TRASH FROM THE ATTIC

Avro York in 1/144

Brian Derbyshire

Long ago I realised that I would never have enough display space for all the World War II heavies I planned to build. A good compromise, I thought, would be to have one of each in 1/72, and the variants in 1/144. So I wrote to Airfix explaining this, requesting that they pantograph down their Lancaster, Halifax, Fortress and Liberator, which conversion addicts (I was sure) would buy three at a time. In retrospect, I perhaps should not have mentioned Lincoln's excellent small-scale Sunderland… Of course, nothing came of this, but the idea lingered on until Crown produced kits of three of my four. True to my plan, I bought three of each. Had I but known! These kits have been rereleased several times over the years, under different labels and often with rather nice transfers. However, nothing has ever been done to correct the mouldings, which are no better than ‘something vaguely like’ the original subjects. Mostly they stayed in the loft.

Then, quite recently, I came by a second-hand (read, ‘affordable’) AModel dam-busting Lancaster. Very nice, and it freed up one of my Crowns for a sideline. You see, I've been a member of York and District Plastic Modellers' Society for over twenty years and there have been murmurs from time to time that not one of us had ever done a model of our namesake, and maybe somebody should. Blow it, I thought, we need a laugh.

So I got the old Alan Hall/RLW article (Aifix Magazine, about 1960) out of the file, copied it down to half size, and compared it with the Aeromodeller (I think) 1/144 Lancaster drawings. Fine so far. I laid the AModel kit on same - equally fine, it looks a very decent kit, though a bit heavily detailed. Then I spoiled it all by doing the same with the Crown kit. The fuselage actually doesn't look too bad, but the parts I needed… oh boy! Where's the aspirin? I should have bought the Welsh Models vac-form, when I had the chance. Oh well, onwards...