The Little World

My current build – the Airfix Handley Page Hampden – is an older kit. Not quite as old as the series 1 baggies, but it does date back to the 60’s. I daresay it has been re-boxed several times and the decals have probably been upgraded, but the basic plastic airplane is an earlier style – it has raised rivets all over it.

It’s really like looking at someone naked in a cold room – the goose pimples are all over. They’re done quite well and I am not going to debate whether they accurately represent the attachments of the skin to internal frames. They are just there and you either deal with it or not.

Current Google pictures of the HP Hampden being preserved in British Columbia show some rivet detail but it is rather flat, and the panel lines are lot that prominent either. It is a smooth skin. The disparity between this and the Airfix mould should bother me awfully.

But it doesn’t.

That may be nostalgia – I built a Wellington and a Lancaster, as well as a Sunderland in those long-gone junior high school days and was delighted with them. I’ll build them again – presumably with a more modern kit and better abilities – but I probably won’t break my heart over looking at rivets or not. I certainly won’t be sanding the poor things flat and trying to scribe panel lines in with sharpened dental picks. I know it’s possible and there’s lots of YouTubes of people doing just this, but for my purposes it is as unhelpful as the photoetched seatbelts.

I am likewise not going to be split-sanding wings to reduce the trailing edges to scalpel sharpness – I recognise that some moulds are too thick back there but I need to be able to handle the wings without cutting myself – and I think I have a much better chance of getting a correct plan-shape to a wing if it has a bit of body than if it is too thin.

I also do not have any objection to slightly thicker landing gear legs – the models need to be picked up and put down by human hands – not laboratory robots.

But one thing I really would like to see – a careful reworking of the pilot figures to make sure they fit in the seats and that the seats fit within the cockpit. I always feel bad amputating limbs to crew a plane…