Avis sur le produit1/144 Amodel 1480 Se-210 CARAVELLE 10r Hispania

Excellence with some rough edges

This Amodel Caravelle 10R kit is molded beautifully – there is almost no flash. The component details are remarkably fine, especially given the kit’s 1:144 scale. Parts fit is generally excellent. The attention Amodel devoted to creating “scale” components means that the wings and the horizontal stabilizer assemblies are very thin and the trailing edges are very sharply-defined. Bravo Amodel! (A word to the wise: the thin wing halves are easily damaged if you are a bit too generous with Tuolene-based adhesives …)

The model's wings show no dihedral – but all of my blueprint drawings show approximately 2-3 degrees of dihedral, as do the many photos I have collected. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to produce the desired dihedral into the superbly-molded wing section with the help of some hot water after you have glued the wing halves together ... (Just don’t get the water temp too high and don’t leave the center section in the hot water to long …) Also worth noting: there are no alignment pins. Therefore, special care must be taken to ensure that components such as the fuselage and wing sections don’t shift as you glue them together.

Two sets of engines are provided, so you can build two different versions – another really very nice feature. Also, the real Caravelle 10R wing fences are large and very thin, so plastic molding at this 1:144 scale would yield very vulnerable results. Fortunately, Amodel supplies an excellent set of photo-etched metal wing fences – another “Bravo Amodel!” for that feature.

The decals are thin, but nicely opaque, so paint lines don’t show through if you decide to use a modified paint scheme. However, there is one major flaw in the decal sheet – the cockpit windscreen’s windows are incorrect in two important ways. First, the real airplane has four cockpit windscreen panels between the triangular side panels, not the two used in the decal. (Take a look at any “head-on” Caravelle photo.) Second, the cockpit window shapes are incorrect. (I know that “getting it right” is a tough job -- I examined 278 photos over a period of several months and made multiple digital versions of the cockpit windows before I could finally conclude that I had captured the details correctly.)

Also, let me make a suggestion about the passenger windows within the airline livery presentation – if you’re going to depend on decals to place the passenger windows, why not simply include the dark-shaded windows within the airline-specific color strip? Supplying a separate strip of passenger windows creates unnecessary extra work and it produces yet another alignment problem.

Actually, I don't quite "get" the passenger window format chosen by Amodel. I believe that a much better passenger window solution would have been to mold correctly shaped and -sized window openings in the fuselage -- painting would be easy that way, since no window masking would be required. The "windows" could then be made very easily and very nicely after the painting and decaling have been completed -- simply use a toothpick to apply a clear acrylic film across the window openings. Ditto with the cockpit windscreen panels.

The fuselage front section leaves much to be desired. Detail photos of real 10R Caravelles show that the cockpit windscreen surfaces are flat and that the flat segments around those cockpit windows "round" gradually to let them blend into the fuselage. Also, the cockpit section's nose contours should be sharper than they appear on the model.

Incidentally, I have 14 Caravelle models in three different scales by four different model makers -- and only ONE of the kits – made by F-RSIN -- has the proper front-end fuselage profile and the windscreen "flat spaces" molded into the kit. (Unfortunately, the F-RSIN kit's fit is very poor and its passenger windows and cockpit windows are decals.) I suspect that the Amodel molding excellence applied to the F-RSIN-like mold, with the addition of the previously-described molded windows would have yielded perfection ...) Never mind -- my "go to" contour-correction solution has been automotive Bondo and lots of filing and sanding to produce the desired shapes.

The Amodel company clearly knows how to produce superb molds. How about issuing a new release with the previously-mentioned features? And how about a Caravelle 12 release? A 1:100 scale -- or better yet, a 1:72 scale Caravelle 12 -- would be a dream come true!

All in all, I like Amodel's Caravelle 10R model and any serious modeler can make a show piece from this kit. Just be prepared to make some modifications ... (I liked Amodel’s Caravelle 10R so well that I’ve bought four kits thus far …)Lire l'avis complet...

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