Revell Flower Class Corvette HMCS Snowberry 1:144 – build review

Thanks too to Eduard for supplying the photo etch sets to help complete this model – excellent co-operation and thank you.

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A note from Geoff…
I have done a full in-box review for this kit and you can find that in Maritime-Here Now-Kits under Revell. You’ll be able to see all the sprues, instructions, decals etc and what you get in the Revell package.

Over to you Ian…

I won’t bore you with a history of the Flower Class Corvettes as their is plenty of reference material in books on the subject and the internet, suffice to say…

• there were at least two main types – short forecastle and long forecastle
• at least six different types of bridge structure
• and just to confuse some of the short fore castles vessels were converted to long fore castle ships
• some had their masts in front of the bridge others behind, so when thinking of building a Flower other than Snowberry check your references
• In fact one vessel similar but with slightly different weapons layout was Bluebell a Royal Navy Corvette, sadly lost towards the end of WWII protecting an Arctic Convoy in the Barents Sea, only one survivor was found alive in the icy water even though her fellow escorts went to her aid straight away.

References…

I used three main books for reference during this build as seen in the photograph they are:

Shipcraft Special Flower Class Corvettes, by John Lambert and Les Brown Seaforth Publishing ISBN 978-1-84832-001 Mine was hard back version but its available as soft bound still

Warship Perspectives, Flower Class Corvettes in World War Two by John Lambert
Published by Warship Perspectives

Ensign number 3, Flower Class Corvettes by Alan Raven & Antony Preston, published by Bivouac Books in 1973

All above are still available first is still in print but soft bound and others are available second hand from stockists.

When I first heard that Revell were going to release a kit of this ship in the 1:144th scale I thought please let it be a new tooling and not a scaling down of the older 1:72nd scale Snowberry. That was actually an old Matchbox release of the mid to late 1970s), which is a truly nasty model to build, ill fitting parts, various issues with hull. I digress, back to the issue at hand, the new kit from Revell.

Read on…