Revell’s kit is a huge upgrade from older Halifaxes. The components have beautiful detailing, and the parts breakdown — plus optional parts — are indicators of variants to come. Included are optional exhausts, three- and four-bladed props, Gallay and Morris radiators, Messier and Dowty landing gear, plus transparencies and vertical fin/rudder parts unique to each of the versions depicted in the kit. The kit decals provide two variants, but five or six could actually be modeled with the included parts, using items like the glider-tow truss. All control surfaces are movable on delicate hinges.
There are some drawbacks. Looking ahead and dry-fitting everything possible before gluing is essential to ensure the variant being modeled actually uses those parts, because there are traps in the busy instruction sheet. Step 12 specifies the nose extension is to be glued in place, but this is only for the GR.II. The instructions incorporate some omissions, some mistakes, parts denoted “not used” are shown as optional during the assembly, and the proliferation of numbers for parts, steps, assemblies, and variants makes the instructions confusing.
A flight deck with attached wing-spar stubs forms the overhead of the bomb bay and is the foundation of a good interior just begging to be detailed. On my sample, the wing halves didn’t fit well, but the rest of the kit fairly clicked together. I’m not sure about the tail wheel well and structure — the retractable one didn’t come along until the Halifax Mk.III — but the main wheel-well box modules are terrific.
The nacelles are too wide and don’t taper enough forward of the wing, the radiators are too large and too square, the spinners are too large and not sharp enough, and the propellers are incorrectly paddle-bladed. I sanded the blades down to more closely resemble the Halifax’s Dowty props.
The bomb-bay doors may be cut apart and posed open on petite actuators, but there are four doors per side, not two as the instructions show. Those additional doors, scribed into the fuselage sides, move outward to allow the main doors to pivot up inside them. It was a simple fix to deepen the fuselage hinge lines, make six small vertical cuts, and bend those doors outward to where they should be — they’re correctly shown on the box art.
Clear parts are thick but well done, and sufficient interior detail is provided; I used decal strip to replicate the missing diagonal braces inside the windows adjacent to the astrodome. The matte-finish decals include stencils and presented no problems.
With its size and all that glass, I spent 40 hours building my kit. I liked the model, but was disappointed in its shortcomings. However, it’s still the best 1/72 scale Halifax available. Aftermarket parts are already in the pipeline to address the kit’s inaccuracies, and this state-of-the-art offering will also improve with future releases.
Those of you who’ve suffered through building one of the older Halifax kits are going to appreciate this one. Ask me how I know about that.
A version of this review appeared in the July 2012 FineScale Modeler.