ON TO THE BUILD
Stage 1 is the main cabin floor
and the cockpit (who would have
thought?). The seats aren’t bad,
but while the photo-etch belts
would help dress them up, I was
supplied with Eduard’s seat
belt set 49819, which has the
advantage of being pre-painted.
Given how tiny this set is, I
would have thought that Eduard
could have included it in one of the
other two sets I was supplied with,
these being 49821 H-21C, which
covers the cockpit and external
details, and 49820 Cargo Internal
Seats, which covers the red webbing
seat backs in the cargo bay. It has
to be said that the cockpit/external
details set is well worth the money,
if only for the cockpit details alone.
As supplied, the kit cockpit is a
little basic, the main instrument
panel being just a flat sheet of
plastic with a decal consisting
of a black square with some thin
white circles on it, and the other
controls being random blobs of
plastic that bear little resemblance
to the real thing. The interior
colours are basically various
light greys with red seats.
Stage 2 covers a bit more of the
cockpit, some bulkheads, and the
avionics rack. There is a little bit
of flash on the cockpit side (Part
39B) which needs to be removed,
and there is more on the seats and
the instrument panel housing.
Stage 3 is more bulkheads and
avionics racking and then it’s on to
Stage 4 and the cargo bay. There’s
a lot to get sorted before you can
join the fuselage halves in this kit!
The kit provides seats and back
webbing; they aren’t that bad
but don’t include lap belts. The
Eduard set supplies better webbing
and a lot of lap belts, though it’s
worth noting that you still need
to paint the reverse of the pre-
painted webbing red, as otherwise
the back will show as bare silver
metal through the windows.
Rather than plastic rod to
support the back webbing, I used a
length of 1 mm Albion Alloys tube,as this had a little more rigidity
than plastic of the same diameter.
For the first seat I pre-bent all
27 little tabs on the webbing to
receive the metal rod support,
but getting them all to behave
simultaneously was a real pain.
For the second seat I just bent the
three on the seat backs at each end
and glued the rod to these six, and
when that was dry I bent the tabs
for the other seven seats around
the rod; this was much easier.
Stage 5 is the engine and itsmounting bulkheads. There is
some nice detail here, but how
much of it will be visible remains
to be seen! There is a slight error
in the instructions in this stage:
Parts 33B and 34B on the sprue are
incorrectly called out as 34B and
33B (i.e. transposed) on the page.
It’s a minor point, though, as they
are pretty obviously different.
I also had to open up the hole in
Part 9B where Part 34B (or 33B if you
believe the instructions) fits. I now
put the engine assembly togetherto see how much would be visible
and what would benefit from some
paint and maybe a little extra detail.
One side of the cylinder bank is
completely hidden by the shroud
it goes into, the other side is 90%
covered by the exhaust collector, so I
am not even sure it’s worth painting
the engine, let alone detailing it.
Stage 6 has you fit the windows,
an etched grille, the completed
engine assembly, and the rear
bulkheads into one side of the
fuselage. But before you do any
of that you need to consider the
fuselage texture and what you’re
going to use from the Eduard
set. Having offered the two
fuselage halves up together one
thing went through my mind.
Oh dear.“I REALLY FEEL THAT YOU CANNOT
DO WITHOUT EDUARD’S COCKPIT
AND EXTERNAL ETCH SETS”
1/48
WWW.SAMPUBLICATIONS.COM • JUNE 2018 • 23
022-27-FEAT-Banana-0618.indd 23 11/05/2018 15:50