The Flying Triangle

There are some 'musts' when building scale model aircraft. Building a Spitfire is pretty much mandatory. Hawker Hurricanes, Mustangs, Bf 109s, Lancasters - all this iconic stuff really does belong in this list of planes you should build at least once. If you build models for a living you may well end up building them quite a lot.

One candidate stands out in my personal hit list. The Avro Vulcan.

There is only one mainstream kit where the Vulcan is concerned and that is the old 1980s vintage Airfix offering. 'Vintage' is another way of saying 'old and probably past it's best'. This has been a bit of a pig to build, fill, sand, fill a bit more, sand, fill even more....and so on.

However, once you get past the assembly stage you are left with this - a substantial lump of plastic.

It only gets better from this point onward. Adding a few coats of paint really does bring it to life - first the uniform Dark Sea Grey and then the Dark Green over the top. A few clear coats and some decals later..... one Vulcan B2.


Note that the actual camouflage is 'hard-edged' and not soft-edged as shown here. This is a result of me free-hand painting the Green camouflage patterns without the use of masks - by tidying up the edges with a narrow spray pattern the aim is to give a hard/soft-edge (if that makes any sense).

So there we go - one of the Aviation 'Must-Builds' successfully built. If Airfix were to release a new-tool Vulcan (similar to their Victor and Valiant) I would go out and snap one up like a shot. Until then, this old-school tool still scrubs up well!