Scaled Small: Heller 1/72 Nieuport-Delage NiD 622

Heller kit 80224

Purchased: eBay, cheap
Completed: 11 July 2007

Nation: France
Era: 1920-1929
Justification: With over 600 built, the Nieuport-Delage NiD 42 family was the definitive French fighter of the age. They were elegant and way ahead of their time.

The kit

There was a time in the 80s when Heller seems to have been making some of the best kits on the planet, and this is one of them! So much so that I'm vaguely worried about how dull a review this may be.

I started this kit after having ruined the first Bristol Bulldog I started and while waiting for its replacement to arrive. Parts breakdown was utterly conventional, with the nice feature of replicating the real aircraft's construction in having the mainplane struts pass through the lower wings to form an attachment point for the undercarriage. My example was entirely flash free and moulded in high-quality grey styrene. The only flaws I could pick would be the overly simplified cockpit (with the usual disclaimer of "Who's going to see it anyway?") applying, and the fact that each of the undercarriage-mounted radiator units had a big ejector-pin mark right in the middle of them.

I bought this kit second-hand on eBay and had idiotically forgotten to read the fine print that said that the kit was being sold sans decals until after sniping it. This caused me some consternation until I discovered a complete set of Propagteam decals in my stash that accompanied the Smer release of this kit in the 90s. What happened to that kit itself I couldn't tell you - presumably it's still buried forgotten deep within the stash somewhere... So while I can't say anything about the Heller decals (one French Army, one French Navy aircraft), the Propagteam decals (same French Army example with crowing rooster squadron insignia and different French Navy example) were, as expected, beautifully printed and very, very thin.

The build

Construction

Assembly was a breeze - with the thing basically falling into place. Fit was splendid, construction easy and logical, and the whole exercise pretty much as unremarkable as one would hope for - no tricky spots, no gotchas, and no traps to warn the builders to come after me about!

Painting

Since I was still licking my wounds after melting that Bristol Bulldog, I treated myself to a rattlecan for painting this one too, in this case, Tamiya . With a basically solid colour scheme, this took a total of around ten minutes; and no melting involved.

Decals

Decals were every bit the high quality that they seemed to be on the sheet and went on without any fuss. If anything, the white decals that made up the large under-wing ID numbers and the stripy bands on the horizontal stabiliser weren't as opaque as I would have liked. I predicted this, and had considered painting the bands on the tail, but realised this was pretty pointless unless I also undertook to paint on the numbers too, and that was a job that I very definitely did not feel up to. In this respect, I'm pretty sure that the Heller decals would have been thicker and more opaque.

Conclusions

Well, there's not much more to say; the kit was great, Tamiya spray paints are great, and the whole exercise was a real pleasure. The finished model captures the elegant, Art-Deco-like lines of the original very well, and makes the Bristol Bulldog next to it on the shelf look very much like a relic from a bygone age even though these types were exactly contemporary. A real gem!