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HELLER 1:72 ARADO AR 196 |
Reviewer:
Kevin Ronayne (kevin.ronayne@nuigalway.ie)
Kit Review submitted:
28 April 2004
Humbrol-Heller artwork dating from the mid-1980's. This is the kit that I am reviewing, and I bought it in 1992 for the princely sum of IR £2 - about STG £2!
Date: 26th April, 2004
The Arado 196 was designed to meet a 1936 requirement for a catapult-launched spotter aircraft for use on Kreigsmarine ships. Its only competition was the Focke-Wulf Fw 62, but this was eliminated from the competition at the prototype testing stage. The prototype Ar 196's were tested in two main configurations - the 'A' model with twin floats, and the 'B' with a single central float and outboard stabilising floats. There was little to choose between the configurations, but the first layout was eventually selected. The Ar 196 was developed from the pre-production A-0 model to the final A-5 variant. Figures for the total production vary, but the total exceeded 540 aircraft. As well as being produced by Arado in Germany, the Ar 196 was also built by S.N.C.A. in France and by Fokker in the Netherlands. The last aircraft were produced as late as August 1944, which gives some indication of how important the Ar 196 was.
The full armament consisted of a single MG 17 7.92mm machine gun on the starboard side of the fuselage, and a pair of wing-mounted 20mm MG FF cannon. The cannon only had 60 rounds per gun. Defensive armament consisted of a single rear-mounted 7.92mm MG 15, which was replaced in the A-5 version by a twin MG 81Z unit. In service, the Arado 196 was most commonly used in the coastal patrol role. It proved to be a very popular aircraft amongst the aircrew who used it. Small numbers of Ar 196's were supplied to Romania and Bulgaria.
This colour photograph clearly shows the light-coloured panel just ahead of the white fuselage band. It also shows that the float tips (as well as the spinner tip) are painted red, at least on this aircraft. The rear canopy wind deflector panels and the rear gun appeared to have been removed, probably for maintenance. This aircraft appears to be from the same unit as the German subject in this kit, and features the same mix of theatre colours - white and yellow. I have a plate of this very aircraft (7R+BK), and it is painted in a single shade of green. This looks also to be the case here, although there were plenty of Ar 196's painted in the same type of 'splinter' camouflage depicted by the kit. Finally, note the position and size of the Swastika.
A couple of years ago, Mark Braithy mentioned to me in an email that he thought (or had been led to believe) that the Airfix Arado 196 kit was one of the best Airfix kits. I responded by saying that I wasn't so sure about the Airfix kit, and that I thought the Heller kit was definitely better - I built both kits in the early 1980's. There the matter rested for a couple of years, until the Airfix kit was reviewed here on SMAKR by Steve Papworth. Mark repeated his comments about the kit when announcing the review, and he reported that the response was, shall we say, less than civil. Ideally, I would have built both kits for a comparative review, but neither is readily available. The Heller kit I built came from the vaults - that is to say, my family attic.
Box art from the Encore reboxing of this kit. Revell have also reboxed this kit, but, at the time of writing, the kit is not readily available from anyone. However, there are signs that much of the Heller back catalogue may be reissued in the foreseeable future.
The kit was very well packaged, with four main sprues (in light grey) and one transparency sprue all sealed in a plastic bag. The transparency sprue was further protected inside it's own sealed plastic bag. Surface detailing is a mix of simple raised lines and a nice 'ribbed' effect on the fuselage. There was no flash, but some mold seam on the float struts. There was also a very rough finish on the outer panels of the one-piece lower wing. I don't think that this is a tooling problem with the kit generally, but was probably due to a production problem with one batch of kits - I have seen similar problems with other Heller kits. There are 41 grey and 3 transparent parts in the kit. Compared to the Airfix kit, there are no crew figures supplied (which is normal for Heller), no under wing bombs, and no moving control surfaces. Despite being in storage for many years, there was no evidence of warping.
Two subject options were supplied with the kit:
Over the years, the paint codes supplied in Heller kits have gone from pure Heller paint references, to Heller and Humbrol references, to pure Humbrol codes. The kit that I built had both sets of codes, but if the kit were available now, the Humbrol codes would be unchanged and the Heller codes deleted. The decal sheet was decidedly minimalist - remember that this kit is probably from the mid-1970's.
This is the instruction leaflet from the Heller-Humbrol kit that I built - an A4 sheet with the paint and decal guide on the reverse side. Heller has never seen any need to weigh down the modeller with an inordinate number of construction steps, at least in diagrammatic form. This kit is so simple that all you need is this guide and some common sense to know in what order the parts should be assembled. Actually, the previous style of instructions used by Heller was quite different, with just a single construction diagram and a set of written instructions explaining the construction sequence in detail.
