-10. Were those kits - if they existed - also re-released by Tamiya after Ben had returned the Tamiya moulds (assuming the moulds were actual Tamiya tooling) ?

In case you referred specifically to me, I am not ignoring anything but was trying to learn whether the original drawing as printed in SMI in 1980 was already the redrawn distorted one, or if that happened later, as specific reference to Nexus was made. As regards the other errors, are they major ones (as the drawings tend to be highly-acclaimed from 1980 onwards)? My point was that maybe the reproduction in the Aircraft Archive book may have suffered, as they all seem to be a bit cobbled together - some drawings (not the Hurricane) look to have a cut through them and being reassemled with a certain seam, for example.

Will you be doing something to the Radar Air Conditioning unit aka "great big void where the intake ceiling should be", or will you go for a FOD screen ?

If the photocopying stretched the drawings, he must have drawn the "intermediate" set shorter in order to pre-compensate the stretch. If those intermediate drawings were used "unstretched" (for the Aircraft Archive book), they would be shorter than "real life"; a longer fuselage would result from clipping up a distorted copy of the original drawing in the process of book production, or have I taken a wrong corner anywhere ? When exactly did this distortion topic come in ? The Aircraft Archive series was published in '87 and '88 IIRC, back then they were still Argus, with the name change (?) to Nexus coming some time later I think. If I understand you correctly, the drawings as originally published in SMI in 1980 or thereabouts were "undistorted" and would be quite safe to use, although not the most up to date info is contained ? Re Marko, I wouldn't bet my life that Argus exercised every conceivable care to ensure the drawings reprinted in the books were true to scale - had they intended a max benefit for the modeller, they wouldn't have layouted so many drawings directly into the spine when in many cases this was absolutely not necessary.

That's exactly what I meant with "representation" - a featureless, slightly tapered ring instead of a ribbed, otherwise featureless, conical affair as used in the B, RF-E (IIRC) and C kits. Fortunately, I bought enough Fujimi Brit Phantoms to keep me occupied for the rest of my life when distribution was good and they could be had cheaply. My H-129s, Hase and Frog F-4Ks are purely for collecting. I am a perverted masochist regarding building ancient kits but not so much that I'd consider building one of those- you have to draw a line somewhere. The T-Birds set was in the German/Continental catalogue at least by 1975, and the mould was used for a couple of years afterwards. The F-4E (H-179) was also made by Revell Bünde (don't recall clearly if it included Luftwaffe decals, but I think not - there was an F-4F boxing of the 1/48 kit, though), but I think only the B and RF-E made it into Revell "grey photoboxes", the RF-E even having at least one blue box issue (04338). Incidentally, as they continued producing the B with thin wings into the 80s, this would indicate that they either had more than one set of B moulds, of which one was modified with the wing bulges, or produced a duplicate mould for the bulged versions.

Have you had a look at "British Battleships of WW II" by Raven and Roberts, probably originally by Conway ? The German edition combining all four volumes into one could be had for 15 € a while back. It's a huge book and contains a lot of pictures and drawings, and also text covering both the technical and service aspects. There should be enough in it about PoW to help, especially if found cheap.

I still like the pure straight B - there was a US edition from ca. 1980 ("eye" boxing) featuring a Jolly Rogers scheme and benefitting (?) from a couple of AIM-9s added that regrettably seems to have never been officially available in Europe. Could actually be quite buildable, though they never bothered updating the wing tanks.

Did it ? I'd class this as an exhaustive discussion rather than an argument. As I have a couple of both the H-109 and H-129 boxings, I'll see if I can manage to find them to confirm how their rear region looks.

Well, that was the reviewer's opinion in the thread I linked to. The B-1 dates also from the same period when Airfix tooled their Vulcan and Sea Sprite. I have no idea if those are accurate, but the Vulcan is generally regarded as a very decent kit, I think, and the SH-2 is lightyears removed from the admittedly ghastly F-105F in level of detail. Obviously Palitoy outsourced the toolmaking to various toolmakers of greatly differing capabilities.

That was a chance find. As much as I admire Monogram kits, this looks like one of the rare occasions when an Airfix kit may be a bit better. No idea how the situation in the UK is, but the original photobox release of the Airfix kit can usually be had for under 20 € on ebay.de.

Here's one.

RH-F has the long carb air intake and apparently the "kinked" lower cowl flaps, and it looks like the uppermost ejector is just visible. The AMT C (in 1/48) represents that version.

