Blackburn Buccaneer S.2C/D - Airfix 1:48
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I can say that this kit is the biggest disappointment in my many years of modeling life. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean the kit is bad, mine is a purely emotional approach, an expression of sadness that my expectations were not fully met. Years ago, I builtAirfix's 1:48 kit with raised panel lines. That kit was a complete disaster. The wings came out of the box bent upto 30°, and I spent 2 weeks trying to fix them using various methods. Even though I tried to do my best, the resulting plane was extremely mediocre, I ended up with a terrible result due to the misprinting of the decals. I recently had the chance to build Airfix's new molding Avro Anson kit. I felt such great enthusiasm, both during and after the completion, that I was happy that Airfix was once again in a position to compete with Chinese companies in the major league. Therefore, my expectations from this kit were extremely high. Of course, since the plane was the same, I technically did not expect a much different design, but I hoped that they could take a better route in detailing and get a much more sophisticated result. Unfortunately, none of these happened: - I couldn't hide my surprise when I opened the box. Airfix has abandoned the usual light blue opaque plastic and used a dark grey plastic which is almost translucent on the thin parts. Actually, considering the dark gray color of the aircraft, it is a good approach; supporting the paint with a similar color in the background will give a better result. As someone who has spent 40 years in the colorants industry, I understand this well. However, the plastic chosen was the hardest I have ever seen in a kit. Even with a high-end Tamiya side cutter, which I used for the second time, and a brand new DSPIAE nipper, it was not possible to cut the parts from their frames without burrs. During this process, serious whitening (cold bending) of the plastic occurred, a result of the translucency. With the old light blue plastic this wouldn't happen. Then, I worked hard to remove these burrs. Let alone sanding and rasp, I seriously had to clean them with a file. Afterwards, cleaning the file marks was a seriously troublesome process. The fact that the body of the aircraft consists of many parts may have been chosen this way due to technical restrictions, but in principle, a body consisting of 6 parts (3 right, 3 left) would definitely bring problems and it was not really problem-free. The junction of the front part and the middle part was not perfect and required intervention after the gluing process. I had to try very hard to hide the problems. Technically, this kit is almost identical to the previous one, with the only obvious difference being that the panel lines are recessed. No other big differences were made. I will not mention the minor errors in the manual, as many of them may also occur in other companies. As a result, I didn't get the pleasure I expected while building this model. Even though the result was not bad, it is not one of my favorite models, and I am really sad about that.
