de Havilland Sea Venom FAW.21

[Paul A H]

de Havilland Sea Venom FAW.21

1:72 Cyber Hobby/Dragon

The de Havilland Venom was a single-seat, single-engined fighter bomber derived from the de Havilland Vampire. First flown in 1949, nearly 1500 Venoms were produced, including many for export customers such as Switzerland and Sweden. The Sea Venom was a navalised adaptation based on the two-seat NF.2 night fighter. The FAW.21 was the second production variant after the FAW.20. It featured a more powerful de Havilland Ghost 104 engine and an American APS-57 radar set. 167 FAW.21s were built in total.

Sea Venoms saw plenty of action during their service life. They took part in Operation Musketeer in 1956, and two years later Sea Venoms from HMS Albion saw action again, this time during the Cyprus Emergency. The Sea Venom was replaced in Royal Navy service by another de Havilland twin-boom design, the Sea Vixen.

Cyberhobby’s Sea Venom arrives packed into a glossy, top opening box. Inside are three sprues of light grey plastic, one small clear sprue, a small fret containing photo etch brass wing fences and a single decal sheet. In common with Cyberhobby’s Meteor and Sea Vixen kits, the mouldings look immaculate and the surface details are as good as any I’ve seen. Panel lines are delicate but well-defined, and are accompanied by very subtle recessed rivet detail.

In common with many other Dragon/Cyberhobby products, the sprues feature several examples of slide moulding. Thanks to this technique, the tail booms are moulded as single pieces and the wing fold detail is moulded in place instead of being moulded as a separate insert. A couple of air scoops have also benefitted from use of this technique.

Cockpit detail is fairly good, but not quite up to the standard of the Meteor. The seats are nicely moulded, but although they are slightly taller than those supplied in the Sea Vixen, they still look slightly too small. The landing gear bays are reasonably well detailed, but the nose gear bay lacks convincing depth.

Things pick up with the engine, however, which is a high point of this kit. It is comprised of fifteen nicely detailed parts, four of which make up the full-length intakes. Full-length intakes are very welcome, but the inner surfaces feature some ejector pin marks that may need to be tidied up prior to painting. The upper fuselage panel that covers the engine is moulded as a separate part, thus enabling the modeller to show off the rather nice little Ghost.

All of the control surfaces are moulded as separate parts, which is a welcome touch. As mentioned above, the wing fences are reproduced in photo etched brass. Photoetchphobics will have to overcome their fear as no plastic alternatives are provided. Personally I’m more than happy with this approach, particularly so as the photo etch fences look fabulous. As was the case with the Sea Vixen, the outer wings are moulded separately so the model can be finished with wings extended or folded.

At this point I should mention that when I compared the kit to a set of plans (drawn by George Cox), the plans, corroborated by measuring the kit parts, suggested that the kit wingspan is slightly too large. It appears to scale up to around 13.68m instead of 13.06m. Although unfortunate, this shouldn’t be too difficult to fix be cutting off the wingtip tanks, removing the last few mm of the wings and reattaching the tanks.

Very little in the way of ordnance is provided. The fixed wingtip fuel tanks are obviously present, but apart from that the only other ordnance is a pair of auxiliary fuel tanks. No bombs or rockets are included.

The canopy is nicely moulded and very clear, although the view through the plastic is quite distorted, probably due to the complex shape. One minor gripe is that the blurb on the bottom of the box states that the canopy can be posed in the open or closed position. This is a fib – the canopy is moulded in one piece and will have to be cut if it is to be posed open.

Two marking options are included:

Sea Venom FAW.21 of No. 894 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm, HMS Albion, late 1950s; and

Sea Venom FAW.21 of No. 892 Squadron, Fleet Air Arm, HMS Ark Royal, Suez, 1956.

The decals, produced by Cartograf, look crisply printed and are nice and thin.

Conclusion

Cyberhobby have to be commended for producing another state-of-the-art kit of a British type. Whilst the kit has a few issues, which is naturally disappointing, it looks as though it will build up into a nice little model. Overall it is a well detailed kit with some nice features such as folding wings and photo etch wing fences. If, as rumoured, Cyberhobby follow this up with a Javelin, then I for one will be a happy modeller!

Review sample courtesy of UK distributors for

[Moofles]

Hmm now that does look nice, cheers for the honest review, great to see some measurements included, nice to see solutions on how to fix the length problems. Pity no ordinance is supplied.

[Vulcanicity]

Nice review Paul!

God, I hope they don't do a Javelin. Not after all the work I'm doing to the Airfix one!

Edited March 3, 2012 by Vulcanicity

[Antoine]

Thanks for the review.

I'm wondering about the feasability of an Aquilon conversion

[Paul A H]

Thanks for the review.

I'm wondering about the feasability of an Aquilon conversion

I'm wondering about an NF.2 conversion!