The current version is in a hard plastic, and goes together surprisingly well... Oh who am I kidding? It's a pretty rough old kit from the stone age that needs an awful lot of tlc. There is ample flash to remove and rough edges to clean up. The propulsion ducts on the sides need a lot of awkward filling, filing and trimming to get them tidy, plus the open ends need thinning. Most locator holes need opening up more to get parts to fit, and weirdly one of the seat ones was missing altogether. The cockpit superstructure parts don't fit properly, the grotesque malformed pilot figures went straight in the bin, etc. etc. I don't usually paint much as I'm going along, but in this case it seemed sensible to get the main parts painted up before full assembly. It turned out my silver paint had almost run out so I used gunmetal for the main body then drybrushed the remaining silver over it. Also knocked up a fake dashboard, then later found a clear shot of the real thing on a YouTube video - if anyone wants to seriously detail this kit Youtube is definitely the place to look!
The decals are mercifully quite strong, and much better than the original set. The serial numbers on the ribbed and curved body below the propulsion ducts are the hardest to apply, and I cut them into small sections to get them on. Some of the chequered vane decals didn't play nice going on to bare plastic so I had to paint half of them instead. A wheel got knocked off and lost while I was doing the decals so I had to scratch up a replacement - I'd recommend putting them on after everything else is done.
This was a really enjoyable old style build. Wish I'd found all the video footage of the real thing sooner as I'm sure the kit would be greatly enhanced detailed up properly. I chose a darker than recommended blue for the painting to match some colour film footage.
