Hasegawa 1/72 BAE Sea Harrier FRS.1

HASEGAWA 1:72 BAE SEA HARRIER FRS MK.1

Reviewer: Mark B (SMAKR Webmaster) (smakr1@optusnet.com.au)
Kit Built + Review Submitted: June 2009

Kit Details:

Series B5:800 - No. 00235 - 1:72 Sea Harrier FRS Mk.1

Aircraft History:

The Sea Harrier is the carrierborne STOVL equivalent of the land based Harrier, which proved itself a formidable air defence weapon in the Falklands War, South Atlantic, 1982. The Sea Harrier had only been in service for just over a year when the war began, after being produced from a program which developed back in 1975. The aircraft shares a lot in common with its land-based brother but its revised structure ensures it is less susceptible to sea corrosion and it has different naval equipment along with a revised forward fuselage, plus the renowned Blue Fox radar.

The initial FRS.1 Sea Harrier is no longer in service, having been upgraded to FRS.2 which included a change from the Blue Fox radar to a Blue Vixen one. The FRS.1 was also sold to the Indian Navy and received the designation FRS Mk.51 in their service.

The Kit:

Inside the sturdy box are three light grey coloured sprues holding about 70 injection molded parts, plus another sprue holding two clear parts to make up the canopy. This kit dates from the early 80's if I recall correctly, so it comes in what I believe is still a lovely Hasegawa era, with engraved panel lines, nicely refined detail and hopefully good fitting parts. It's also the time when Hasegawa reinvented pilots to look like pilots and have separate limbs, and often these kits had things like boarding ladders etc - as this one does. I've read a few reviews of this kit over the years, never built one myself, but reports suggest a reasonable replica and project is ahead of me. Most of the ejector pin marks are on the interior of parts and there is virtually no flash, other than some crusty parts on the canopy which needs a good scrape with the sharp hobby knife.

Instructions:

The fold out sheet is as is always now found in Hasegawa kits, following their standard format. Bilingual brief history and specifications kicks off the instructions and inside the page is a matrix showing different external stores configuration, most of which is supplied in the kit. The footer of the inside section of the fold out instructions contains modelling symbol information and colour painting guide from Mr.Color and Gunze Sangyo range. However, most of it will require mixing up paint to get the right shade. This where I would prefer FS numbers because at least then you can use your own paint range to sort out. There are seven assembly steps, and these are as always very straight forward and extra inset diagrams are provided for things like refuelling probe attachment and close up painting of the various stores options. On the back of the instructions are a small sprue map and a mixture of three and four view decal and painting diagrams.

Construction:

A pilot figure is supplied in this kit so he got painted up, limbed up with his detachable arm and thrusted onto a seat which doubles up as a tub. A control column and main instrument panel along with decals for this and side consoles are added before the cockpit is painted Humbrol 166 light aircraft grey (apparently Humbrol 129 is also a similar match but I wonder if this is for US Harriers?) and installed into the forward fuselage half. I also painted the area either side behind the cockpit H166 which will be inside the intakes later. The same colour was applied to the intake fan housing (the fan itself aluminium) and the internal areas of the intakes. You will need to open up the holes in the forward fuselage starboard side if you want to add the boarding ladder later - which wasn't a wish of mine.

The forward fuselage halves go together nicely with the cockpit trapped within and the intake fan is affixed to the back of the sub assembly, a small arrow on the back of the fan will tell you which way is up! Just make sure you test fit the canopy before you go any further - as you will read below! The main fuselage was then tackled, the exhaust nozzles were painted burnt iron and these are pushed in (ie: not glued) to their housings. The larger nozzles need to be pointed downwards in order to install the rear blast plates afterwards and this is explained in the instructions. Although the nozzles are not glued, they sit quite firmly in their housing - some of you may wish to glue these in so just remember the blast plates have to be installed with the nozzles pointed down (ie: make sure the nozzle glue is still wet!). If you want a central underfuselage stores option then you will have to open up the holes as directed in the instructions. Then the main fuselage halves go together nicely, and then connected to the forward fuselage sub assembly. Test fitting revealed a little bit of scraping out with a knife but otherwise only a bit of cleaning up around the joins was needed.

