Fonderie Miniatures' 1/48 scale
Handley Page Hampden

by Mick Evans

Fonderie Miniatures' 1/48 scale Handley Page Hampden
is available online from Hannants priced from £38.29

As discussed in my in box preview posted late last year, Fonderie Miniatures’ 1/48 scale Handley Page Hampden is their offering best to date. 

The parts might look daunting to a modeller who has not previously encountered Fonderie Miniatures, but this kit really is a straightforward build once you clean up all of the parts. 

When purchasing a FM kit you must realise that you are going to have to use some serious modeling skills.  Unlike mainstream kit companies such as Hasegawa, Tamiya and Trumpeter, FM kits are limited run low pressure molded.  They suffer from heavy flash, mould defects and warping.  These may all be overcome as long as you expect a little extra effort will be required,  and you are willing to use your modeling skills. 

I have now built most of the FM and HiTech range and, yes, they need some major extra work, but if it was not for FM and HiTech I would not have kits such as the Halifax, Maryland, Vautour, Ventura etc in my collection.  The finished product after extensive work usually looks great.

The build for the Hampden involved the usual very extensive cleanup of all of the mating surfaces of every part, except for the resin and metal parts.  The resin and metal parts do need some cleanup and in some cases filler but in general they are quite good.

Construction started with the sanding of the fuselage halves until the dimensions equaled the width of the transparencies for the cockpit and nose transparencies and the upper and lower rear gunners transparencies.  Once this was complete, the fuselage walls were cleaned up to accept the cockpit floor and bulkheads.  This process requires constant trimming and trial fitting until a snug fit is achieved. 

The cockpit and navigators area is quite a complex build requiring a fair amount of cleanup work and painting. The detail here is very good and requires little extra detail work and looks quite convincing when it is complete and painted.  Once this process is complete, the fuselage assembly is a very easy assembly process. 

The wings are then the next big challenge.  The wing halves need a huge amount of sanding to achieve the correct thickness at the leading and trailing edges.  Once this is comleted the process of assembling the wheel well assemblies can proceed.  The wings also becomes a simple assembly process from this point on.  The same process was repeated for the horizontal and vertical tail planes. 

The wings, horizontal tail, and fins were added after some cleanup of the mating surfaces. Very little filler was required except for the horizontal stabilizer to fuselage join.  This required a fair amount of filler to smooth the joints. 

The next major task was the transparencies.  Firstly all parts were dipped in Future.  The transparencies were an easy fit with super glue.  A major disappointment was the rear upper gunners sliding transparency.  It simply does not fit, so it was modeled partially open with the Vickers gun protruding.  In reality I should have cut it into its revolving sections and completely open the gunner’s position up.  The frames were all masked and any seams were filled and sanded. 

At this point I sand the entire model with fine emery paper and then steel wool to remove the orange peel effect left by the mould release agent.  The transparency masking was left on until after the kit was completely painted.  I spent a lot of time blowing all of the sanding dust out of the fuselage, and a final complete immersion in water ensured that when the masking was removed no dust adhered to the inside of the transparencies due to static caused by the tape removal.

The last major project was the engines.  The engines are a solid piece of resin with a mounting plug to be installed at the back of the engine to mount it to the firewall.  I added some ignition leads made from fine solder and some push rods made from stretched sprue to add some extra detail to the already nicely molded engines. 

My main points of criticism of this kit are as follows;

• Once again, the lack of detail in the instruction sheet. This pertains mainly to the location of the guns within the turrets.  A bit more detail here would have been helpful, my saving grace was an old cut away drawing of the Hampden. At this point I am just waiting for some reference photographs to install the gun deflection device for the upper gunner’s position and the antenna wire.

• A major improvement may have been to provide the entire nose area in clear having the modeler mask the window areas rather than have the windows as inserts.  The framing area between the windows is quite fine whereas on the kit they are a bit thick and over scale.

The kit was finished in Xtracolor's enamels for the standard RAF night bomber scheme of Dark Green and Dark Earth upper surfaces and night under surfaces.  

The decals were quite nice and went on with no problems at all. 

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The kit was over sprayed with semi gloss before the small cabin windows were filled with Krystal Klear, as the supplied transparencies would have been difficult to fit. 

In summary, when the kit is finished it looks like a Hampden and makes into a nice kit. Just remember that it is not a Tamigawa kit and it will not just fall together effortlessly.

The end result was well worth the effort and delivered a very nice looking Hampden in 1/48 scale.

Thank you FM!

Highly recommended for experienced modelers.

Thanks to Hannants for the sample

Fonderie Miniatures kits and Xtracolor paints are all available online from Hannants' website

Model and Text Copyright © 2008 by Mick Evans
Images Copyright © 2008 by Brett Green
Page Created 7 February, 2008
Last Updated 7 February, 2008

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