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ITALERI 1:72 BAE FRS.1 SEA HARRIER |
Reviewer:
Kevin Ronayne (kevin.ronayne@nuigalway.ie)
Kit Review written:
18 February 2004
As I have already reviewed the Hasegawa FRS.1 kit, I am not going to repeat the history of the Sea Harrier here. Nor am I simply going to cut and paste it! This review is meant to be read in conjunction with the Hasegawa kit review, so that the two kits can be properly compared. Come to think of it, the Hasegawa review is in turn partly based on my Hasegawa Harrier GR.3 review ...
One piece of additional news is that there is a rumour that Thailand may be interested in taking on some Sea Harrier FA.2's once the have been retired from Royal Navy service.
This is an ex-ESCI kit, dating from sometime in the mid-1980's, which would make it a contemporary of the Hasegawa kit. I suspect that just as was the case with the Hasegawa kit, this kit has some commonality with the ESCI Harrier GR.3 tooling. How much is hard to say, as Italeri have not released or announced the GR.3 kit yet, although we live in hope. I had just ordered the Hasegawa kit in early 2003 when Italeri announced this kit, and has been my intention ever since to build this kit for comparison purposes. Well, that and that fact that I like the Sea Harrier.
The kit comes in a one-piece box, costing around STG £, or 10 Euro. This makes it slightly cheaper than the Hasegawa kit (at least in my locality), so cost is not an issue between the competing kits. The kit is on two main sprues of light grey plastic, with a small transparency sprue sealed in a plastic bag. It's good to see Italeri finally protecting the transparencies, but when will they bag the main sprues as well? There is a little flash and some mold seam on the parts. There are also a few sink marks, but they don't destroy any detail and are easily repaired. Surface detailing is superb, with finely recessed panel lines. The decal sheet is produced by Zanchetti, and as usual it looks excellent. The instructions look as if they might have been copied very closely from the original ESCI instructions. I say this because there are a few detail painting mix-ups and other items that are reminiscent of the problems that I found on a lot of ESCI instructions. Paint codes are given as both ModelMaster and ModelMaster Acrylic, with the main colour of Dark Sea Grey matched to a ModelMaster II colour. This is a mistake, as it should read Extra Dark Sea Grey. The artwork on the back cover seems to show the correct colour, so the error is only in the colour description. There is no sign of BS standard colour references, not that one would expect this in an Italeri kit.
Apart from the Aden 30 mm gun pods (and replacement strakes), the stores options are very limited:
The implications of this will become clear when we look at the three subject options represented by this kit. These are:
It's possible that some or all of the subject options and the attendant decals were lifted directly from the ESCI kit, as Italeri have done this with ESCI kits before.
Now back to the weapons: the AIM-9B Sidewinder would only have been carried by the Yeovilton aircraft. The Invincible aircraft would surely have carried the AIM-9L variant that was brought into service for the Falklands War. The box artwork actually shows this subject with these type of Sidewinders - the kinked forward fin is a giveaway. Unfortunately, that's as close as the kit gets to the AIM-9L. The Indian Navy Sea Harriers don't use the Sidewinder at all - they have always used the Matra Magic AAM. I am open to correction on this point, of course.
As with the Hasegawa Sea Harrier kit, it would have been nice to have some more weapons - at least the Hasegawa kit included Sea Eagle ASM's and 1,000 bombs. The only stores 'option' is to omit the Aden gun pods and fit the strakes instead.
I thought the kit would be more difficult to build than the Hasegawa kit, because of the small amounts of flash and mold seam that were present, and the slightly rough finish of some parts, particularly the engine nozzles. How wrong I was. This kit went together with extreme ease, so much so that I can't find too much to write about. But I'll try. As is the norm for Harrier kits, the front fuselage is separate from the main body of the aircraft, this being dictated by the large and visible engine compressor face, and to allow different versions of the Harrier to be produced with minimal alterations.
Pictures of a completed kit from the box. This is definitely a shade of Barley Grey, which is both correct and contrary to the painting guide.
The cockpit is quite sparse - as I've said before, a Harrier cockpit in 1/72 scale is not really a place where you should expect to find a lot of detail. There are side and main instrument panel decals, and they fit very well. The main panel is set very far forward, which I'm sure is wrong. The seat looks quite good, but lacking seat belts (either molded or as decals). There is a main control stick, foot pedals molded onto the floor of the cockpit 'bath', and a small transparent part for the HUD - that's about it. The interior colour is quoted as FS36375, but the correct colour is BS627 Light Aircraft Grey - Humbrol 166 for me.
The canopy is missing some solid framing at the rear, even though it is clearly shown in the overall paint guides on both the instructions and artwork - it's a DIY job. The base of the rear section of the canopy may need to be sanded down a bit to ensure a proper fit. There was a small gap between main canopy and forward windscreen - how many times have I had to type that in a review. As with other recent kits, I fixed this with a very narrow strip of masking tape over the gap, the tape becoming part of the framing. The transparent parts are actually quite thin, but the view through the canopy is still distorted by the curvature of the plastic. The windscreen has the correct asymmetric bulge at the forward base, with the wiper sticking out.
Before assembling the fuselage halves, the only parts that need to be put in place are the engine compressor face and the main undercarriage leg, which has a door section built in. After that has been done and the compressor face painted, the forward fuselage section can be attached. After that, I added the one-piece wing, which is a major plus in any kit of a Harrier given the slope of the wing. The all-moving tail planes attached very easily using simple notch alignment. The Hasegawa tail planes were very fiddly as the Japanese kit designers tried to incorporate synchronised tail planes. No such problems here. Once the fin/rudder was added, the main body of the kit was complete, and it was time to move on to the next stage.
