Airfix 1/72 Bristol Blenheim Mk.IV

AIRFIX 1:72 BRISTOL BLENHEIM MK.IV

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

Kit Details:

Hornby Airfix 1/72 Bristol Blenheim IV - #02027

Aircraft History:

The Blenheim was designed as a fast executive transport for the proprietor of the Daily Mail newspaper, Lord Rothermere as the Bristol Type 142, in 1935. It’s high top speed of 307mph was faster than the standard RAF fighters and the Air Ministry issued an order for the aircraft as a light bomber as the Blenheim I. The Blenheim Mk IV was ordered as a light recon. bomber, entering service in 1939. The cockpit was lengthened 3 feet over the Mk I. The aircraft was powered by two Bristol Mercury XV radial engines producing 905 Hp on take off and giving a maximum speed of 266 mph. This kit makes either of two versions, the Mk IV bomber, or the Mk IVF fighter. The bomber was armed with five .303 machine guns, with a two gun dorsal turret, two gun chin turret and one .303 in the wing, the bomb load was 1000lb. The fighter version had the chin turret deleted and four .303 Browning machine guns fitted in the bomb bay. The Blenheim IV was the first RAF aircraft to fly over Germany in September 1939. It served as the RAFs light bomber in France, England, the Middle East and Far East until replaced by American aircraft such as the Boston and more advanced British designs such as the Beaufighter. The Blenheim also served in Coastal Command and as a trainer. The aircraft was also manufactured in Canada as the Fairchild Bolingbroke.

The Kit:

With all the kit purchases and builds over the years it is surprising even to me that a Blenheim was never in my collection until very recently. This is a Hornby packaged product although the boxart (aside from the series, skill and yellow decal sash) is essentially identical to the above. Everything inside the box is the same as prior Airfix releases of this kit other than a reprinted instruction and decal sheets (same colour schemes though). I also used the review of the Blenheim previously done on this site as a basis for my project so my comments mirror just about everything in that review, other than the $12.95AUD price from a decade ago has now dropped to $11.50 AUD in mid 2009!

Inside the small box the parts are all on small trees and packaged in a plastic bag, including the clear parts. About 75 light grey parts in the usual soft Airfix plastic are provided, with very little flash but plenty of raised lines and rivets. The clear parts total about five and come on a separate tree, a little distorted as is often the case with Airfix clear parts.

Instructions:

Just the one A3 double sided sheet folded to make an A4 sized booklet is provided with the notable feature of the colour and markings for two versions (and both only three view diagrams) squeezed together into a half of a page. There are nine steps within the centre spread and a notable omission for the large part is that there is virtually no guidance at all for painting interior or small parts! Just a couple of references to 33 (Matt Black) - very poor indeed. It's a pity Hornby didn't update the instructions other than insert their logos onto it. Shaded boxes for the external scheme are provided with only Humbrol numbers provided, so nothing new to assist the modeller under the new banner - in fact in my view a step backwards. The centre spread includes 9 assembly steps which for the most part should be fairly straight forward but a couple of areas such as the nose probes/tubes will require a bit of guesswork. The other pages of the instructions are devoted to a very brief overview of the aircraft in many many languages and the usual assembly icon instructions and warnings.

Construction:

Of course this kit has been around for awhile - perhaps before electricity (which means before the plane even flew so that is probably a slight exaggeration!) and while the molds are generally quite clean, with only a bit of small amounts of flash, the way the kit goes together often gives away its age. For example, your pilot, navigator and gunner are only torso's, none without feet and navigator/gunner without anything below the waist line! This is obviously done to aid fitting etc. All figures were painted up in khaki uniforms and set aside for their various areas later.

Not surprisingly the interior detail is very sparse with a floor, seat, control wheel, instrument panel and rear bulkhead provided for the cockpit and nothing for the navigator post - aside from him of course. The floor extends into the nose area and the navigator is positioned on a small tab jutting out inside the starboard fuselage. With the glazing - in spite of its fairly distorted view - a little bit of effort is needed to bring the interior up to some semblence of realism. I added in some stretched sprue and plasticard for some interior detail, dry brushed black and aluminium for contrast against the Interior Green, that included some hydraulics, radio boxes and similar. I used some cockpit photos out of a reference book I had to give it a bit of a lift. It was still highly inaccurate, but it at least gave it some oomph! The instructions don't tell you what to paint the interior, so I went with the standard WW2 RAF interior green.