Starting with the cockpit, there is a forward cockpit floor onto which the pilot's bucket seat, main control stick and foot pedals are attached - the distance between the seat and the pedals looks to be slightly too long to me. I attached cockpit floor unit to the port fuselage half first, as dry-fitting showed a slight gap in the starboard side fit. The remaining cockpit parts consist of the suspended observer's seat, various instrument panels and a forward gun sight, and the rear gun mount and twin machine gun. All the references that I have seen say that the MG81Z (Zwilling = twin) installation was only used in the final A-5 production variant. Yet, although both this and the Airfix kit include the MG81Z unit, both refer to their kits as being A-3 variants. I will return to this issue later. The rear seat was actually a sliding seat, and I suspect that the gun mount could also be moved backwards or forwards. As it stands in the kit, the twin machine gun would be too close to the observer - I could have shortened part of the mount.
Most of the cockpit interior was painted Humbrol 92, which is a match for RLM 66 Schwartzgrau. This is correct for any mid-war Luftwaffe subject. After assembling the fuselage halves, I added the transparent parts: windscreen, forward canopy and rear canopy. The rear canopy is slightly narrower than the forward canopy, which is correct as the forward section would have slid backwards. The transparencies are quite clear and distortion free, aided by the fact that they consist of flat panels. All of the framing detail was hand painted (both Hu 92 undercoat and camouflage topcoat) before attaching these parts. There is a rectangular cut-out on the underside of the fuselage beneath base of fin, which probably had something to do with the shipboard catapult. It is possible that not all aircraft had this, as the later aircraft were never likely to be launched from a ship anyway. All Ar 196's appear to have been fitted with the tie-down lug, which in this kit is molded onto the port side of the fuselage.
Box art from the early 1980's. This was one of the very first Heller kits that I bought, and it was (for me) a huge advance over the Airfix and Matchbox kits that I had been building up to that point. In this illustration, the entire outer surface of the main struts is painted green, which is at variance with the painting guide. The tips of the floats are painted a dark colour - they could be painted red to match the spinner, but the kit instructions say nothing at all. The illustration also shows the small exhausts behind the base of the cowling. These are missing from the kit.
For a kit with a single-piece lower wing, I normally attach the upper wings first before mating this unit with the fuselage, and this was no exception. I spent no more than two or three minutes sanding down the rough surface on the underside wingtips - as I said already, this fault will probably be found in some examples of this kit. After adding the one-piece tail plane/elevator unit, I moved onto the underside of the aircraft. The float and strut assembly has the exact same parts breakdown as in the Airfix kit - upper and lower float sections and separate rudders, front and back main strut units, and port and starboard inverted 'V' support struts. This kit is a bit better engineered in the way in which the 'V' struts attach to the floats, and the detail at the apex of the struts is also properly reproduced. The order of assembly is a no-brainer: first, assemble the floats - note that the starboard float is 'keyed' to ensure that you can't mix up the two floats. Having removed the mold seam from the strut part, you then attach the two main units to the fuselage. Add the floats, and then the 'V' struts. Everything should snap into position, giving a very sturdy assembly even before the cement sets.
Side box art from the old version of this kit. The kit doesn't include the bombs shown in this illustration, but spare SC 50 bombs are quite easy to find. Bombs were probably mounted with the fins set flat ('+' rather than 'X'). In the kit, the bomb pylons are molded onto the underside wing, and include tiny bomb crutches!
After this came the four horn balances, the starboard under wing pitot tube, and the aerial mounted on top of the windscreen. This is offset to the starboard side, and photos and illustrations also show that it should be canted outwards.
Lastly, we come to the engine assembly. On paper, this part of the kit is exceptionally well designed. The engine block (#14) is cemented to the front of the fuselage. The five-part propeller/front engine assembly can be built as a standalone unit and attached later. Two of the 18 tubes on #25 were missing on my kit - they were probably lost during packing, so I made up replacements. I left this assembly off until I had put added the cowling halves, because dry-fitting had shown up a couple of minor but irritating problems. The engine block has three positional pins - on top, and one on each side more than halfway down. The first problem is that the pins are too long, and I had to trim them slightly. Then, I found that I had to cut away a small part of the underside of each cowling half, as the oil cooler intake just behind the cowling would otherwise have prevented the cowling from being attached at the correct angle. Even with these adjustments, I still ended up using superglue to attach one cowling half to the engine. When that had set in the right position, I attached the other half to it rather than to the engine. Finally, I manouvered the propeller/front engine assembly into place. The cowling opening isn't quite wide enough at first glance, so I just turned the unit slightly to get it through the gap. Heller instructions rarely give any guidance on what colour the inside of the cowling should be, but I painted it Hu 31 - RLM 02 grey-green.