From here things go very quickly, with the interior of the wing halves sanded just to ensure a flush mating together before affixing without need of filler onto the fuselage. The tailplanes have an overlapping alignment pin which glue together inside the tailfin to enable the tailplanes to be moveable. I couldn't get this to fix quite right so I glued them in place. The intakes received a bit of sanding on the mating surface, a notorious part of Harrier kits is usually a poor fit, but I found these went on near perfectly. Harriers look naked without Aden gun pods so I put these together and put them on the underside of the aircraft. As has been reported in other reviews these are far from accurate but they are okay and look the part. It's also a matter of getting them in the right spot on the fuselage as to where they go, tiny holes guide you a little but you have to work it out mostly yourself. They also obviously only go on the side they are supposed to, so pay attention to the instructions.

At this point things were looking good but that run had suddenly come to an end when I realised - being a wheels up modeller, there were no gear doors in the kit nor were there any wingtip wheel fairings for in-flight mode, yet the kit provides an extended refuelling tube. I was horrified! This kit has been produced ONLY for wheels down display. At this point I seriously considered doing a wheels down model, one of the very few I have done, but stubborn-ness got the better of me when I realised I had a perfectly good tube of putty and some sharp modelling tools to perform some landing gear removal surgery!

First up was the air brake, sadly this is molded in such a way the kit fully intends you to have it open with a jack supplied. I needed a little bit of filler as a base to get it to sit right in the housing before glueing it in the closed position. The wheel wells (and airbrake bay) are completely devoid of any detail at all, so I simply squirted some putty in there and over a couple of evenings set about sanding it and using a scriber to make it resemble a door. The wing tip wheel housings were much more difficult - I surgically removed the wheels and struts from the shape that best resembled the housing in the closed position and then glued that into place. A little crude, but when sanded down and a couple of small gaps plugged up with filler, it didn't look too bad. Unfortunately though it is not accurate because the wheels are not there.

Assembly became much easier again as I put together some underwing stores and added all the aerials and masts onto the fuselage. None of these gave me any problems but of course you have to be very careful removing the smaller parts from the sprue. Kevin obviously undertook a lot of research about the different stores configurations in his review, but suffice to say, the kit options are not accurate for the 1980-1982 period that the examples provided cover. Sea Eagles weren't carried until the mid 1980's and AIM-9L sidewinders were not used until well into the Falklands conflict. The gun pods are also molded inaccurately, something fairly well known so if history matters, and you are doing one of the first four aircraft, you will need to review the stores configuration to display (ie: get some more accurate "spares" or have a clean configuration).

But by this stage, knowing my model's accuracy was ruined a little by lack of wheels up option, I started looking at this project as one of those that sits in the dark corner of the hobby cabinet and one which I am happy not to have historically accurate. So I chose to add the Sea Eagle and Sidewinders as shown on the boxard. In addition to these two stores options you are also provided with a 1,000 kg bomb for the underfuselage section, or underwing 100 Imperial gallon tanks. Gun pods can be replaced with fuselage strip fences. These were all painted as sub assemblies before installation on to the aircraft, as happens in other similar kits, the pylons go over underwing decals. You can apply the decals and carefully install the underwing stores afterwards, or do as I did and test fit the pylon over a dry decal and just slice off the width in the middle of the decal so you can apply it eitherside of the pylon later.

All that was left to do was add on the canopy, and my decision to persist with a wheels up model came back to haunt me big time here. The canopy firstly had to be shaved due to being encrusted in flash but it was clearly made and intended to be displayed OPEN! There is no way in the world this canopy will fit over the cockpit in the closed position. I was furious. Painstakingly slowly I carefully removed Mr. Pilot, shaved off the top of the seat by a mm or two, pretended to be Jaws and ripped several scale kilos out of the pilot's ahem... ass, and then put everything back into place. It didn't really look right now, but at least the canopy fitted a little better. The rear of the canopy would not meet the fuselage and I had to put in a bit of putty very carefully and file it down with a precision file. It looks okay but if you glance at the canopy any more but a couple of seconds you can clearly see it is not sitting right.