I also fitted the side cockpit windows at this point which are a very poor fit, test fitting revealed they needed to be trimmed (ie: carved!) down a fair bit to fit decently. Also at this point the turret was put together with the half torso gunner and an O ring integrally molded to hands into which you slide one half of the gun and glue it to the other half - the idea of course being that the twin guns are moveable up and down. The only problem is - which I didn't discover until doing a bit more research - is that all of the QY machines I have photos of seem to have a single Vickers gun (common to many Mk.IVs) than the twin Browning's supplied by the kit. I left the two Brownings on but you could just omit one gun, remove the O ring, and carefully make it look like the gun is in the gunners hands! In any event the turret needs a lot of test fitting and work, as described in the next paragraph.

Before affixing the fuselage halves together, make sure you cut out the holes for the gun pod underneath which is also the same if you choose the Free French version and the chin turret. The other major thing you need to do is keep test fitting the gun turret sub assembly and the fuselage halves over it until you find you can squeeze the halves around it. It took me several goes and minor adjustments for this to work - I found the best result was to have the turret guns facing aft and a little bit of trimming on the side of the turret, particularly where the clear part met the body of the turret. Then it was a matter of affixing the halves together which did fit together nicely but required several clamps to ensure it dried as I wanted it. Another small tip is to make sure the very nose of the aircraft adheres together nicely, or you will have problems with the glazing afterwards, so I used masking tape to ensure it dried correctly.

Now it was time for the most atrocious part of the kit (and that is an understatement!) - the cockpit glazing. To say it is an awful fit, a shocker, frustration with a capital F.... well you get the picture. The only real tip I can give you here is to have a small fine flat file, test fit and test fit and test fit again, and make small adjustments until you can achieve a decent fit here. The glazing needs a good clean up scraping of some minor flash and all the mating surfaces benefit from a quick sanding/filing to remove any leftover bits of plastic that will ruin the fit. Then the main issue is the area where the side cockpit windows are - I filed these right down and the top framing quite liberally in order to achieve a good fit. But in the end, the fit - particularly the front part - was almost achieved to perfection, so the effort paid off. Then to ensure it dried without prizing off, I used a fair bit of Tamiya masking tape, effectively wrapped around to the bottom of the fuselage - like a rubber band - to hold the glazing down. The result is very good, but the constant filing did leave a couple of nasty gaps between the cockpit glazing and the cockpit side windows. This was easily fixed with the very very careful application of some Mr Surfacer (the danger is getting it on the area that is supposed to be the window).

With that out the way, the next task is the lower front window in the nose. With the effort needed for the glazing I was prepared for a bit of a fight, and although easier than the cockpit glazing, it still needed a fair bit of effort to affix into place. I needed to keep test fitting, trim off the edges of the window and effectively enlarge the cavity, after a while it fits if you keep testing and adjusting.

I was pleased that the worst part of the kit was out of the way. The tailplanes are upper and lower halves, go together nicely once you sand out any annoying ejector pin marks and fit into the rear fuselage slots, but will need care (or a jig) to allow to be left to dry in the correct positions. I had run out of super glue so the tail wheel was inserted, glued and very carefully manipulated into position and left to dry.

The main wings come in upper and lower halves and are the stock standard easy to affix together and insert into the fuselage slots but as with the tailplanes test fit first in case any internal ejector pin stubs need removing. As I am a wheels up modeller, I also needed to close up the wheel bays and insert a wheel so it was slight exposed out of the cavity for the in-flight mode. The wheel wells are far too deep for this, the wheel disappears into the well, so before the halves went together I held them together without cementing (and after the gear doors were installed) and used the hobby knife to scrape a small line to show the centre of the wheel well, because they are not boxed in. Then I cut off some small bits (about 5-10mm in length) of leftover sprue from the kit and carefully placed these in the well, then I mounted and glued the wheels onto these so they would stick out just a little as they would in flight. The result was excellent.

