THKv Bristol Beaufort Mk.I - ICM 1:48

As part of my work for the book that our association will publish this year, I took the Beaufort model from ICM to the bench after finishing both Beaufighter (Revell) and Blenheim (Airfix), all of which are Bristol production.
ICM is a company that has surpassed itself in recent years. I made many of the models he produced with great pleasure. I have almost always been satisfied with the result. I had the same feelings when I started Beaufort. The injection quality is very high, the transparent parts look perfect, I started to work with interior detail sets, even if it was not necessary. I was also happy until I closed the fuselage and attached the wings. But when it came to landing gear and engines, all my enthusiasm was gone. This time, they did not hesitate to exaggerate the number of parts and to give some pieces almost as thin as a hair in order to increase the detailing. Therefore, the landing gear seems to break very easily. Airfix produced a very similar construction landing gear in Blenheim much more intelligently. Since it was my previous model, I can seriously see the difference. They also made the engines extremely detailed and complex, moreover, the engines cannot be completed without mounting the propellers, which creates serious difficulties in the painting phase. For this purpose I broke them out of their places and re-glued as the model was close to be finished. It is now a fixed propeller (!) aircraft. It was extremely meaningless to put tiny parts inside the engine that would not be visible from the outside. I gave up after trying so hard to put them on. Their absence will not be known anyway. The engine covers are also very rough and require putty, but I gave up due to the existing raised details and limited working space on it, which paves the way for the jury to directly disqualify the model in the upcoming competition. My final word is for the rear turret. While there was a much smarter way to do this part (Airfix gave a detachable turret), I think ICM messed it up. In order to complete the assembly of this, I had to paint and polish some parts separately from the model, and I could only assemble them after removing the masks on the glass cage. I didn't like this part either.
All in all, the model is fine overall, but it would have been much better if there were no such details that made it unnecessarily difficult to build, and perhaps Airfix Blenheim wouldn't have won the first place, when asked which of the 3 models was better.