with Gerry Doyle
A note from Geoff C…
Many thanks to Gerry D for pulling out the stops and completing this impressive build for us all – I’m sure you, like me, are keen to see how this Trumpeter release stacks up against the Airfix release that came out only a few years ago.
If you’d like to see the full build I did of the Airfix kit, check out Aircraft-Finished Now-Airfix. Here’s a quick look:
And here’s a quick look at the great job Gerry has done with the Trumpeter kit:
Over to you Gerry – let’s hear how you got on…
For the better part of the past two decades Trumpeter have been bringing us some well sought after subjects in scales that I as a (more mature) modelLer never thought I’d see in large run injected plastic, and, in scales that were only ventured into by Vac-form companies.
For this reason, I have bought many of their products over the years and have always tried to be as positive as possible about the company and it’s efforts. Now that’s not to say I haven’t been disappointed with some releases. Like Forrest Gump’s ‘life is like a box of chocolates’, you never really know what you are going to get.
So, when the Sea Vixen landed on my door step I opened the box with one eye closed and was pleasantly surprised by the seemingly decent surface detail and quality of what was on the gates. Good start.
The instructions were comprehensive and clear, well, except for the colour plates. More on that later. I do think Trumpeter missed a trick here though. I know the Airfix kit is as rare as hen’s teeth now but an injection FAW 1 would have been a nice compliment to Airfix’s FAW 2.
A bit of planning goes a long way
Before I got stuck in I offered some parts up to scale drawings and comparing it to my Airfix kit and found several shape issues mainly in the tail area so if you are going for accuracy a bit of whittling, filling and re-scribing will need to be done. I used Roy Sutherland’s book on the Vixen as reference throughout. By the way, it took me 15 minutes to find, resize and print drawings from the internet so how hard can it be to do this in Trumpeter headquarters! But I digress.
Because this is a review build I decided that this would be an out of box build as there will be a more in-depth feature coming soon. With all this in mind, on with the build.