Tornado GR.1

Panavia Tornado GR.1

Revell, 1/32

After priming, the kit was brush painted with Humbrol Dark Sea Grey then masked off using blue tac sausages. These enabled me to spray the white camo using a can of Halfords White Primer and still achieve a nice feathered edge to the camo. The camo is a bit rough in places, but that’s OK as in real life these Artic schemes are often a bit rustic and not very neat. The kit decals were used throughout, and by and large they are pretty good. The only problems I had with silvering were with some of the smaller stencils, the rest went on lovely with a bit of Klear to bed them down. I did make a mistake with my matt varnish though. On larger kits I like to use Humbrol Matt Varnish from a spray can, something that has always produced good results for me. However, after a couple of coats, my model still had a somewhat satin look to it - perhaps I had a can from a batch that was not quite as Matt as normal? So I made the mistake of applying some more varnish, with the result that parts of the white - especially on the upper fuselage have a slightly yellow tint. DOH!

I had decided early on to have my "Fin" in ferry config. with 1500 lt tanks under the fuselage and 2250 lt "hindenbergers" under the wings. One feature that is very obvious from looking at pictures of Tornados is that they often have tanks in a variety of the colour schemes worn by the plane down the years. I decided it would look good to have one of each. So we have the old skool grey/green, the light grey as worn by drop tanks originally carried on the F.3, desert pink and the modern Camouflage Grey. Humbrols Desert Pink is *far* too dark compared to the colour as used in the Gulf War of 1991 so I used another tip gleaned off the What If? forums. 1st of all I primed the tank in question with Halfords Grey Primer. This represents the original grey colour of the tank. Photos of anything painted Desert Pink shows that the Pink flaked off very quickly to reveal the darker colours underneath. To represent this I daubed blobs of Maskol at strategic points on the tank before brush painting several coats of Tamiya Flesh on. Finally over this I applied a wash of Klear/Tamiya Brown. I probably slightly overdid this wash, but I still think it looks pretty

Finally after 4 months, this kit was done! I was happy that I stuck with it, as I do get very frustrated when I get bogged down in a kit and this one seemed to take forever. Nothing ever goes very quickly with a 1/32 model! The question I like to ask myself when I finish a kit is "would I buy & build another kit of this?"

The answer for this kit is “maybe". It’s not a bad kit, but it does require a bit of work and there are a few pitfalls for the unwary. Certainly I wouldn't recommend it to the beginner, but the intermediate modeller, of which I regard myself as one, will find it a model that requires him to use his skill. I found my skills tested and tried several new things, some worked and some didn't, but I certainly feel that my modelling ability and knowledge have been improved by making this kit. I'm glad I've done this model as it builds into a large and good looking plane, but it's certainly no Tamiya kit - but then again a Tamiya kit of this subject would be at least twice, maybe thrice, the cost of this Revell kit. You certainly can't fault Revell on their value for money.

I would like to do another one, if only to build one that doesn't sit nose up or have a droopy wing, but the fact that it takes such a looooong time to build leaves me doubting I'd go to the effort of doing another. I would stress to anyone contemplating building this kit, *make sure you have plenty of good references*, you'll need them. More detail on my construction of this kit, including in-progress pics can be found on the forums at http://www.whatifmodelers.com/forum//index.php?s=e3345e21394ad86324f97c0e90a61de5&showtopic=2525&st=0

The kit makes a nice addition to my collection of 1/32 planes, all 2 of them!

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Page created December 15, 2004