Echelon vacuform kit overview
1/32 scale Hunter Echelon (vacuform kit)
The Echelon kit was issued in the nineteen-eigthies by Frank Brown of the UK. The kit is a vacuform kit , comes with metal parts and extensive decals and allows you to make any Hunter variant. Also an Echelon two-seater vacuform kit was released; here an overview of the single seater kit will be shown.
The Echelon kit comes with many many parts, mostly in vacuform except for the metal details. It comes with various extra parts on exhausts, wing leading edges and stores to create the various variants. The kit is very accurate and it shows the research gone into it through the kit instructions and drawings which are excellent.
The Hunter has imposed kit manufacturers many problems to get the real shape accurate. The fuselages, intakes and wings of various kits (especially a large number of older ones in 1/72 scale) often had errors in shape and size.
But not so for this Echelon 1/32 kit.
Contrary to many other Hunter references, the kit itself, its drawings
and information is perfect.
The Echelon kit is hard to find nowadays and as Revell of Germany issued an injection moulded kit late ninetees, it will not be that popular anyway by the average modeller.
I have a couple of Echelon kits in the stack as my modelling friend Bas gave me one as he would not built it anyway. I will use some of its parts to make a conversion of the Revell kit to create a Hunter mk.4.
The Echelon parts come in numerous
plastic sheets as usual for vacuforms. Here you will see the parts, some
of which have already been separated from the backing sheet.
mostly
fin and wheel weels
wings
inlet and bulkheads
exhaust parts, with or without para pack
You will also see here that the basic
Hunter shape is a streamlined cylinder.
Two airbrake types are provided.
On the far left the earlier airbrake
of the mk1-4 and on the far right the later slightly longer airbrake on
the mk.6 and later marks. Also the hinge fairing is a bit different.
(in the middle you see the corrected
Revell airbrake as used for the mk.4 model).
The canopy and metal parts are shown
here. Metal parts are mostly ejection seat (either 2H or 3H), instrument
panel and landing gear. The canopy has unfortunately become yellow in time
and unusable. Probably I should have covered in by Johnson
Future when I got the kit to prevent light getting through ???
The decals are very extensive. They
may be usefull to study these. The JPEGs are also shown with the backing
decal colour removed. Note: you will not see the white decals anymore on
this sheet)
As the kit is not easily found nowadays,
you will find a scanned decals sheet here in parts:
ECHELON
DECAL SHEET PART WITH LETTERS
ECHELON
DECAL SHEET PART 1 (NO white)
ECHELON
DECAL SHEET PART 2 (NO white)
NOTE: Large files may take a while to download; use in your browser the "save target" option to download.
My modelling friend Henk Hirs made a couple of Echelon kits years ago depicting aircraft of the Royal Netherlands Air force. Some pictures are seen below. They should give you an idea on what can be achieved. The kits look very convincing. Henk, thanks for the pictures!
F6 made by Henk Hirs using the single seater kit
T7 made by
Henk Hirs using the two seater kit
Pictures made by Frits of the IPMS
The Netherlands
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Created this page December 27, 2006