R16 Jet Provost T.3
Completed: November 2017
My rating: 10/10
Therapy ratting: 10/10
The last couple of builds have been quite long projects so I am looking forward to doing something a bit simpler. This little kit fits the bill nicely.
I remember a lot of these being around in my ATC days in the 70's.
First impressions
Pretty good. The panel lines are of a nice depth so filling these in should, for a change, be straightforward.
A good set of some 100 nudred decals are provided for the two variants included in the kit.
For this build I am going for the later (1984) colour scheme.
The clear plastic is of a high quality that allows good viewing without any blurring.
Tub
The cockpit detail provided is fairly basic but probably adequate for this scale. The ejector seats come in three parts which makes painting a bit simpler.
The moulded seat belts are OK but you are rather stuck with them. I am just going to stick with whats in the box and paint in instrument detail here and there. Otherwise the detail is pretty sparse.
The main instrument panel has a fairly good decal provided but the panel itself is completely flat with no relief.
Overall the cockpit is pretty dark in reference images.
Adding a silk varnish and some metal weathering will hopefully add a bit more zing.
Pit Done
I am pretty happy with the cockpit overall. This is just out of the box. The Eduard PE kit is rather tempting but at £11.00 kinda pricey for a 1/72 kit. Maybe next time.
The overall scheme was taken from reference photos of which many are available. The instrument panel decal is actually rather nice once in situ.
Loose fit
After fitting the cockpit and gluing the fuselage together I was a bit dissapointed with the fit. Quite an obvious gap in the join on the top.
I did spend time dry fitting these before gluing, but the cockpit does seem just a tad too big resulting in the gaps in the fuselage. Maybe just me. A bit of paint too thick somewhere? Who knows.
Just too say that some filling may be necessary. A lot of the time the paint will hide of lot of these small gaps. But on this occasion I felt a little filler was required to take out the join line. (There isn't one on the real aircraft so its got to go).
Painting
With the wings in place it starts to look a bit more like a Provost.
Two coats each of my usual 50/50% enamel/thinner mixture provided a fairly brush free finish. The white definitely needed that extra coat. I do find that the Revell Email 'Matt 5' White nearly always requires a second coat.
The 'Light Aircraft grey' on the wings was just white with a tad of black made up to match reference images. If you look at the photo at top you can see that it is a very light grey indeed. I think mine is perhaps a little dark but I like the stronger contrast this provides against the white fuselage.
The red is Revell Email SM330 which did only need one coat of 50/50 mix.
The trickiest part was doing the masking. It took a few attempts to get the curve under the cockpit looking right.
I sued some 2mm masking tape which was great for this little job.
Panel lines
