by Holger Veit
1/144 BHC SRN-4 Hovercraft 'Swift' (Hoverlloyd) (Airfix)
The pictures show my attempt on the famous SRN-4 hovercraft kit from Airfix. I've done the 'Swift' which shuttled between Ramsgate and Calais for Hoverlloyd in the seventies. The model, despite its age, is finely detailed, in some places very fine indeed - the propeller pylons for instance. Second highlight is the possibility to build the model with a transparent roof, so that the interior shows through. However there are also some downsides, the biggest one of them the transparencies: Some of them sport a lot of air bubbles, so that they are virtually unusable. I've replaced those with overhead foil, which gives much better see-through. There are also a lot of sink marks and some nasty positioned ejector pin marks that need attention. The overall fit of the kit isn't that good also - I think this is mostly due to the age of the moulds, which makes it into an advanced build. Particularly challenging is the roof-to-sidewall fit, espacially because of the big transparent roof section and lot of adjacent cabin windows. Because I wanted to display the model with open front and back doors, which wasn't intended by the kit, I had to scratch-build the inner bow section or otherwise it would have been possible to look right into the skirt. Because this model turned out to need a lot of filler I started to replace the sanding sessions with fine sandpaper (> 500) by polishing with "Johnson's Stahlfix Classic" instead - this saved a lot of time and is much easier to handle especially on crooked or rounded surface areas. Because "Stahlfix" slowly dissolves enamel paints it can also be used to carefully clean up clear parts.
