I build a lot of airliners so when I was offered the opportunity to review this kit in 1/144th scale I decided to take a chance on it. I wasn’t disappointed.

The kit consists of two gray and two clear sprue. There were no major surprises with the construction, the instruction sheet was very well laid out. After building up the five piece cockpit area and trapping it in the fuselage halves, (the only place where putty was needed was where the pylons fitted into the top of the fuselage) I moved on to the wing. After a little sanding of the seams and a quick soap and water wash down, I was ready to paint. To avoid a lot of masking I kept the wing and fuselage separated until the painting and decaling was completed.

Deciding which variant to represent created a small problem. The kit instructions, the box art, and most of the decals represent what I suppose is a civil version in natural metal finish. There were markings on the decal sheet for several naval recon versions as well so that’s what I chose to represent. There were no references on the kit instructions for this so I went to the internet and came up with two good profiles of the Mavis in green paint.

After painting and gloss coating , the decals went down with out any problems. I laid the wing upside down on a kit box and dry fitted the pylons into the locater holes in the wing. Then a little liquid glue into the sockets. Before it has time to set up completely I start fitting the long wing struts to the fuselage and wing . The fit is not perfect but it will suffice. ( I had painted the struts and other small items while still attached to the sprue). I strongly suggest that you use super glue when attaching the small struts between the wing and main struts, there is not a lot of room and you wouldn’t want to mess up the paint when you're  so close to completion.

I painted the framing on the observation blisters and tail gunners position with a fine brush because the windows were too small to get a mask into. I glued these into place and used Micro Kristal Clear for all of the small windows which were to small for me to handle.

If I had to guess I would say it took about 8 to 10 hours of building, painting, decaling and assembling to finish this kit. I was very pleased with this kit and I do look forward to building more from Trumpeter.

This kit was provided to the IPMS Reviewer Corps by Stevens International, (Distributors of Hobby Specialties).

PS. After I had written this review I was going thru my 2005 Squadron catalog and I noticed that they offer this kit and another one that is obviously the naval version, so it appears that there is more of a choice than I had assumed. So which ever you choose, I’m sure you will enjoy it.

(Trumpeter, via Monochrome, has re-issued the Kawanishi 4-engined Flying Boat (H6K5-L) as the civil version operated by Japan Air Lines. - ed.)