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Special Hobby Sunderland


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Well, this one was a bit of a struggle.... Although it looks lovely in the box and all the pre release 'hype' I personally found all is not well when putting it together. OK, some of it might have been me maybe expecting more than I should but I'm just not happy with the overall experience...Hey ho..

Anyway, as you can see it's finished in SAAF markings as a favour to a SA friend. The decals (and again these didn't help but obviously no fault of kit ...) are from MAV decals and are rather opaque (so I used 2 sets) and are ALPS printed so tend to be rather (dotty?) for want of a better word. Hopefully someone will do some more? I also wanted to do one with a turret so changed the serial number and code letters.

As far as  the model goes it's very detailed inside but you can't see much, the engines are nice and so are the clear parts. It's the fit of the parts I found troublesome and some of the 'silly' mistakes such as location and size of some of the windows, and not sure whether it was me again or not but the bottom of the fin is about 3mm shorter than the root it sits on so some gentle removal of the rear of the root was required along with reshaping the rear of the rudder. One of the more annoying points is that when cleaning up the wing joints you inevitably remove the fuel tank detail which is pretty tricky to replace and I'm still not happy with it now..

The two intakes on the wing leading edge between the engines are totally the wrong shape and need reshaping and the landing lights are awkward too.

The instructions are nicely printed but are a little difficult to follow at certain points during construction too.

There are optional parts throughout (particularly turrets and upper fuselage inserts (another badly fitting part) and I'm sure we can expect other marks in future but I for one will probably give it a

miss next time round.

The decals though are superbly printed

Anyway thanks for looking.

 

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Edited by keithjs
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Hi Keith,

 

Very nice SAAF Sunderland. :thumbsup:

 

It's interesting that SAAF Sunderland's had the same wing white/grey paint

scheme on wing upper surface as RNZAF ones did

 

Unfortunately Special Hobby messed up on the Porthole sizes.

In 1/72 scale, all the porthole transparencies should be 4.1mm (or 4mm)

(exception being the Beam Hatch where the port is larger)

The opening Portholes have a larger diameter outer rim (metal) which I think is where

the odd sizes come from for the portholes........

 

Thanks for sharing your model with us

 

Regards

 

Alan

 

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Very nice Sunderland.

 

I love the look of those, I made an Aliteri MkI version recently.

 

Like you  I made a bit of effort with the interior but can't see any of that either! 

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I`m just building one of these myself and I concur with everything that you have said. All the same,.....you have done a superb job of yours, I love the SAAF markings ,...if mine turns out half as nice I will be well chuffed,

 

Brilliant job,

 

Cheers,

            Tony

 

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A superb looking Sunderland and a very interesting scheme.  Disappointed to hear the fit isn't so good. Not that you can tell from your build.

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