Scaled Small: September 2007

KP kit 72161

Purchased:
Completed: 4 September 2007

Nation: Czechoslovakia
Era: 1920-1929
Justification: Avia produced a number of world-class combat aircraft during the 1920s until overtaken by the rapid changes of the next decade.

The kit

I have quite a soft spot for KP/KoPro kits; in many ways, the poor Czech cousins of the Airfix offerings I remember so nostalgically. While generally nowhere near as nicely moulded, the parts breakdown, surface detail (including generous rivets) and general level of detail invites direct comparison between the two companies' products. Similarly, while Airfix did its patriotic duty in kitting many less celebrated British aircraft, KP produced kits of many important Czech planes that otherwise would not have seen light of day in scale form. The Avia B.21 was one of them.

My example was moulded in an extremely hard, shiny, brittle styrene, this latter characteristic demonstrated by the fact that one part (the cabane struts) arrived shattered into at least four parts. I say "at least" because despite the fact that the sprues arrived in a sealed polybag, I could only find three fragments of this part and there was still more of it missing. Parts breakdown was as expected, with the only remotely unusual feature being the topside of the forward fuselage being supplied as a separate piece, necessitated by the unusual shape of the engine cowling.

Mould quality was what I expected from KP - lots and lots of flash but otherwise not too bad. The instruction sheet was unremarkable but perfectly adequate, and the decals beautifully printed and comprehensive, offering five different aircraft and even a choice of different national markings from different periods.Unfortunately, they would not end up performing as well as they looked.

The build

Construction

Basic assembly was straightforward and presented no real problems until it was time to attach the upper forward fuselage. Predictably, fit here was thoroughly horrid with huge gaps practically everywhere. A lot of filling and sanding ensued, with me getting well and truly sick of it probably a couple of iterations short of a good job.

No prizes then, for guessing that strut attachment was going to be every bit as unpleasant. The key thing to note here is that the pins moulded onto the ends of the struts were simply way too small for the corresponding holes. I felt more comfortable slicing off the pins and basically butt-jointing things together than attempting to enlarge the holes. The other problem was that there was, as far as I could tell, no guidance whatsoever as to where the cabane struts meet the fuselage. More on this later... As I said earlier, the one-piece moulding that makes up all six cabane struts was shattered in my example. I reconstructed it as best I could, using a small piece of stretched sprue to fill in the missing section.

Eventually, everything went together more-or-less OK and I breathed a sigh of relief. I then started to plan the rigging and noticed something strange. There was just no way that the rigging lines could make any sense. As I looked harder at the model, I realised that this was due to the fact that I had actually installed the cabane struts backwards. Given the hassles of the build so far, I was immediately tempted by the "Who's going to know?" solution of leaving things as they were. I might even have done it too, if only I could have worked out how to rig the thing convincingly. In the end, however, the accuracy conscience won out, and I despondently pulled the top wing off the model, of course shattering the cabane struts again in the process.

Well, as with any such ordeal, the second time around is never nearly so bad, and it wasn't long before I was back where I started.

Painting

For the paint scheme, I chose one of the multi-coloured camouflaged options. The very early Czechoslovakian markings added extra interest. Because a few months have now passed since I actually did the painting, I have to admit that I've forgotten exactly what I mixed up. Anyway, this all went quite without incident, and when I finally pulled off the seemingly miles of masking tape, I was very pleased with the result.

Rigging and final assembly

Rigging also went without further hassles now that I had the plane actually assembled the right way, and it was time for the decals.

Decals

And disaster struck again. As soon as the beautiful decals touched water, they shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces. I tried a couple more markings from the sheet with exactly the same result. Without decals and with no reasonable way of replacing these unique markings, the Avia was finally relegated to the shelf sans markings. I'll have to include them on the custom sheet I'll need to get printed one of these days.

Conclusions

Well, this was a really unpleasant build. Admittedly, the worst part of it (breaking the model and having to rebuild it) was all my own fault, but that's pretty cold comfort.

Still, it's the only game in town in this scale, and that always rates highly with me. I guess I'm more usually pleasantly surprised by kits than unpleasantly, but this one left a bad taste.