The kit I bought is the Novo boxing although I believe it was also produced by Frog two U.K. based companies but one of the sprues has "made in USSR" moulded into it so who else distributed it is anyone's guess. The kit is typical of it's era and price range ,that is to say poor ,you have to really want one of these in your collection or it's probably not worth bothering . Anyhow I did want one so I picked it up at a club day for a fiver, and as soon as the much better Horsa was finished I cracked straight on, these two builds actually overlapped a wee bit as I did the cockpit interiors and pilot figures at the same time .The plastic was very hard ,almost like resin , some parts didn't respond to the usual cement and had to be superglued together, I suspect if I were to drop it it would fall apart ! .Parts fit was generaly good except for the canopy and tail wings which didn't seem to want to play ball in fact one wing snapped off as I removed the masking tape and forced me to clean up the damaged edge and drill and pin to get it back on then redo the paint around the join, the canopy was fun also as it leans over slightly to port ,I improved this unusual defect by removing some plastic from the starboard side but could only go so far without removing the moulded framework ,you can only really see it if you look at it head on and even then it's only slightly off plumb. Generally it is an easy kit to build but the painting is much more complex. There is a full two man canopy and 13 tiny porthole windows to mask off and then typical of the era dark earth/ dark green camo above black and yellow chevrons to the underside. The decals in the box looked to be printed nicely but were extremely dry and fell apart on contact with water as I suspected they might but no problem as I could match everything from my spares box the final result being sealed in with another coat of Future and then finished in Testors matt varnish from a rattle can.
As always I didn't do a step by step set of pictures as I don't have the time or patience.
A little history of the aircraft now. The Hotspur, first flown in 1940 was a wooden construction assault glider able to glide for 100 miles after being released at 20,000 feet carrying 7 troops and a pilot however it proved too small and never really achieved its intended potential and was soon relegated to the trainer role with a 2 man cockpit ,the crew sitting in tandem.
The only pictures I have are of the finished aircraft so I will wait until the grand reveal to display it.
Cheers ,Neil.
1 attached image. Click to enlarge.
