Toko Hansa Brandenburg Kit 1999 '

The arrival of Toko's 1:72 Hansa Brandenburg from Hannants in March '99 gave me the opportunity to add a very distinctive model to the collection.

Toko's kit comes with (what to me look highly dubious) sworl decals for the top wing surfaces, and a rather coarse set of woodgrain decals for the fuselage.

As for the construction - well there are a number of points you might like to be aware of if you want to build this one:

Built OOB !

Step 1 is the undercarriage! - forget this until much later.

Step 3 is a rather nice engine top -not required in this version, one for the spares box.

There is a lack of clarity as to the location of the interior bits and pieces, take care particularly with the dashboard - part 1A - I got mine too far forward and it interfered with the fit of the fuselage halves.

Part 24B, the engine cowl was too small on my example, leaving a 2mm gap at one end. It might be better to fabricate a part from styrene sheet. Leave the exhaust (15A) off till later if you're as ham - fisted as me.

After cleaning up the wings, everything was primed and painted (aluminium for the fuselage and linen elsewhere) and the wood decals applied, then trimmed with a sharp blade around the engine panels. The wood decals went on surprisingly easily, but are quite thin, so won't stand much repositioning. Unfortunate then, that Toko don't give us any decal for the fuselage underside! This had to be replicated with Dulux Woodgrain (Mahogany.)

Part 6A has no locating point, and wasn't visible on any of my photographs of the full size 'plane. I left it off.

The dubious - looking sworl decals went on the wings just as easily as the fuselage decals, and the crosses and serials were added with no fuss and sealed in with Johnson's floor polish.

Now for the star-struts: A jig made of polystrene foam was made up to hold the wings in their correct relative positions. and the longer X-shaped stuts (29B) were fitted first from the outside of the lower wings to the centre. They DON'T FIT !

In fact all of the struts turned out to be 2 to 4 mm too short. In the end I had to replace the V-shaped struts with Aeroclub 'Strutz' material. The tailplane struts are shown on the kit drawings, but they are not included in the parts provided. I didn't get around to fitting these, as my patience wore very thin with trying to get the struts to fit accurately.

In the end I got my Star-Strutter, and looking at it now, it's not too bad. I just wish someone at Toko would buy a decent set of vernier calipers, and do a bit more research on those decals !