Once the kit was completely built, I applied very small amounts of filler. The main problem area was the strut/float junction, with the fuselage/float junction also requiring a bit of attention. I also used some filler on the upper wing root and tail plane/fuselage junction, but the gaps here were hardly noticeable anyway. All plates and photographs show some cross-bracing between the front and rear main struts, but this is not mentioned at all in the kit. The time to add this detail would have been after the main strut units were attached to the fuselage, but before the floats were added. The only feature really missing from the kit was beaching gear, which usually only supplied in kits of larger aircraft.
For a standard RLM 70/RLM 71 'splinter' camouflage, the Humbrol colours would be 91/30. For some strange reason, the scheme was specified as 75/30 for German subject in this kit. Hu 75 would be the right shade of dark green if I were building, say, a Churchill tank. For this kit, Hu 91 is the correct colour and that goes for the propeller blades as well as the camouflage. The undersides were painted (and given) as Hu 65 light blue - aka RLM 65 Hellblau. The underside of the cowling and the outer wing panels were painted Hu 154, which is reputed to be a 'correct' match for RLM 04 Gelb. The instructions specified Hu 24 (plain yellow), but that is typical for older kit instructions. The demarcation line for the yellow under wing panels seems to have been at about the midpoint of the ailerons. I chose the inner edge of one of the inset panels in the lower wing as my demarcation line. The white fuselage band had to be hand painted - it's about 6.5mm wide, and positioned just behind the rectangular panel on the upper rear fuselage. Some photographs and plates show this panel as being a very light colour, so I painted it Hu 121 pale stone. The tip of the spinner was painted matt red, and the tips of the floats should also have probably been painted red.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
I have a couple of observations on the paint scheme. The first is about the float struts. It seems that most of the struts were painted RLM 65, but some parts of the 4 main struts may have been painted RLM 70 and/or RLM 71. According to the paint guide, the lower sections of the struts were painted whatever camouflage colour was at the base of the strut. Even then, the inward-facing side of the struts may still have been painted RLM 65. Other photos and plates seem to show the rear main struts painted RLM 65, and the forward main struts (or at least the outer surfaces) being completely painted a shade of green. On a wider point, it is possible that at least some Ar 196's might have been painted in the RLM 72/RLM 73 'seaplane' scheme - but that would be opening up the proverbial can of worms.
What to say about the decals? The Romanian decals are next to useless, but the Luftwaffe decals are OK, being only very slightly out of register and excellent in all other respects. I had to break off the pitot attachment before placing the lower starboard cross, and cement it back afterwards. There are no swastikas, so I used some from sheets produced by Fantasy Printshop - black with a solid white outline in this case. Note that the swastikas were positioned on the rudder, and not on the fin. The badge design and colours are, I think, basically correct.
Basic accuracy appears to be first-class. It's not just the dimensions, but the wing dihedral, wing planform and fuselage profile are also very accurate. The floats are correctly tilted down a couple of degrees - or the fuselage tilted up, depending on which way you look at it. The wing panelling is more extensive than on the Airfix kit. I have a large two-page plate that shows no wing panelling at all, but I suspect this is wrong.
This is a very rare shot of a formation of Ar 196's. This photograph clearly shows that the tips of the floats were painted a different colour to the rest of the floats. Notice the narrow apex of the inverted 'V' strut, and the darker colour. The kit captures the detail very well, but I don't know what the dark colour should be. On the nearest aircraft, the side and upper rear canopy wind deflector panels are opened slightly. Airfix included this option in its excellent Hs 126 kit, but neither the Airfix or Heller Ar 196 kits include this option. The small exhaust stub behind the cowling (on both sides) is also missing from both kits. The bump underneath the tail of each float is included in this kit, but not in the Airfix kit.
There is still the question mark over the rear gun armament, and how an A-3 could be carrying the twin gun mount that was only used on the A-5. If the German subject was from 1943 and not 1942, then it might well have been an A-5 and everything would be OK. However, the Romanians only used the A-3 variant with its single rear gun.
This is the excellent kit that I remembered from many years ago, with only a few minor faults. On the 'Heller scale', it deserves 9 out of 10, or even 9.5. It is definitely better than the Airfix kit, as it is better engineered, and has better cockpit and engine detail. The canopy parts are also much better in my opinion. The main shortcoming is the lack of extensive cockpit detail, but that would be normal for a kit this old. Again, the Airfix Hs 126 kit from the mid 1970's had amazing cockpit detail, but that kit was the exception rather than the rule. Both Aires and Eduard have produced etched detail sets for this kit, which is probably a good indication that this is generally considered to be the better Ar 196 kit. Some catalogues refer to these sets as being for the Revell kit, but that is this kit. Here's hoping that Heller get around to reissuing this kit soon.
© Kevin Ronayne 2005
The Ar 196 is hardly the most famous aircraft around, and I leaned on my two standard Luftwaffe reference works:
There were a few pages on the Web, but these added little to what was in these works. The images came from Rod's WarBirds, which is attached to the WarBird Pictures site.
© Person 2004
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