The Less You Know That You Know
I’ve been preparing to build the Revell Sea Hurricane as part 2 of my “easy, low stress build” designed to get the mojo flowing and the model production going. So I have been doing some research to find out just what might be wrong with the Revell kit.
Caucasian...please.
Never in human history has human history been such a tangled mess. I’ve spent a couple of hours at the World’s Foremost Authority on Hawker Hurricanes (grumble…the Britmodeler forum…grumble) and I still don’t know what I’m talking about. The more you dig into the history of this old airplane, the less you know that you know.
Here’s what I know so far. The Revell kit has incorrect decals for an incorrect aircraft. The one that’s not white. That one is bogus. Photographs easily located on the interweb show that 1) the Revell model is not the correct type for those markings, and 2) the codes are the wrong color (they should be yellow or maybe sky, but NOT red).
I don’t want to build the white one. White is a difficult color to paint with a brush, but that’s not the source of my dislike for this scheme. Despite the very interesting history and all that, I think it’s ugly. Ugly, nasty white airplane. That’s how I feel about it and so I’m not building it.
The thing is, there just weren’t a lot of Sea Hurricane Mk.IIc’s. There just were not that many of them, compared to the more numerous Sea Hurricane Mk.Ib. So…
Look, the hobby kit industry is full of surprises. Not fun surprises, but nasty, ice water down the back mixed with sewage surprises. Not fun. I’ve read reviews of both the Hasegawa Hurricane Mk.I and the Revell Sea Hurricane Mk.IIc and while they may have mentioned some “problems”–I cannot see where I missed the thorough damming that these two kits should have gotten. I could build a respectable Hurricane from the Revell kit, but Revell included ONLY the Sea Hurricane parts. It’s impossible to build a “regular” Hurricane from the kit without filling and sanding an area that is covered in “fabric.” Can you dig it? I knew that you could.
The Hasegawa monstrosity has been condemned by me elsewhere.
I’m just very disappointed that I’m looking at two kits that were obviously made by people who, at some level, just don’t care. The guys who made a lovely Hasegawa Hurricane Mk.IIb in 1/72 saw their work prostituted by issuing it under bogus labels as a Mk.I. Revell could have saved us all some pain but they want to force you to buy more kits, so they don’t include all the alternate parts in one kit, either. Both Hasegawa and Revell are guilty.
So what a reviewer should ask him or her self is this: Does this kit offer “alternative” parts?” If the answer is yes, then “does this kit offer all the parts and the decals needed to build an accurate model of something?” If the answer is that the only option you have is to build an impossible chimera of an airplane (Hasegawa) or an ugly white one with a weird propeller (Revell) then the reviewer should get out the “condemn” stick and commence to beating.
It’s only fair.