Airfix 1/72nd Bristol Bloodhound

I've always been fascinated by the British Bloodhound and American Bomarc missiles, and that's not very surprising since they have a lot in common. They were both big ramjet-powered surface-to-air missiles, and they were both plagued by development problems. Bomarc left the US inventory fairly quickly, but the Bloodhound served as Britain's primary home defense missile until it was finally phased out in the 1980s in favor of the Rapier SAM and the Tornado interceptor. Now most surviving Bloodhounds serve as gate guards outside RAF bases and museums.

I happened to be on a business trip in England many years ago and was wandering through Harrod's when I happened to see the old Airfix Bloodhound kit on the shelf. I bought it - how could I not? - and packed it home in my suitcase, and after many years finally got around to building it.

It is an entirely typical Airfix kit with one welcome exception: they left out the heavy fuzz of rivets that they always seem to put on everything else. But by and large, it's classical Airfix. It's simplified and blocky and even a little crude, but it's also easy to build and very inexpensive.

The missile itself is quite simple and builds up very quickly. The fit was pretty good, and the only real improvement I made was inserting pieces of thin brass tubing in the ramjet exhauts, which were oval and ragged. A little white glue filled the gap between the tubing and the stock ramjet exhausts, and after that, it was just a matter of masking and painting. I left the solid-fuel boosters off so I could mask and paint thems separately. Attaching them later reveals that there are no positive alignment features for them. Once again I used my calibrated Mark I eyeball for alignment, and it came out pretty well.

The launcher isn't as nice as the missile. It sports a bit of rivet fuzz and the shapes are heavy and coarse. I couldn't think of a convenient way to fill the gaps so I dabbed white glue into them and elected to ignore them. Still, given a coat of RAF dark green paint, it looks okay. It doesn't draw attention away from the missile, and I guess that's the main thing.

The kit comes with a Land Rover, a Rube Goldberg trailer, and a few figures including a dog. The figures are actually pretty good, and how many 1/72nd scale dogs do you see? I put them in storage pending better uses for them, and slammed the trailer and Land Rover together in finest quick-and-dirty fashion. The Land Rover in particular isn't very good and I didn't feel like putting much time into it. I filled its gaps, sealed the yawning holes in the wheel hubs with tiny disks of plastic, and painted it and the trailer very dark blue to hide as much detail as possible.

But don't get me wrong, I do like the kit very much. The Land Rover is bad, the trailer is fairly bad, and the launcher is fair, but the missile and figures are pretty good.