Short Sunderland (The Seven Crystal Balls)

The Seven Crystal Balls (French: Les Sept Boules de Cristal) is the thirteenth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The story was serialised daily in Le Soir, Belgium’s leading francophone newspaper, from December 1943 amidst the German occupation of Belgium during World War II. The story was cancelled abruptly following the Allied liberation in September 1944, when Hergé was blacklisted after being accused of collaborating with the occupying Germans. After he was cleared two years later, the story and its follow-up Prisoners of the Sun were then serialised weekly in the new Tintin magazine from September 1946 to April 1948. The story revolves around the investigations of a young reporter Tintin and his friend Captain Haddock into the abduction of their friend Professor Calculus and its connection to a mysterious illness which has afflicted the members of an archaeological expedition to Peru.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

THE FINISHED MODEL:

THE VIDEO:

THE STORY:

Strangely enough, I don’t really have all that much to say about The Seven Crystal Balls.

As Tintin albums go, it’s a bit middle-of-the-road for me. I enjoy the adventure. A mummy, a curse, a mystery… all sound good, but there’s not much else in it as far as a real hook for me. I don’t love it, but I certainly don’t hate it.

The same can more or less be said about where this ranks overall in terms of my Tintin project. However, one thing I do love is flying boats. So, if The Seven Crystal Balls gives me the excuse I need to build a Short Sunderland, then that’s good enough in my book.

I’d actually been looking for a kit for this project for a long time, but for whatever reason Short Sunderland kits don’t seem to grow on trees – or at least not at the price point I wanted to buy them at on eBay. Luckily, however, one of them seemed to randomly show up on the shelf of my local hobby shop – and at a price I could live with.

Maybe it was just the thrill of finally succeeding in the hunt… or maybe it was the prospect of building a flying boat… but whatever the reason, I just couldn’t resist having this box pass directly off the store shelf and onto my workbench. It didn’t even spend a minute in the stash.

THE BUILD:

First off, this is a fairly large sized airplane. Even in 1/72 scale, it’s got some heft to it. So I knew pretty early on that I wanted to display it actually sitting in the water, rather than balancing precariously on a clear plastic straw.

I also knew that I wanted to have all the motors working. Much like the Air India L-749 Constellation from Tintin in Tibet, when this baby is spinning props, it pushes a lot of air.

Given how small the windows are, I basically decided to go light on the interior details. I did a bit of work on the cockpit area, but for the fuselage itself I was satisfied to just paint the interior black and leave it at that. All in all, that seemed like a wise decision. Those little round windows are small, and basically shaped like the bottom of Coca-Cola bottles… you can’t see a thing through them.

With a kit this age, one of the biggest issues was (no surprise) the fit. Definitely left something to be desired, so there was a fair amount of putty/sanding that needed to be done. Because the airplane in The Seven Crystal Balls is a civilian transport, I certainly did not need any of the armament provided. However, I also didn’t need the gun turrets. Mainly that just meant leaving the vaguely machine-gun shaped bits of plastic that came with the kit alone, but the large turret mid-way down the spine of the fuselage was tough to get rid of. In the end, I decided that the easiest (and probably the most likely scenario) was just to create a square patch over the hole. It might not be perfect, but there was no real way to insert a new piece amidst all those rivets.

Like most of my yellow Tintin projects, I decided to go with the Tamiya X-17 Pink base coat. It makes the XF-3 top coat so much easier to go on. It covers well and usually one coat of yellow is enough and you’re left with a nice rich, slightly orangey hue.

The other nice thing was that since the wings were so big, the wiring for those massive props could be done at the end. That way I didn’t have a lot of wires hanging down during the painting process. I just had to feed the wires through the wings, and then down through the fuselage by accessing them through the bomb bay doors on the side.

I do kind of regret basically adhering the model to the base by setting it in the silicone water before I did the bit of rigging on the side floats. That made things a bit more awkward than they needed to be, and I ended up snapping one of the float supports in the process. But a dab of carefully place glue fixed it up nicely. Unfortunately the dab of glue that was not carefully placed did chew a hole in the paint on the upper side of the wing. However, I resisted the urge to touch it and after the glue dried, it was really only a matter of touching up the pink and then yellow in one spot. Not ideal, but could have been much worse.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the result, but feel free to tell me what you think.

THE TAMIYA PAINT :

• XF-1 (Black) – Propellor blades
• XF-3 (Yellow) – Main Fuselage
• XF-16 (Aluminium) – Fuselage underside
• XF-19 (Sky Grey) – Engine cowlings
• XF-56 (Metallic Grey) – Engines