Airfix's 1/144 scale
De Havilland Comet 4B

by Roland Sachsenhofer

De Havilland Comet 4B

Airfix's 1/72 Whitley is available online from Squadron.com for only $33.99!

As a milestone in civil aviation, the de Havilland Comet would have deserved a more up to date representation in scale. Wanting to build one, my choice fell on the Airfix re-boxing of its 1962- vintage forms.

Fitting of parts is rather basic. The bow has to be filled and sanded to get a proper shape and the thick wheel fairings have been sanded to make a more appropriate appearance.

All the raised panel lines have been grinded down; they would not fit to any airplane representation in that scale.
Instead lines of pencil where drawn on those parts, where I would like to have panel lines. The NMF surface on the wing roots have been detailed that way, whereas the small lines of pencil have been overpainted with white on the fuselage to achieve a kind of pre-shading.

That’s a technique which seems to work quite well for me.

Further enhancements where done in form of wiring the landing struts, simulating five fuselage - antennas with stretched sprue and creating a third air intake between the two represented by the kits forms by using small trimmed black decals.

The kit decals by the way are of excellent quality, no trouble in any way to get them on the surfaces –with one exception: the size and shape of the cockpit window- decals does not look good. But this may be my fault, because of the heavily reworked bow section.

Anyway a nice kit with superb decals –and an very attractive boxart!

Nevertheless it´s time to get a state of the art kit of that appealing aircraft- maybe in 1:72?

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Thumbnail panels:

If you are interested in the building process, please have a look on the workbench at the JAM Forum:
http://www.razyboard.com/system/morethread-dehavilland-comet-4b-airfix-1144-raidenjack-2086023-6359122-0.html

As ever, remarks will be appreciated: ro.sachsenhofer@gmx.at

Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2017 by Roland Sachsenhofer
Page Created 24 January, 2017
Last Updated 24 January, 2017

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