Fairey Gannet AS.4

Now here's another kit I planned to do in 1/72 scale, but since I moved into 1/48, and this wonderfully weird aircraft was just released new from Airfix - I decided to build it as soon as it was available to me.

The kit itself is a great fit with lots of nicely moulded details. For most part it goes together as a charm and I'm especially pointing at the ingenious engineering of wings assembly! Exceptionally long plastic spars are keeping the geometry while also serving as rails of sorts to guide the wing onto its root. It then goes into the fuselage by a few mm and the fit is so tight and precise, that no filler is needed thus no details are lost! If you plan to store it in a compact way there's no need to glue them at all! (Just watch out for the landing gear!)

Cockpit was mostly done OOB - I just added the seatbelts from Eduard. All the instruments, blips, radars etc. are the sets' decals. When applied properly they sit very well and really you can't make it any better with coloured PE and maybe even 3D decals. I sadly didn't do any good photos of the cockpit before closing the fuselage.

There are some areas that need improvement though. First to go are the exhausts - Aires resin is a nice, direct replacement and they are much better detailed and deeper, so definitely use them. I also changed wheels for the resin ones from Eduard - they have much nicer details on the rims, especially front ones.
Another set that's worth getting are the various air intakes from Aires. Kit has them all moulded along the fuselage, so they are not hollowed. I tried to do it using some mini drill but wasn't exactly thrilled by the end result. So i replaced all of them with the resin ones and though it might not seem as much it just gives this one finishing detail to the kit that - at least as I see it - make it subconsciously give the proper impression of the real thing. I also cut off the handrails along the cockpit frame and replaced them with a wire - again they are moulded with the part and are not hollow. Minor thing - major result.

Later I came to a conclusion, that I should also have changed the props for Aires ones as the ones provided with the kit are losing the screw details on the spinner's edge and the decals are not fitting there well. But the prop blades were all done with all the decals in place so I went along with them.

For the walkways I used Montex masks because making them out of provided decals would not give the proper effect.

This is one beast of a model kit, and it needs to be weighted down A LOT. And I mean it, especially that the front landing gear tilts the nose higher than the tail. I wanted to make it with an opened bomb bay and some nice payload but ended up with an ugly tail sitter. I had to close the bay doors and find some nooks and crannies to put the lead ballast in. That also means the main landing gear struts are stressed to their plastic limits, so they need to be glued in well and maybe even reinforced with some CA glue.

The single crew member comes from AIMS as I remember and that was the only set of period-proper figure I managed to find.

Painted using AK Real Colors for the Extra Dark Sea Gray and Hataka Orange for the Sky.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out - unfolded wings shows it unique shape well and it was a pleasant build!