Once the wings sub assembly were done they were affixed to the fuselage, reasonably good fit but still a small gap on the port wing root from memory which needed to be filled. At this point rather than moving onto the engine sub assembly, I actually added all the small bits and pieces such as venturi tube, pitot tube, underwing strake and antennae, all of which required a full overnight's period to be left aside to dry. The underfuselage gun pod fits quite well but one of the holes needed more enlarging for it to fit. Very small flattened areas can be found around the fuselage, presumably for antennae etc for other versions of this kit. The port wing landing light is supplied as a plastic part according to the instructions, but I could not find this part either on my injection molded sprue nor on the clear sprue - what is worst is that the kit has this on the starboard wing! Incorrect. In the end I used putty to fill in the chunk out of the wing and effectively molded and sanded it to match the contours of the wing.

All that was left to do from a construction perspective were the engines which needed some flash removal with the hobby knife. These are straight forward components with a backing plate with collar glued onto the back of the cowling. Within the cowling the engine block goes and the propeller shaft is fed through to be glued onto a small stopper at the back. Two air cooling rods are also included for insertion into the cowling but you will have to look at your references to find out where they go. They effectively go as twin sticks on the left side of both engines, yes both engines (so they are close to the fuselage on the port engine but on the wingtip side of the starboard engine), and inserted into the cowling. Spin your propeller to make sure they don't get in the way. The fit of these sub assemblies onto the nacelle sections on the wings was again not the greatest but with test fitting, small hobby knife adjustments, a good fit can be achieved without too much work. Two style of engine exhaust stacks are provided, one for the RAF and the other for the Free French version and they fit okay.

Phew, for a skill level 1 kit, that was a long haul as far as construction was concerned, and certainly not a plane sailing kit!

Colour Schemes:

The kit allows for two examples to be built from the kit, neither of which is actually identified to the point of individual examples other than a RAF and Free French version. The RAF version is finished in the standard upper dark green/earth camouflage over beige green undersides (should this be pale glue or duck egg blue?) which translated into Humbrols 29/30 over 90, and the French version is Light Tan (instructed to use H74 Linen[!!??])/dark earth upper camouflage over hellblau undersides which obviously means operating in North Africa, presumably 1941/42 and if I were doing this version I would seriously double check the colours quoted. According to the other review, the QY RAF fuselage codes indicate a 254 Coastal Command Squadron and I confirmed this through resources, plus the fact that these aircraft were generally Blenheim IVF's, meaning that the four gun pod under the central fuselage is correct for this version.

Decals:

The decal sheet has clearly been reprinted for this Hornby release as it has a much glossier and thicker look to it. One of the biggest problems with Airfix decals has always been the register and printing of the decals, they're often slightly off centre, have white edging or other bleed through effects. On first looks this new decal sheet seems to have finally overcome all those issues. The carrier film on the roundels is virtually non existent and as usual the dots are separate for each of the air force's roundels. So the test would come when applying them to the model.

In the end there were mainly good and some bad points. The application of the decals was excellent, although feeling a little thick and glossy, they bedded down perfectly with Gunze Sangyo setting solution, and once sealed in with a gloss coat after and given a matt varnish, they looked like they had been painted on (the biggest compliment you can give decals). The downside was they really wanted to "grab" as soon as they lodged on the model so be liberal with with water if you need to move it around. No offprinting register, the colours are very good, those issues all over come... but... they have the old problem of being almost see through (does this make them too thin rather than my assertions they are thick?), so the paint scheme underneath could be seen through the decal. This was really a big let down and is a real pet hate of mine!! If not for this major error, the decals would be nigh on perfect. So you will have to put up with colour that is not solid enough on the decal, particularly the lighter colours like white and yellow and the light grey fuselage codes - you can see the painted demarcation easily underneath.

Accuracy:

Overall the general appearance of the Blenheim IV is captured quite acceptably although the kit tries to emulate the port nose glazing canter, but just doesn't get it quite right. The wings and tailfin have similar inaccuracies in that they are too rounded at their tips compared to the real aircraft. But overall it doesn't look too bad without being a rivet counter.

Overall Recommendation:

This kit has seen much better days and the molds are old and tired. It is a far cry from the Skill Level 1 the older Airfix boxings suggest, and took a lot of work for me to get it to a reasonable finish. The glazing - all of it - is atrocious. I haven't built the MPM kit but from reports it is a better kit in many respects and perhaps even a little easier. With that in mind I can't really recommend this Airfix kit unless you are prepared to put in a bit of effort, don't mind the challenge of transparencies that don't even feel like they belong in this kit or you can't get your hands on the MPM version.

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