Beyond a lip section that is clearly marked on the kit, the interior of the curved engine intake fairings might be painted light grey. The cover artwork clearly shows this, but the instructions don't mention it. The engine nozzles each come in two parts, and look very rough. However, they are fine once assembled and cleaned up. The instructions say that both the nozzles and the rear deflector plates should be painted matt black, although the overall paint guides show the nozzles being finished with whatever the main paint scheme is. Forsaking this, I followed the Hasegawa instructions which I felt to be more realistic. This was to paint the front nozzles the same colour as the main paint scheme - as I was building the Yeovilton aircraft, this was BS640 Extra Dark Sea Grey (Hu 123). The rear nozzles and deflectors were given a burnt metal finish.
The gun pods were easy to assemble, but (again!) had to be attached in a 'conformal' manner. You really need to see accurate drawings or pictures to get the positioning right, as no precise location is indicated in the construction guide, and the overall paint guides only show the strakes. There is a central fuselage pylon, which I included, but only after removing the stores attachment notch. The kit supplies two types of inboard wing pylon with kinked and straight leading edges. Both types were seen on the Sea Harrier, but only the kinked type (which seems to have been the more commonly used) is used for this kit. Above the outer pylons, there is a small bulge in the wing under surface - judging from a picture of a trials aircraft with no outer pylons fitted, this looks correct. That's a plus for this kit, is as the separation of the Sidewinder launch rails from the outer pylons. If only there was something else to put on the pylons! A minus is that the wing pylon-to-wing attachments do not take the steep slope of the wings into account, leaving small gaps between pylons and wings. One more point: the instructions don't explicitly say to remove notches on the outer pylons to allow the launch rails to be fitted, but they show it having being done in one illustration.
Another picture of a completed kit from the box. Whoever attached the pylons, missiles and outriggers must have been in a hurry!
There is no option to build an aircraft with raised undercarriage, so the outrigger legs would have to be butchered to do this. The outrigger bays themselves are open, which contrasts with the solid bays of the Hasegawa kit. One more point to ESCI/Italeri, which we might take away again for suggesting that the forward nose wheel doors should be open. Pictures seem to indicate that this should only be the case during take off and landing, so I put the part in the closed position. Taking the easy way out, I cemented the ventral airbrake in the closed position.
The rest of the kit consisted of a few antennae and auxiliary intakes. Most of the fin antennae were premolded. The forward pitot tube above the nose was premolded onto one of the fuselage halves, but I kept breaking it off by accident during construction. However, it is very thin, unlike the corresponding part in the Hasegawa kit. For ease of painting and decaling, I didn't attach the fuel tanks to the inboard pylons until the rest of the kit was completely painted and decaled. As far as the 'filler index' goes, I only had to apply very small amounts filler to remove some very small gaps, marks and other imperfections - around the airbrake was the main problem area.
Painting was very easy, as one might expect given the simple paint scheme. On part of the rear fuselage, the dark grey/white demarcation line was not clearly shown in the paint guides in the instructions or on the rear box cover. It would have been easy to include a diagram with the wings and pylons removed. Also, some of the external details should have been clearly indicated on the instructions, and not just on the artwork. For example, the forward nose wheel doors should have been painted a shade of sand with a black outline. I don't think the instructions for painting the outriggers were quite right either, but I had enough references that I just ignored the kit instructions and did what I felt was right.
The decals were excellent, which was just as well as there were nearly 100 to apply. They seemed able to handle any amount of mistreatment that I gave them, and still adhere perfectly without any setting solution. The under wing roundels and aircraft serials had to be cut up to fit around the pylons. The roundel colours look more accurate than those on the Hasegawa decals, although the white band isn't quite opaque. Actually, a lot more could be said on the various types of roundels used on the FRS.1, as I'm now beginning to think that neither Italeri or Hasegawa have got them quite right in terms of design or colour.
According to the Harrier Special Interest Group (SIG - see reference below), this is the 'Best FRS.1 in 1:72'. No information is given as to why that might be, but presumably the kit is very accurate in terms of outline, dimensions and panel detail. Searching the forums on the site gives no further information, except to confirm the kit's status as the best one available.
When I initially opened the box and looked at the mold, I thought that this kit was inferior to the Hasegawa kit that I had just finished. Having built the kit in what was (for me) near-record time, I'm prepared to revise my opinion. The Hasegawa kit has better stores choices and markedly superior painting instructions, but this kit is the more accurate one. It's also easier to build. In terms of the level and precision of detail, there is little to choose between the two kits. I already have another Hasegawa FRS.1 waiting to be built, and I think I'll get at least one more of this kit. The only real drawback is the lack of stores options, and some items (AIM-9L and Magic missiles) can easily be sourced from elsewhere. This is an excellent little kit, and one that I'm very happy to have built.
As with the aircraft history, I am not going to repeat my references here - look at the Hasegawa Sea Harrier review, and maybe even the Hasegawa GR.3 review as well. I will include the link to the Harrier SIG site that I referred to: harrier.hyperlinx.cz. To repeat what I said before: this is a Harrier Special Interest Group (SIG) sanctioned by IPMS/UK. This site includes a 'kitography' section that lists almost all the Harrier kits of all variants in all scales. This includes sporadic opinions on the merits of various kits, and equally sporadic explanations for the opinions and ratings. That comment is not meant to be in any way derogatory; it would just be nice to see the reasoning behind some of the comments made about this kit and the GR.3 companion kit.
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