The Little World

This model is a gift from my friend Paul, but it is not the first time I’ve built one. I purchased the same model from a small hobby shop located underneath Trinity Arcade in Perth in the 1960’s – a last gasp of plastic modelling before academic pressures took all my spare time away. I glued it together, but I cannot remember painting it at all. My chief memory of the time and the shop was the old owner bitterly complaining about how badly served he had been by his business partners – as a young customer I was in no position to even discuss the matter…

This kit is a model of its time, but a good one nevertheless. I rate it much more highly than the contemporary Airfix He 111, if only because the clear parts fit. The rest of the outfit is ambitious – with three guided bombs – and the whole aircraft promises to be quite a large one when finished. No wonder – it is, after all, a 4-engined bomber – albeit with the engines in two nacelles only.

Sprue flash and burrs? Sink marks? Ejector pins? Raised rivets? Need you ask? If I had wanted t a modern kit of the He 177 I’d have bought a Revell product and got all the good modern moulding. But this was a free Heinkel and I am determined to make it look good.

The problem of the scheme and markings is easily solved – the French resistance captured a number of these in the closing months of the war and shipped one back to the Rafwaffe. I can paint in the Armée de l’Air colours or the RAF ones. And there are plenty of googleable images of these two periods.