A.W. Meteor NF. Mk 12 ‘Defending the UK Skies’
Kit No: SH72360
Scale: 1/72
Type: Injection Moulded Plastic
Manufacturer: Special Hobby
UK Importer: Hannants www.specialhobby.eu
Newly returned to modelling, and following a lengthy flirtation with theFROG Skua, I discovered Modeldecal sheets, and these were to influence my modelling for a decade or more of building RAF subjects in ‘the gentleman’s scale’. Not as easy as you might suppose at the time for someone wanting to model the ‘classic’ period of RAF jets. Hunters and Canberras were dependant on finding old and outdated kits – Revell’s Hunters had not made their appearance – and my early efforts involved a lot of scratch detailing, with some very ‘creative’ attempts at wheel wells, intake trunking, and other intimate areas of the aircraft that 1960s technology had not seen fit to depict with anything other than a large hole.
Among my favourite sheets were MD92 and 93, which offered a bewildering assortment of Meteor night fighters, all of which I wanted to build, but confronted with an old boxing of the Matchbox kit I gave up in despair. With nothing but a shallow indentation for the nose gear well, the traditional Matchbox trenches by way of panel lines, and a level of detail commensurate with its age, it was simply too big a job to contemplate building more than one. I gave up on Meteors in 1/72 and turned to the even less likely prospect of a Westland Wasp in the same scale…
Some twenty years on and I find myself opening the box of Special Hobby’s recent tooling of the NF.12. It’s long overdue and every bit as good as one might have hoped, so here are a few notes on assembly that may help fellow modellers make the best of it:
Steps 1 – 15 Cockpit and Nose Gear Well Assembly
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