COMET MINIATURES STINGRAY

A few photos of my Comet Miniatures Stingray.

I bought this kit when it first appeared, maybe in the late eighties or early nineties , and enthusiastically started to build it, but to be honest it turned out to be a very slow job as I’ve only recently finished it.

As it’s a vac- formed styrene kit, it’s not as straight forward as your usual plastic construction kit.  It needs a fair amount of patience and careful work to cut things out and dry fit everything properly. My enthusiasm for it came and went and came back again over time. I would work on shaping parts and then put them away to work on later, but this year I thought, enough is enough, time to get it finished.

Once I was satisfied with the shape of the vac-formed components, everything was glued together. Some parts are metal so naturally different types of glues had to be used. It naturally needed a lot of filling, sanding and priming. Some of the components had faults in the moulding which also needed correcting.

The kit does have a couple of minor drawbacks. The top and bottom hull sections don’t have moulded internal rear ‘ballast intakes’ each side. A more adventurous modeller than me would probably alter things to suit, but I just settled for painted representations rather than possibly ruin things. The other thing, which is actually mentioned in the instructions, is the landing skids must either be fixed in the retracted position or extended, but not both, as with the latter, the model would be tail heavy unless weighted. Also, the forward hydroplanes don’t line up smoothly with the hull.  None of these points are deal breakers of course, as they don’t really spoil much.

The kit comes with a fairly basic cabin interior, which allows for improvement. No scale in mentioned but at 12” long, (13” including the rear hydroplanes) I reckon the kit is in the region of 1/72 scale (approx. 72 to 78 feet long) so it needed a couple of in-scale seated figures at the controls. The clear acetate moulded control cabin had yellowed with age, so some internal detail is consequently obscured, but to be honest I actually quite like the yellow tint on the window screens.

It’s a fairly tricky job painting the model, as apart from the bright yellow centre and cabin surround, everything else is down to your own judgement and how it looks to the eye. There are not many straight lines on Stingray, so spraying the model involves a fair amount of cutting the masking tape by hand.

When it came to selecting paint I was happy to go with similar colours that are used on the Product Enterprise die-cast model, which looks fine to me.

I decided against weathering the model just yet as I wanted to keep its clean ‘showroom’ look for now.

I must add that the model comes with some excellent water slide decals, which even after the passage of time were still usable, although the white strips were a bit fragile.

The last thing added to the model and one of its major plus points is its clear plastic Rate Master which adds so much to its accurate look.

It spite of any drawbacks, I found this a fun and challenging build to do, and I reckon the finished model has turned out to be a fairly reasonable and accurate representation of its TV counterpart, and makes a pretty good static display model.