Revell's forthcoming 1/72 scale
Hawker Hunter

by Jay Laverty

This is the soon to be released Revell 1/72 scale Hawker Hunter. I was more than a little bit surprised by the quality of the mouldings for this scale and was was equally impressed with the fit of the model.

In all, construction of this model only took a couple of days, and I would have had it completed much sooner than I did had I not had several other projects on the go, namely my 1/32 scale Hayate. I am confident that any level of modeller could have this model completed to a very high standard over a weekend.

There are no fit problems and aside from the lack of proper locator points for the well flaps the tidiness of the engineering on the kit is to be commended.

While I had this model nearing completion just for curiosity I compared it to the 1/32 scale FG.9 by Revell as well. This kit is actually better detailed than the 1/32 version in most respects aside from the cockpit.

What stood out most to my eyes was the wheel wells.


 

The model has been finished in Xtracolour enamels which sparyed with their expected quality and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, come highly recommended.

As the kit was a test shot I needed to source some aftermarket decals and after a brief search I came up with Xtradecal 72046 which has several nice schemes on it with aircraft spanning the late 50's to the early 80's. As Xtradecal are printed by Microscale there is no problem with quality and with a bit of Micrset and sol they settled on to the surface perfectly. On top of this went my standard wash of Winsor & Newtons Raw Umber and this was sealed in with matte varnish. I used small amounts of CMK's stardust on the wheels to "dirty" them up a bit, and with that the model was complete.

For a complete and more in detail look at this model there will be a full build article in the next issue of Scale Aviation Modeller International.

As far as I am aware at this moment there is not long now to wait for this kit to be released from Revell, and I can honestly say that this wil be every bit worth the wait for even the most discerning of Hunter fan. I never build 72nd scale kits, but I found this one to be an enjoyable build with very satisfactory results. I think I'll have to get that 32nd scale version onto the workbench soon...

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Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2005 by Jay Laverty
Page Created 30 March, 2005
Last Updated 29 March, 2005

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