1/48 Classic Airframes Bristol Blenheim IV

Gallery Article by Darius Aibara on July 6 2003

 

Classic Airframes continue to produce excellent 1:48 scale kits of aircraft that no other manufacturer will consider - and long may they continue! Their Blenheim Mks I and IV kits are superb examples but do need some work to produce a reasonable model. The Mk IV kit contains limited run injection moulded fuselage, wings and tail surfaces with resin cockpit, wheel well, engine and armament details. The entire front fuselage is moulded in clear plastic split vertically. Decals are provided for an RAF or Coastal Command aircraft.

 

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The injection moulded parts have large sprue attachments that need careful separation and cleaning and the contact surfaces need to be sanded much like a vac-form kit before they can be glued together. The resin wheel wells are well detailed but do not fit at all into the wings without excessive removal of resin. There is no alternative but to sand and test-fit repeatedly until a reasonable fit is achieved - in my case the well walls were only microns thick at this stage.

The clear front fuselage parts were masked inside and out with Tamiya masking tape and the interior brush painted with Humbrol Interior Green before demasking the interior and carefully glueing the parts together. The central triangular windscreen pane is split by the join of the front fuselage parts and so I filed it away and replaced it with a piece of clear acetate sheet that used to stiffen shirt collars in a previous life. The pre-assembled front and rear fuselage parts were carefully joined around the completed resin cockpit and some filler was needed to mask the joint. The wings are supposed to be butt-jointed to the fuselage, however I added some plastic strip spars to strengthen the joint. I dropped the wing flaps and cut out the port wing lights (which are moulded solid) - adding clear lenses from the spares box and a clear acetate cover.

The model was spray primed with grey auto primer and Humbrol enamel "Sky" spray applied to the undersurfaces.  I then brush applied Humbrol RAF dark earth enamel brush applied over the entire upper fuselage.  I masked the upper camouflage pattern and then spray applied Humbrol dark green enamel to complete.  I used a combination of the kit decals and spares to model an aircraft of No. 11o Squadron flying from RAF Wyton in Cambridgeshire in 1940.

Darius Aibara

      

Photos and text © by Darius Aibara