1/72 Azur Stampe Vertongen SV-4b

Gallery Article by JC Depiesse on June 12 2020

 

      

Some words of history. The Stampe Vertongen SV-4 is a belgian production airplane. In the late 40's the Belgian government acquired, in 4 different batches, 65 of these machines for initial pilot training. The first three batches were initially delivered in an aluminium color with yellow training bands around wings and fuselage, the last 8 adopting the overall orange color so familiar to this plane. Ultimately all of them were re painted orange. The very last machines were used by the Belgian Air Force as glider tugs until 1975. A very last one flew until March 1978 for airshow presentations. Many of them survive to this day with most of them still in flying condition.

The kit now : This is the beautiful model from Azur Ffrom in 1/72nd scale. That's a short run kit that builds up very nicely with some attention.

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I built this kit during a 24h challenge. Objective is to complete the model in less than 24h work in total. It took me 2 weeks to build and I managed to finish it in about 23h30. As it's a biplane, most of the work was done in the wings assembly and rigging plus the control cables running along the fuselage. Dashboard panels were detailed with Mike Grant instruments.

I need to say this kit is so tiny I had to think about each and every build step before proceeding forward. What needed paint before assembly and what could be glued before painting.  I took a few pics of it sitting with a Tiger moth I completed previously. You can see the SV-4 is even smaller than the british plane. But ultimately I'm quite happy with the result and proud to have added this belgian bird in my display case.

JC Depiesse

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Photos and text © by JC Depiesse