Hasegawa Avro Lancaster

The Avro Lancaster is another type that I have built before, but only in its Airfix incarnation from many moons ago. I haven’t completed one of the new-tool Lancs yet.

I remember a conversation with Al Trendle of Minicraft waaaaaay back in the day. They had already produced the B-17, B-24, and B-29, and a few of us were trying to sway him into doing a new tool Lancaster. He rather scoffed at the idea, with the rather forceful argument that “it would never earn us back the money it cost”. Well, nowadays we have new-tool Lancs from Hasegawa, Airfix, and Revell, so apparently someone thought it would make them a profit in the meantime. Still nothing from Minicraft, though.

This particular one is the Hasegawa kit. As you would expect, it went together wonderfully. It borders on being over-engineered, but that is the Hasegawa way. Still a million miles better than the rivet-laden ancient Airfix kit that is already on the display shelf.

The markings are from Tiger Force, the group that the RAF put together to finish up the Japanese War in 1945. But before everything was ready to go, the two bombs dropped and plans changed. They took up positions in other parts of the Pacific, but didn’t really ever appear as a unified force. The decals come from a nice Xtradecal sheet, Postwar Lancasters X72256. I’ve always had good luck with Xtradecals (they are good at producing 1:72 markings) and this time was no exception.

The most difficult part was the masking and painting. It seemed that no matter what I did, there was some overspray or leakage that needed repair. The model thus spent more than its share of time on the Shelf of Shame. But it is particularly satisfying to rescue a model from that shelf. There were definitely issues with canopy masking, self-inflicted. Much of that may have come from the respraying to repair some of the large (non-canopy) masking issues. The paint was a little thick which caused some definition issues. This is one of those models with a long gestation period, and might not have ever been seen in public except for the core philosophy of this blog (that everything completed gets photographed and displayed). Still, I’m glad that I finally could get this one into the display case and out of the “pending” area.

This is completed aircraft #513 (11 aircraft, 1 ordnance, 2 vehicles for the year 2019), finished in March of 2019.