Tamiya has re-released its kit of the Avro Lancaster, Great Britain's most famous World War II bomber. The kit provides a flight crew, bombs, and fuselage interior with posable bomb- and landing gear bay doors. New to the kit are different engine covers, propellers, armament, smooth tires, and markings for four aircraft.
I painted the fuselage interior according to the instructions (except for painting the fuselage walls with Testors British interior green), then masked the fuselage windows. The fit of the fuselage halves is not up to current Tamiya standards; I devoted a lot of time to cleaning up the seams.
Test-fitting the wings revealed some of the same fit issues as the fuselage. I was disappointed with the poor fit of the engine nacelle halves, the engine covers, and their fit to the wing, taking a lot of time to fill and blend the seams. My suggestion would be to glue up the engine covers first, then adjust the nacelles to fit the covers; you will still have to smooth out the nacelle-to-wing fit after installation.
After assembling the wings and tails, I glued them in place and found their fit was clean and solid - good news for such a large and heavy model.
The canopy has a choice of side window sets, with or without a blister on the port side; the proper sets are indicated on Page 3 of the instruction sheet, according to your choice of plane. I used Tamiya's extra thin cement to attach the clear parts.
This model has 41 clear parts! Too bad there were no kit-supplied masks for all that glass and framing; you may want to look to the aftermarket for self-adhesive masks to skip through this task.
The nose turret's fit to the fuselage was poor and took some adjusting.
Choosing to model a Mk.I of No. 424 Squadron, I painted the top-surface camouflage with Testors RAF dark earth and RAF dark green, then coated the underside with flat black, using Tamiya paints for this and the rest of the painting. After putting the decals down with Micro Set solution, I finished with Testors flat clear.
It took me 45 hours to complete this kit, mostly because of the seam repairs. The model appears close to scale, and I'm glad it's available again. But, because of the fit issues, I can only recommend it to advanced modelers.
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