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Kit Review - Special Hobby 1/48 Grunau Baby IIB "German WWII Glider"

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Brad Cancian:
Special Hobby 1/48 Grunau Baby IIB “German WWII Glider”
Reviewed by Brad Cancian



Item: SH48237
scale: 1/48
Price: 17.19 Euros, direct from Special Hobby

Review kit kindly provided by Special Hobby at https://www.specialhobby.eu/grunau-baby-iib-german-wwii-glider-1-48
The Pilot’s Glider

The Grunau Baby was a single-seat sailplane first built in Germany in 1931, with some 6,000 examples constructed in some 20 countries. It was relatively easy to build from plans, it flew well, and the aircraft was strong enough to handle mild aerobatics and the occasional hard landing. It was named after Grunau, the town where the manufacture's factory was located, now Jeżów Sudecki in Poland. The tips and leading edges of the wings up to the main spar were covered with plywood. The tail unit was built of plywood. The intention was to create an aircraft suitable both for training and for cross-country soaring. Typical for its day, it was a high-wing braced monoplane with a fuselage of hexagonal cross-section and an open cockpit. The Baby was an instant success, and was enthusiastically promoted by gliding champion Wolf Hirth. An extensive redesign was undertaken in 1932 following the fatal crash of an unrelated design, which resulted in the Baby II. This version and the definitive Baby IIb that followed were adopted as standard sailplane trainers for the German Air Sports Association (later the National Socialist Flyers Corps).



Following World War II, series production restarted in Germany in 1956. The Baby was also built in France (as the Nord 1300) and the United Kingdom (as the Elliotts Baby EoN and the Slingsby T5 - Slingsby also used it as the basis for a number of their own designs). Edmund Schneider emigrated to Australia, where he developed the Baby design into his Baby 3 and Baby 4, which had enclosed cockpits.

The Kit

Special Hobby released their first boxing of the Grunau back in 2020, in their SH48203 boxing, covering British, Spanish, and French versions of this machine. This boxing, released in 2023, covers purely German versions of this neat little glider.

In keeping with the simplicity of the Grunau design, thie Special Hobby kit is also quite simple, consisting of one single sprue of medium grey plastic (28 parts), a sprue of clear plastic, and decals.

The grey plastic sprues contains all but one of the parts to construct the kit. The parts are crisply done, with minimal flash, and suitably comprehensive details for the interior, skids, and other bits and pieces.



The fuselage has a smoothly moulded exterior, with no hints of the underlying structure beneath the surface. Mould release pins on the interior parts are unobtrusive and shouldn’t cause too many problems.




The interior is understandably simple, with an integral seat, rudder pedals, a control stick, and other smaller details. No seat belts are provided, so the modeller will need to make these up if so desired.

The flying surfaces are represented with slightly raised lines to represent the underlying rib structure. This may not be to everyone’s taste, but will help provide some visual interest to the exterior.




One may, if they so choose, sand off this detail and utilise some clever painting to represent this detail (there is indeed a masking set available for this kit from Special Hobby, just for this purpose).

Ailerons and rudder are moulded separately, allowing them to be positioned. The Elevator is moulded with the horizontal stabiliser, but the demarcation line is crisp, which will allow the modeller some ability to reposition if so desired.



The clear windscreen part is nicely moulded, and but may require some careful masking.



Instructions

Special Hobby’s Instructions are provided in their modern, high-quality booklet. Presented in 9 glossy pages, construction occurs over 16 steps. The instructions are comprehensive with a parts layout, clear instruction and paint call outs (in Gunze and Mr Colour paints), and full colour four angle painting profiles. The small amount of rigging, where needed, is identified in the instructions. 







Four colour schemes are presented; two German, one Slovenian, and one Croatian.  Each of the schemes is relatively simple yet sufficiently different to provide some good options for the modeller. The schemes are:

•   Grunau Baby IIB, LH+HX, NSFK Rossitten, East Prussia, Germany, 1944
•   Grunau Baby IIB,OK-300, Central Glider Pilot Flying School, Stranik, Slovak State, 1941-1943
•   Grunau Baby IIB, Croation Air Force, 1942
•   Grunau Baby IIB, D-7-342, NSFK Gruppe 7, Dresden, Germany. The forward fuselage wore the logo of the aircraft sponsor, the Mannesmann Werke AG group.









Decals

The decals, like all recent Special Hobby releases, are crisply printed with solid colour and excellent register. Interestingly, these appear to have been printed by Eduard, and thus have the same removeable decal carrier film as Eduard decals. Colour density, fine detail and register is excellent, so I envision no problems with these decals. No decals are provided for seat belts, so the modeler will be left to their own devices here. The decal film looks nice and thin.




Accuracy and Buildability:

Without detailed plans, I eyeballed against online plans and dimensions, and I must say that it looks accurate in shape. The representation of the flying surfaces may not be to everyone’s taste, and some will also look to add seatbelts to their model. There is no trolley or any other accompanying items, but this is not unusual for gliders. It would have been nice, though, to have an option of some kind here for those that wanted their little Baby to sit a bit more ‘wings level’ on the shelf.

This is a simple model with a small parts count, so without significant joining surfaces for filling, or complex parts, this should be quite a simple little build.

Conclusions

It’s wonderful to see Special Hobby working on a project that is clearly a passion. This is an interesting subject and, given its size, will have a presence on the shelf or on the competition table. It should be a simple build, able to be completed over a weekend or two; perfect for getting the modelling mojo going. Others may want to take a little longer and really get into some detailing on this little glider. In any case, I am looking forward to getting into this one on a quiet afternoon one day soon.

Highly recommended!

Our very sincere thanks to Special Hobby for the review sample!

kensar:
Nice review of this kit, Brad.  I think it is a better representation than the Fly kit.
I have built this kit in a different livery: 
https://forum.ww1aircraftmodels.com/index.php?topic=13670.0

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