François Laloux is a prolific builder of models here on TMN – even more so when the kit is as small as the new Revell Of Germany 72nd scale Eurofighter - He gives us a round up of the kits, as well as a walkthrough of his build in his latest build review. See how his turned out...
Build review: Eurofighter Typhoon single seater
From Revell of Germany
1/72nd scale
New tool kit
Kit No #03952
When my friend Nico received the last models from Revell, we found a very nice little Eurofighter typhoon in 1/72 in the box. I had the chance to build their Saab Gripen a while ago, so why not have a go at this one?
What do you get with that kit:
85 parts in light grey plastic, with very subtle engraving (a little too subtle for my taste in places) all of them in one single bag as usual...
A sprue full of the most recent weapons that can be carried by the Eurofighter as well as drop tanks for the kits.
A simple sprue for most of the fuselage aprts, wheels and tail as well as the landing gear
The details of the fuselage are a little soft, but I suppose in such a small scale appropriate
Cockpit tub's dials and switches can be easily picked out even in this small scale.
The rail for the ejector seat had a little extra plastic on it that will need to be removed in this case
Afterburner cans are shown in a closed statea nd blown in full afterburner
Another sprue with mostly the wings and nose sections notably.
The wheel wells are already moulded with details on them - enough for this scale.
Landing gear is supplied of course, and pretty fine and thin to match the scale...
...but well enough detailed for most modellers use.
As are the gear doors with proper shaped surfaces
The Instrument panel cover is a little soft in the recessed detail.
The rest of the cockpit from above as well as the shoulder mounted airbrake.
Clear parts are very nice, but you will have to deal with a moulding seam in the middle of the canopy.
I was going to use this marking choice -t hat of a special marking german plane "Richthofen" markiRichthofentured here in July 2016.
Let’s start the build : Cockpit first of course, fast and easy. The dashboard is molded in clear plastic with the headup display, an uncommon feature, but it is a nice thing i think. The seat is nicely molded in 4 parts, reasonnably well detailed. I didn’t use the suppied decals and painted the raised details with a fine brush.
The rest of the build is very straightforward. I have to mention that the inside of the air intake would be quite tricky to sand flush if you would want to do so (i left it as it is). Also note that the air intake is quite short and empty inside. It did not bother me, but a pair of FOD covers would of been nice to hide that shortcoming (you can scratchbuild these of course)
The rest of the build is easy, all the pieces connect well and only a small amount of putty is required.
the canopy had to be sanded and polished to get rid of that centre seam.
Ready for painting :
After priming with white alclad primer, i decided to do some pre-shading with black, because the panels beeing so fine i expected the wash to be uneffective (i was right)
For the main color i used the revell aquacolors, mixed per instructions.
To keep the preshading effective i cut the paint with 50 % gloss clear, used a little bit of flow enhancer and acrylic retarder.
I still manage to screw it a bit and lost almost all that subtle preshading…
Next came the different shades of gray and the very dark gray.
A coat of gloss clear and let’s get those decals on, a quite long process because of the large decals on the fin, these required a lot of revell decal softening solution to give a good result.
I used a gray watercolor wash with mixed results, the panels beeing so finely engraved. I also did a little bit of post-shading effects using tamiya smoke to give the model a little variations.
With all the small pieces glued on i sprayed a coat of satin vallejo varnish.
The final result is very nice in my opinion.
The kit is not perfect (what !!?) but you will have in the end a very nice representation of the plane, with a good level of details and an attractive scheme. All of that for 20 euros, a bargain price i think…
I had a lot of fun with this kit and I WILL continue building small scale modern jets in the future.
Thank you Revell for providing the kit.
Cheers
François Laloux
Thanks to Revel Of Germany for sending this kit to François to review and build for us – check out all of their kit son their website...