I fully agree, it would have been natural for Hasegawa to do the Brit versions as well based on their 48th kits. Possibly they felt the Fujimi kits were too good to warrant to try and compete with them. Revell has abused that venerable B kit to represent just about every version. Possibly only for the German market, they reissued the kit with a spurious recce nose (but no other changes) as as RF-4E (H-109). They also did a pseudo C (Air Commando series) and I think a J, issued as a Blue Angels set. One boxing of the E (H-179) had an attempt at representing the wing bulges, but I think they did them symmetrically, with the top bulges looking much like the ones below. To return to the topic, I take your (aerofan) statement to confirm that the Revell F-4K indeed had Spey exhaust representations.

You recall wrongly. Tamiya had an E and a K/M - the RF was, to my knowledge, a version only done by Roskopf, and a mould of their own.

I have an earlier version of that kit (-1), and yours is much reworked. The main u/c bay structure is new, and the original didn't feature the IFR probe bulge.

I'm not aware of a Faller F-4K/M - they did somehing that looked like a B, with German markings for an AG 51 RF-4E. This was probably the last aircraft subject they kitted. The Revell Transall is, BTW, not "their own Jurassic 1/96 kit", but a 1/100 Heller original. No one so far has mentioned Lincoln (later Kader), who also did a number of kits that apparently are quite close to 1/96 (Canberra, DC-3). Roskopf had a range of kits coming variously from Tamiya (e.g. F-104G), Heller ( a lot - C-160, Puma, Gazelle, Alouette II), an as-yet-unidentified Japanese producer (Mannen ?, Sunny ? - F-14, F-15, MiG-25), plus their own moulds - Do 28, F-4F (NOT Tamiya E reboxed), RF-4E, 109G, CH-34 (reportedly reworked Faller), DFS 230... A number of Starfix-originated tools (F-4B, H-19, MiG-21) were sold in Heller boxes for a period ca. 1973.

...but I don't think the Revell "F-4K" included the B style exhausts, so you'd be left with a fairly decent B with pseudo-Spey exhausts. Of course you could buy an Airfix multi-version kit as it contains alternative parts resembling both the long and short J79 exhaust and take the short ones for the Revell kit, but then you're left with a thin-wing Airfix with long exhausts... The original Fujimi kits were numbered H-6 to H-9, comprising K, M, 1 and 2 (not in numerical sequence), the updated kits possibly H-17 to H-20 ( I only have 18, the FGR.2). IIRC the retooling mainly concerned various aux air doors moulded slightly open, and wheels and tyres moulded separately - I think those changes were first introduced on the hi-tec releases as "25 years" and "Alcock & Brown". The "older" and updated kits may have been in production concurrently, way back when.

The original release of the 47 was the last kit Imanaged to finish, way back in '97. As Sofus correctly says, the canopy is rather hopeless and the worst part od the kit by a great margin. IIRC I used a Sea Fury replacement (from Squadron ? Or Aeroclub, perhaps ?) which looked the part, as no dedicated 47 replacement was available then.

The Frog Type H "white box" would be their own version (others would say "copy") of the Hase mould. Frog also made own versions of the Harrier and Lightning kits based on the Hase moulds, that's why those moulds went to the USSR. The other Hase kits reboxed by Frog were bagshots moulded in Japan.

What they are meant to represent exactly I don't recall; poor, they are !

But that's a DB-7 (no suffix), with small fin, different nacelles, completely different engine - you know that of course, but the photo doesn't take any confusion out. I'm always confused after reading about early DB-7 versions...

May I suggest you also have a look at the drawings by Richard Dann in the 2nd edition in action book (Sq 1191 ) and the Walk around (Sq 5504 ) ? The drawings in the original Detail and Scale book are not particularly accurate IMHO (but don't feature the Martlet I anyway), and IIRC the later edition also has some small issues.

Yes, but it's 48, unlike the Airfix kit (no one ever used the pods as supplied by Airfix, and I have a number of them in my spares box).

As far as I know, they also use (or did use) another Italian decal printer, Zanchetti. Zanchetti had the printer code "Z" after the kit number on the sheet, so "C" should indeed indicate Cartograf.

If you mean that Revell always keeps the same number for any given kit, I think that's incorrect for their four-digit system in use since around 1980. They used to stick to the formula "4" as first digit = aircraft, 0 as second digit = small scale kits (1/100 and 1/144 military), 1 = small 1/72, 2 = civil, 3 = medium sized, 4 = helicopters, 5 = 1/48, 7 = 1/32. The 6 and 8 as 2nd digit are relatively recent innovations, so they basically worked with a very limited range of numbers for each section, with reassignment of the numbers to different kits. The 39xx format for this Ta is quite new, the last incarnation I bought (which went oop at the end of '99) was 4180.