silver Cloud/Pegasus 1/48 scale Martin Baker M.B.5

Kit: No. SC4820
Scale: 1/48
Manufacturer: Silver Cloud/Pegasus, available from Squadron Mail Order, 1115 Crowley Drive, Carrollton, TX 75011-5010, 979-242-8663, www.squadron.com
Price: $59.98
Comments: Mixed-media, 31 injection-molded parts, 30 white-metal parts, decals
Pros: Interesting subject, crisp surface scribing and details, separate control surfaces
Cons: Parts have flash, trailing edges are thick, some shrinkage, white-metal parts require cleanup, fit is troublesome, inadequate instructions

The Martin-Baker Company is not as well-known for its innovative fighter designs as it is for its life-saving ejection seats. Its M.B.5 prototype was powered by a Rolls-Royce Griffon 83 engine driving big counterrotating propellers and was to be armed with four 20mm cannons.

The cockpit layout was efficient, featuring a side-mounted control stick - a design that finally saw production in the F-16! The M.B.5 first flew in 1944, and testing continued into 1946. By then it had been surpassed by jets.

Silver Cloud's kit comprises mostly injection-molded parts with white-metal details. The soft plastic parts have some flash, making cleanup necessary. There are no locating pins, though some parts require precise placement.

The instructions include preliminary notes and an exploded view, but there is no set sequence and only photos of a built model to guide painting and decaling.

One fuselage half and the clear canopy in my sample were incompletely molded. The surface detail is fine, but a lot of it disappears in sanding the seams. Silver Cloud's molding machine requires feed tunnels that are visible inside the large parts, and the extra thickness they entail causes exterior sink marks and makes fitting internal details difficult.

The best way to build the model is to arrange it into subassemblies and repeatedly test-fit everything. I sanded all the mating surfaces first, then built each fuselage half to include the fin half and cowl half. These halves were joined while on a perfectly flat surface.

While each fuselage half was curing, I built the wings. Shrinkage from the feed channels mars both surfaces, but I let it go so I wouldn't sand away panel detail. The thickness of the wing parts prevents a good fit of the white-metal spar that forms the rear of the landing gear bay. Thinning the inside of the lower wing and test-fitting the spar helped.

The left wing's upper surface was molded in a different-colored plastic, and was about 1.5mm shorter in span than the lower half, requiring a styrene-strip filler at the root. I added the ailerons at this point but kept them in the neutral position.

Silver Cloud's white-metal cockpit parts are not as well-formed as contemporary polyurethane resin detail sets. Instrument faces for the panel are decals.

I had to thin the upper portion of the cockpit coaming to get a good fit for the cockpit tub - the instrument panel shroud should fit snugly just inside the opening when glued in place. The exhaust pipes are not round in cross-section as they should be.

Closing the fuselage showed a good match on top, but not so good along the bottom. I dry-fitted the completed fuselage to the wing and found the wing was thicker than the fuselage root fairings, requiring filling and sanding. The spar had to be trimmed to get the fuselage to sit correctly. The white-metal ventral air scoop (looks like a Mustang, doesn't it?) was oversized and required more filling to fit. The separate flaps were too thick.

I had to clean up all the white-metal propeller parts, and made sure the pitch of the individual blades for the fore and aft sections was correct. There is no provision to allow both the counterrotating sections to rotate freely.

The instructions do not clearly show the landing gear assembly. All the struts required cleanup, and the doors had to be thinned. I replaced much of the retraction mechanism with scratchbuilt components.

I consulted an article, "Mr. Martin's Memorable M.B.5" in the February 1979 Air International to get a better idea of the color scheme and markings. I used Humbrol, AeroMaster, and Xtracolor enamels. The decals provide markings for the only M.B.5 ever built. The red was too dark, so I found alternate roundels and fin flashes in my spares box. The kit's prototype circle P decals were thin and fragile.

The finishing touch was the canopy, and mine was thick at one end, thin on the other. I found a spare in an old Falcon-brand vacuum-formed kit and used that.

I spent close to 30 hours on my model. I recommend it to experienced modelers willing to tackle substantial cleanup and fit problems.

- Ross Whitaker