Westland Lysander Aircraft

Found this in my local store and gave me a bargain price, from a recovered collection I was told. It was the original 1967 HAWK company that later became a few other companies including Lindberg. Be careful as I totally put the wings on backward when disturbed during the build, As long as no one knows about this bird then I am fine with people not knowing as it still turned out okay. An old kit but fits together very well for such an old kit. I will add pictures of the completed build.

The Lysander was by far a true war horse that carried men supplies during World War Two. This kit is the rendition that fills a large gap in history and is a very easily built kit. I started out by thoroughly reading the exploded drawing instruction sheet which was typical for the era of the kit's age. I decided to build sub-assemblies to ease painting the parts later and piecing them together with better results. That is a good practice with this kit. I had no fit issues and there was little flash of leftover plastic which was nice. As old as the plastic seemed it doesn't take well to CA or Super Glue and after trying a few parts using HobbyLinc brand CA I was successful by clamping parts together such as the wing halves, and fuselage but beyond those parts there were no more gluing issues. I found that painting the entire model with a light greenish-grey primer of acrylic paint was the best way to go and through research found photos of actual aircraft had been restored showing a light green for the underside of the wings, so I painted them accordingly. I painted the fuselage in a similar paint pattern as the box cover shows and added different decals as the markings followed an actual aircraft pattern. This would make a good beginner kit with minimal supervision and loaded with fun parts to detail if one chooses. I highly recommend this kit to anyone with a little experience with aircraft models.

this is a very simple kit to build. Only around 40 parts. It is a quick build, once build you will be surprised about the size of this model. The decals are a minimum, but there is a dash board and the co-pilot even has a map that shows a river on the flight plan. If you take the time to detail the painting you can make a very nice model of this kit. Some parts are even not showed on the build plan, there is a spare fuel tank, just you must figure it out yourself were it goes. If you want a more detail build you would need to spend more. But all in all I was happy with this build. Very good kit for a starter builder.