Revell’s 1/72 Heinkel He 177A-5 & A-6 by Mark Davies and Steve Lowe

Revell’s 1/72 Heinkel He 177A-5 & A-6
Twice As Ugly When There’s Two Of Them...

by Mark Davies & Steve Lowe

Heinkel He 177A-5 & A-6

Sword's 1/72 Curtiss SO3C Seamew is available online from Squadron

Introduction

It’s a standing joke amongst my group of modelling mates that whenever the He 177 gets mentioned I am compelled to point out what a hideously ugly piece of the proverbial I think it was. Meanwhile, one or two Greif-lovers will leap to its defence and say that they think it’s a great looking plane. They will even go so far as to trot out a whole pile of feeble excuses as to why it would have been a great design; if it had not been for this or that factor, and so on... The argument will go around in circles until someone with neutral views on the HE 177 conveniently recalls our universal appreciation of female anatomy, and changes the subject to something we can all agree on...

One of my modelling mates, Steve Lowe, sits somewhere in the middle of the middle of the Greif love-hate scale. But on the occasions when I rant over the He 177’s looks he cannot resist reminding me of how I talked him into buying the Revell 1/72-scale kit of the said beast. I did so because it’s a good kit; and good value for money too. Besides which, his stash is woefully small, with just 90 unbuilt kits; so I’ll use any excuse to get him to buy more.

Steve was around at my place looking at my much healthier stash of 954 kits, and asked me which I planned to build next. I said that it had crossed my mind to build my Revell He 177 as a joke. In response, Steve suggested a two-man secret group build; his idea being to unveil our finished Greifs at one of our Friday-night gatherings of our modelling mates. So here for gallery display are the results of our two-man group build.

Mine is the He 177A-5 with overall RLM02 blotches over RLM73 and RLM65 under-surfaces. Steve’s is the He 177A-6 with RLM72/73 splinter over RLM65 and white cloud camo over the fuselage sides and under-surfaces. Steve was very quick to point out how much slimmer his camo-scheme made his Heinkel look when compared to mine; which given that I’m a fat-bastard, amused him quite a bit. It’s also something he will be quick to point out at the He 177 unveiling to our mates!

Construction

Taking a slightly more serious stance, I’ll now comment in brief on our builds.

We both boxed in the supercharger intakes that flank each engine nacelle, we both got sick of braking mass-balances off the ailerons, and we both disliked Revell’s matt-finish decals that are rather prone to silvering. I also noticed that several of my decals were proportionally bigger than they are shown on the decal placement guides. This did not help when it came to placing them on the model. I know I’m far from the first to mention it, but Revell’s style of instructions are horrible, and their painting guides even worse. When will they learn from many of their competitors who do a much better job of these?

I foolishly decided to use an Extra-Tech PE detail set I had, despite the kit’s cockpit detail being pretty good as supplied. All this did was make the fit of cockpit parts less than perfect (probably my fault), and waste a lot of my time painting the instrument bezels in various colours and various control levers. I had planned to use Falcon vac-form canopies to make sure this detail l could be seen, but decided after cutting them out to use the thick and rather poor kit clear parts instead. My reason was that I’d had a guts-full of Greif at this point of the build, and was feeling lazy. Keeping the kit parts meant that I could use an Eduard paint mask I had for the cockpit glazing. I then passed the masks on after my use to Steve, who managed to use them as well.

Painting Blotchess

My camo blotches were masked using Blu-Tac (that rubbery-stuff for sticking pictures to walls) after spraying the upper surfaces overall RLM02, whilst Steve’s clouds were done by spraying the white through a paper mask with random shapes cut in it. Both schemes consumed a lot of Tamiya tape for other areas needing conventional masking.

Conclusion

We both got disillusioned at various points in our builds, and both contemplated binning them. Not because the kit is hard to construct, but just because the models weren’t turning out as well as we each had hoped. To be fair, Revell’s He 177 is a good kit with generally good fit and nice detail.

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The decals are a weak point, as is the need to box in the supercharger intakes, whilst some of the clear parts, particularly the nose, are overly thick and a rather rough.

The He 177 may be ugly in my opinion, but I have always thought it looked impressive in model form. Steve and I are both happy with our models from this standpoint. I will even concede that on their own, the wings, engine and undercarriage look kind of OK. But it was still a disaster of an aeroplane, and the fuselage and tail are still pig-ugly!

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