Part 2: The Build

Firstly, an apology for omitting a thank you in the first part of this review. I should like to sincerely thank Martyn Weaver at Hornby/Airfix for the review sample - his enthusiasm for the American market will, I hope, result in increased availability of Airfix products in this country. (Ed- Nuts. I should have caught this and very much appreciate Martyn and Airfix support also!) Construction begins with the interior of the aircraft. The cockpit area, weapons bay roof and three bulkheads are provided, and these are given very positive location slots inside both fuselage halves, ensuring exact alignment for all these parts. All fit perfectly. As I mentioned before, the cockpit area is rather sparsely detailed and I did a trial fit to see what could be seen once the model was completed. The cockpit windows and roof are supplied as one large clear piece, so I painted the roof in black to block the light from that source. With the cockpit tacked together and the fuselage halves wrapped around it, I was able to see that while there isn't much visibility into the cockpit, some extra detail would help give the impression of busyness. To that end, I found a Nimrod cutaway in an old magazine, and constructed a simple box structure to go behind the pilot's seat - this representing a bank of radios and other electronic gear - and the flight engineer's panel and table on the starboard wall behind the co-pilot. I added some cockpit placard decals by Reheat, and also some other assorted warning/data plate decals. With the canopy section is in place, this gives a good impression without being too specific. I really don't think that a resin or PE cockpit superdetail set is necessary for this model, but that is down to the individual. Behind the cockpit bulkhead is an open space that I simply painted black, along with the rest of the fuselage interior - no sense in adding detail here as the cabin windows are too small to make it worthwhile. The only addition I decided to make was an extra bulkhead about halfway between the two supplied in the kit. This serves two purposes - firstly, to help prevent too much of a see-through fuselage, and secondly to add a bit more rigidity to the central fuselage section. As the central fuselage cross section is the same along its length, I simply traced around one of the kit's existing bulkheads onto a piece of 40 thou plastic card, cut it out and sanded to fit, then painted it black on both sides. This new bulkhead fitted nicely on top of the weapons bay roof piece. Before gluing the cockpit/weapons bay/bulkhead assembly into place, you'll also need to fit the nose wheel bay parts into place. Placed on the underside of the cockpit floor, this consists of front and rear bulkheads, plus the two sidewalls that feature the unusual inward-opening bay doors. There is absolutely no detail in this bay, so I added a few stringers to the roof from 40 thou strip - this also helped to cover two inconvenient injector pin marks. As the model sits so close to the ground, I didn't see much point in adding more detail but, once again, your mileage may vary. Talking of ground clearance, I trial fitted the nose gear leg, and comparing it to photos, it is a little long. In fact, the oleo looks to have been molded in the extended position. I carefully cut 2mm from the bottom of the oleo, and repositioned the scissor links. Superglued back together, it now looks much better. The method of construction will have you add the bare nose leg before fuselage assembly. I temporarily added a slice of 40 thou plasticard in front of the leg to protect it from knocks; I can remove it later in assembly.

