BGM-109 Tomahawk

This is a typical 12 Squared kit. It comes packaged in a plastic bag with a paper header. There are 20 parts, crudely cast in soft, lightgrey plastic, with lots of flash and large injection gates. You can just tell from looking at the quality of the castings, that this is not going to be an easy kit to put together. The instruction sheet provides an exploded parts diagram.

There are no part numbers (I have added part numbers to aid identification in this review). All the parts are butt joined, no locating pins are used. No decals are provided.

Separating and sanding the parts is the first task. Once complete, everything needs to be checked for fit. The wing (part1) is designed to slide through two slots in the body (parts 2 & 3). The slots are too small, so they need to be opened up enough to get the wing through.

You have the option of modelling the kit with the air intake open (parts 8 & 9) or closed (part 10). I chose to have it open, so I discarded part 10. You can also add the rocket booster and covers (parts 11,12, 13 & 14) which mount to a small indent at the rear of the body where the jet exhaust is located. Since I wanted the exhaust to be seen, I had no use for these parts and they were discarded.

With the wing slots and the jet exhaust looked after, I glued the body pieces to gether. The parts diagram is non too clear regarding which way to mount the wing, so make sure that the wing has the straight edge as the trailing edge.

In the hope of reducing the amount of work required to finish the seam along the body join, I had pre-sanded the parts on a flat surface, but it was to no avail. I still had the "mother of all seams" along the entire length of the body to contend with. Some copious amounts of scraping, sanding and filling was needed to get it to disappear. The exhaust was drilled out and I inserted a small plastic tube with the inside end blanked off.

The fins (parts 4, 5, 6 & 7) are useless. I threw mine away and replaced them with plastic card.

A maintenance dolly is included. The frame (parts 18, 19 & 20) was terrible and I replaced all the kit parts with some Evergreen T-shaped plastic rod. I separated the casters from the bottom of the original parts (19 & 20) and glued them to the replacement parts.

Painting preparation consisted of multiple coats of light gray primer, with sanding and filling in between coats. Once an acceptable finish was achieved, the kit received a couple of coats of Aeromaster Light Ghost Grey, a coat of Testors Gloss Cote to even the finish and a final coat of Aeromaster acrylic flat. The dolly is finished in Testors Gunship Grey.

Conclusion

This is not an easy kit to build. Because of its small size, it won't take long to finish construction, but the time to do so is significantly large with respect to the size of the subject.

	BGM-109 Tomahawk kit no. 2-2
			Review by Al Magnus - one72guy(at)gmail(dot)com