The Little World

Sooner or later I was going to have to start the kit.

The box had to be opened and the sprue trees taken out. All 870 of them…The AS truck had already been built as part of a Soviet airfield but the main monster remained.

Amodels are flashy mouldings., and slightly friable plastic. Many of the parts would need sawing from the trees and careful sanding back. Fortunately most of the external surfaces looked well-detailed and clean.

There were duplicated trees as this is a four-engine aircraft and carries a full bomb load – not a lot of bombs, however, for the size of the finished model. The engines were under-powered and the wing was extra-large to compensate for this.

The turrets are discouragingly complex, with multiple clear mouldings and a lot of structure inside them. There are two unusual gunner’s positions in the aft part of the inner engine nacelles but these seem to be somewhat hidden in the finished model and may end up being hard to see.

Good wing mouldings, but broken into four panels for each wing, with complex shapes needing to match and be faired in. A wonderful big horizontal stabiliser that will tie together the aft part of the fuselage, but surprisingly complex fittings where the rudder and tail actuators turn. The rear turret is highly detailed inside.

And the delight: black tyres with weight squash moulded into them.

The Amodel instruction sheets are diagrammatic, of course, but well-drawn and no mistakes discernable. The colour call-out is monochrome, but I’ll be choosing a simple scheme anyway.

The decal sheet is Sovietly sparse…though eastern European decals always want an overspray to keep them together and a considerable length of soaking time.