Crews affectionately called the Britannia (and its Canadian cousin, the CL-44) “The Whispering Giant.” Roden has done Bristol’s airliner proud. Featuring engraved detail, the kit’s gray parts look good generally, but molding consistency is a stumbling block.
Panel lines start strong but fade in some places, and some are just too faint. On the other hand, the control-surface hinge lines are deep and sharp. Gear struts are terrific, but only the wheels’ outboard sides have much detail. The nose wheels’ axle holes are way bigger than the axles on the strut.
There are no wheel wells, just shallow sockets for the gear struts. There’s also no flight deck, although the small cockpit windows would allow little interior detail to be visible anyway. I don’t think either omission detracts from the finished model. Typical of many small-scale kits, details like antennas and pitot tubes benefit from delicate
sanding.
Nice clear parts include cabin windows to be glued into the fuselage halves before joining them. I left these out because the cheat line’s clear decal carrier film makes excellent “glass” instead of tedious masking.
Construction proceeded without problems.
The long fuselage includes only two locating pins, one at the nose and the other in the vertical tail. To reinforce the structure and aid alignment, I glued small scrap-plastic interlocking tabs along the seam before joining the fuselage halves.
I built the fuselage and the wings separately for easier access to the nacelles and cowls to rescribe panel lines lost during blending and sanding. Once joined, the model was really sturdy.
I had issues with the props. They attach to the sprues between the blades, leaving little room to clean up the spinners. Worse, filler was needed to smooth a gap between the front and rear parts of the spinners with little room to work. Next time, I’ll separate the blades, clean up the spinners, and then reinstall the blade in drilled holes. It’s not in the instructions, but Britannia prop blades had short de-icers. I added them using strips of black decal film.
Painting and decaling a model brings it to life. It’s my favorite aspect of the hobby — unless things go wrong. Decals provided the livery for a single BOAC aircraft.
Unfortunately, the thick, brittle decals didn’t conform to surface detail and needed extensive slicing and touch-up. Setting solution didn’t prevent extensive silvering.
Slicing the decals along panel lines, or even just touching them with a brush, caused flaking. Fortunately Blue Angel blue (FS15050) matches the livery pretty well.
I liked the model and, other than a couple of things, it wasn’t a difficult build. I spent 30 hours on it, more than usual for an airliner. A lot of that time went to cleaning up the props. The frustrating decals let the kit down, but there are a lot of aftermarket options.
Note: A version of this review appeared in the February 2016 issue.