Well that was certainly a mixed bag. I couldn't help but think that had've I made wheels down then everything would have been a breeze!

Colour Schemes:

There are four different aircraft markings to choose from, all of which come from the Royal Navy and all from around the Falklands war era. The first two come in the typical pre-Falklands war era camouflage of extra dark sea grey over white featuring the blue/white/red roundels. One (as per boxart) is 104 with the tailfin winged fist emblem from No.899 NAS, RNAS Yeovilton and the other being 003 sporting a winged forked emblem on the tailfin from No.801 NAS, HMS Invincible and presumably one that would serve in the Falklands War (I guess one could paint this in Falklands war scheme?). The third example is all over extra dark sea grey with blue/red roundels from No.899 NAS, HMS Hermes, 1982, the only aircraft from these four in Falklands War livery. The final example is an all over low viz grey with very low impact/viz greyed out blue/red roundels which are only affixed to the fuselage, and no other roundels are on this aircraft, from No.809 NAS, HMS Illustrious, 1982. I really wanted to do a Falklands War aircraft and I really wanted to show the extra dark sea grey over white scheme representing the first Sea Harriers. I couldn't unfortunately have it both ways, so I decided to settle on the latter, before the aircraft went to war!

One thing I did notice with the 104 aircraft was that the instructions and boxart tell you to place the blue/white/red roundels on the uppper wings. The model depicted on the side of the box shows the upper wing being the red/blue style roundel. A bit of conjecture here, I have pre-falklands aircraft photos in my earlier References, all of which have the blue/white/red style roundel on upper wings, but then again none are this actual aircraft example or from the unit it depicts. So may wish to check other sources of references to be sure.

Decals:

The decals also follow the typical thick looking glossy style that Hasegawa are renowned for and are in very good register, although the smaller stencilling and warning triangles are all blurry. There is pretty much all of the stencilling provided and decals are supplied for the cockpit instrument panel and consoles. Red dots for the blue/white/red roundels are provided separately, I am not convinced about the low viz UK roundels colour but accept they are probably correct.

Obviously as noted above, be aware of the underwing decals being applied in and around any stores options you have. There are two obvious ways to do this, paint and decal, then glue your stores on afterwards (and risk spoiling your decals with glue) or patiently cut them to fit around and against the pylons, which is my usual way of doing this.

The only real concern I had with these decals was they needed a helluva lot of cold water soaking time, but this time shortened significantly if the water was warm. So I had a kettle with boiling water beside me to put in a tiny few drops every 5 mins or so to maintain a luke warm or above temperature. They performed pretty well, with a bit of water were easy to move around and slide into position. Initially a lot of silvering was evident, but this is due to the thick/glossy nature of the decals and disappeared nicely when sealed in with a gloss cote. A couple of small errors are that there are two decals marked 6 on the instructions, one of which is the danger arrows on the cusp of the rear of the canopy and so should be shown as 4, similarly there are a couple of 21's on the HMS Invincible version I did, but the one shown in front of the cockpit starboard side should be shown as 20.

Accuracy:

Proportionately this kit looks pretty much spot on but there are some minor issues including length, canopy rear, slight inaccuracy with intakes (plus the shutters are too shallow) and the inaccurate weapons profile and the gun pods - I think all of which were picked up in Kevin's article. The kit is clearly overscale in length and just under 200mm whereas the box says 192mm. Presume with nose probe as it is about 188mm without - either way inaccurate.

Overall Recommendation:

I cannot recommend this kit if you are looking to do wheels up version, you will get a serious headache from all the extra work you have to put in to close up things, most particularly the canopy. There are other Sea Harriers on the market to cater for this.

I have been wanting for so long (literally 20+ years) to have an original Sea Harrier in my collection, fully endowed in the red/white/blue UK roundel and the extra dark sea grey over white scheme. Finally I have achieved that ambition, in spite of the time it has taken. Also in spite of the concerns I had with this kit being wheels down, if you do predominantly build your kits for show, then this one certainly will look very good all done up. The detail is probably lacking a bit by today's standards but overall I enjoyed this build.

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