Drawing on lessons learned from the Blenheim, the Bristol Beaufort entered Royal Air Force service in 1940. Designed as a torpedo bomber, it also served as a medium bomber and trainer, and many units were converted into a heavy fighter called the Beaufighter. Roughly 1,200 Beauforts were produced in Britain and Australia. The ICM 1/48 scale Bristol Beaufort Mk.IA plastic model kit is the company’s sixth offering of Beaufort variants and comes with generally clear instructions and three schemes.
The instructions are organized into 94 mostly logical steps, though depending on how you intend to paint the kit, you will need to modify the order of assembly. Fortunately, the kit is designed to facilitate this. The instructions only reference ICM paints, which may not be available in all markets, but the company provides a comprehensive cross-reference chart on its website to help match colors from other major brands.
Assembly begins with the bomb bay, cockpit, and fuselage. Two internal wing spars are sandwiched between the fuselage halves, adding strength, setting the correct dihedral, and ensuring a clean, positive wing-to-fuselage fit. At Step 26, the instructions introduce a recurring issue: optional holes to be drilled in the fuselage, with a vague reference to Step 85 for context. As to why the holes are to be drilled? There’s no indication other than the scheme profiles to discern which option to go for. This lack of clarity is consistent throughout the instructions. If you can find reference photos of the aircraft you are building, that will help you make accurate decisions.
The build proceeded smoothly for me, but you need to plan ahead on how you intend to paint the model. The tailwheel and landing gear, called for in steps 22 and 50, can be installed after painting. One of the trickier areas was engine assembly — each exhaust tube is molded separately with no positive locator on the collector ring. In Step 54, the instructions called for adding the propellers, but that would have made painting difficult—I left them off until later. As a result, I had to settle for props that don’t spin, but I was able to assemble the cowling and flaps and slide them over the engines without obstruction.
Reaching the painting stage was especially exciting thanks to the inclusion of paint-mask templates for the canopy in the instructions. Unfortunately, the templates are oversized. If you have access to a copier, reducing them slightly should yield usable masks. The canopy frames are crisp, so using a toothpick and a sharp hobby knife worked to trim my masks. Don’t be daunted by the large amount of cockpit glass; the fit is excellent, and the clarity impressive. With one exception, all seams fall along canopy frames. That outlier is the gun camera housing atop the fuselage, which requires careful sanding and a dip in clear gloss to restore transparency.
The ICM 1/48 scale Bristol Beaufort Mk.IA torpedo bomber plastic model kit is not for the beginner, but modelers with a bit of experience will find it builds into a beautiful model of this iconic WWII bomber. And if you prefer to go off script and not follow the instructions, this kit offers plenty of opportunities to do just that.
Photos by Kyle Nelson