Once I'd added the nose wheel bay, I glued some fishing weights into the nose - this model would otherwise be a confirmed tail-sitter. Airfix recommends 25 grams, or about an ounce. Remembering the trouble I had with the Classic Airframes Canberra, I doubled that just to be on the safe side. The final step for the cabin interior is to add the cabin windows. These parts are nice and clear; I dunked them in Future even so, to provide a barrier against superglue fumes. The oval windows will fit exactly if inserted the correct way up (in fact, they literally click into place); trial and error will establish this, and they are all the same. They do stand a little proud of the fuselage, but a thorough sanding and polishing remedied this. Some will no doubt claim that the Airfix windows are "too thick" and will use white glue or some such "clear" substitute. This really isn't necessary - all that is needed is a little elbow grease and you'll have fine looking windows. I've never found these white/clear liquids to be particularly convincing in any case. The large "bubble" windows at the front of the cabin are also a good fit and also really look the part once in place. The final "to-do" before closing up the fuselage is to add the taxi light in the nose of the aircraft. This is a little too high on the nose, but I didn't fancy moving it down a millimeter or so, and left it as is. Airfix provides a clear part for the cover, as indeed they do for the landing lights and taxi lights in the wings, but do not provide anything to go behind them. In each case, I added a small MV lens behind the cover, though it was suggested to me that the size of this model would make it ideal for adding working lights - the thought of simulating the 70 million candle-power searchlight in the starboard wing was a bit much however! As each fuselage half replicates virtually the whole of the length of the aircraft, these are long joins that need to be tackled carefully to avoid misalignment. I used tape to close up the fuselage, and then ran liquid cement along the seam. This left a minimal amount of clean-up work; judicious use of Mr. Surfacer and some light sanding tidied things up to my satisfaction. With the fuselage dry, I added the previously Future-coated clear cockpit roof section with superglue. I found this to be slightly too wide at the rear, so I pinched in the sides and let the top bulge slightly - I thought it easier to sand down the non-windowed roof rather than fiddling with the window frames. Incidentally, I discovered shortly afterwards that the windows in the center of the windscreen are slightly wrong in shape, as are the "eyebrow" windows. As the differences aren't that noticeable, I decided to let this one slide. Sometimes, especially with clear parts, discretion is the better part of valor…. The final area of work on the fuselage at this point is the MAD stinger on the rear end of the model. This is very slightly larger in diameter than the fuselage and needs a little sanding down to get it to match. A couple of minutes with the sanding sticks set this right and the positive location sets it in place. Turning to the wings, the first step is to glue the main gear wells into place. You'll wish to ensure that these line up correctly with the cutouts in the lower wing section to prevent unnecessary filling. Next up are the engine intakes, and this area is very important for the final look of the model. The Nimrod has 4 engines, and the wing root intakes are a major recognition feature for the type, so it is essential to spend some time getting these assemblies right. First up, there are some pesky ejector pin marks on the inside that need to be covered up. With a smooth interior surface, painted white, the top and bottom halves were joined and the seams eliminated with filler and sanding. The front turbine blades of the engines are nicely represented and after painting and a black wash, look very realistic after gluing to the back end of the intakes. Setting the intakes into place within the wings shows that there is some seam work to undertake, but nothing too serious. The shapes of the intakes are slightly incorrect; both are a bit more oval and less squared off than they should be. There's no easy fix for this, and it isn't really noticeable unless you look carefully at photos, so I left them as is. The only modification I made was to open up the intake between the engine intakes. This was a simple process with a sharp knife and round file, with some 20 thou plasticard for the intake splitters.

With the intakes set, the wings can be joined. These are large and very flexible pieces, so care needs to be taken to ensure that nothing breaks. Once dried up, I added the leading edges landing lights, each backed by an MV lens as before, and blended them into the leading edges. Another minor point here is that these lights are set a bit too far outboard on the wings. Again, not a quick fix, so I left it - reference to photos will be helpful for those of you who wish to correct this. Yes, I am compromising on some of these minor errors - the perils of deadlines and reviews. So shoot me. The wing assembly was allowed to dry overnight, before fitting to the fuselage. This revealed that, while very good for the most part, there were a couple of areas of concern with the weapons bay. Firstly, the rear of the weapons bay was slightly misaligned with the bottom of the fuselage, and secondly, there was also a slight step at the port forward end. Each was dealt with by filling and sanding, then a little rescribing. Otherwise, fit was good, with just a little Mr. Surfacer and a light sanding on the wing/fuselage joins. The last major airframe components were the tailplanes. Oddly, while the rest of the airframe is blessed with fine recessed panel lines, the stabilizers have no surface detail at all. Using a cutaway drawing as reference, I scribed a couple of lines on each surface. Fit to the fuselage is a little loose, and I needed to sand the joining surfaces of the tailplanes to get them properly square and at the same dihedral as each other. Even then, there were gaps on the undersides of each that required a plasticard shim and a little filler to blend them in.

With major construction complete, its time for a break and a nice cup of tea before tackling painting, decaling and final assembly.

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