Hawker Sea Harrier

This is my 6th Airplane build since restarting modeling after over 30 years. I'd heard great hype about Tamiya kits being very accurate, nicely detailed and that they go together well, and so was excited to find one with an unusually low price. The low price has its reasons; the parts come from a mold manufactured in 1982 (32 years old), there were a lot of parts that required sanding / trimming of flash before fitting and painting. The Engine cover panel when placed into location is sloppy leaving a gap all around. The option is there to leave this loose to remove and display the Rolls Royce Pegasus engine, but unless you're going to add extra details to enhance it, save yourself the trouble of painting it and secure the engine cover panel. But, you will need to fill the gaps before painting. The cockpit interior is minimal- a very basic tub with a seat, a joy-stick, a pilot and a instrument panel indicated by a decal. It doesn't include side wall details, or console switches and handles. Again, you could enhance the interior with an after-market resin and etched brass kit. The fit of the wings to the fuselage could be set at a slightly shallower angle compared to the actual plane. The reason I say this, is when you assemble all the wheels, including the two wing tip stabilizer wheels, you'll find that the wing tip wheels are off the ground and so the plane will tip to one side and rest on one of them. A simple fix for this, and one that I employed, was to sand around 1/16th of an inch off the bottom of the fuselage wheels which then lowered the plane and the wing tip wheels sat nicely on the ground. When fitting the front cockpit window, the profile of mine was wider than the profile of the fuselage and therefore, it overhung on both sides. I tried to flex the sides in and hold them in place until the glue bond retained the position. But, whilst doing that, stress crazing appeared and so I stopped. When it comes to decaling, these are thicker and glossier than the more recent decals and therefore, if you want them to look painted on, ensure a good coat of gloss varnish followed by 2 good finishing coats. A few of the decals also cracked during application and discovered that they were reacting to the decal application solution. To overcome that, I simply diluted the solution with water. The Air-Intake nozzles are smooth and do not have molded in air flaps that go around the periphery of them. These are features that stand out on a Harrier during its resting position as they drop inwards leaving open windows. Again, this would require either surgery to the existing nozzles to replicate them, or the purchase of after-market resin air intake nozzles. A simpler remedy might be to create a stencil and paint these windows onto the plane? When fitting the Air Intake Nozzles to the fuselage you'll find that their profile doesn't match with the fuselage and require filling and sanding. The plane does come with 3 options of weapons load, I went for four 1,000lb bombs, two on each wing, couple with AIM 9L Sidewinder missiles. The two Aden guns are common to all options. Overall; for the low price, you can't grumble at what you're getting in the kit. I did enjoy building it, despite the nuances, and it does look good when made. My model was built straight from the box with no added extras. Beginner modelers will need patience, but they will be satisfied for being patient. Seasoned modelers will no doubt use the money saved on this low priced kit to purchase the enhancements that are available for it.