Thunderbird 3 is here!

It's a good day today... my Aoshima Thunderbird 3 kit arrived from Hoby Link Japan today.

 

This is a brand new model (well, 95% is new) and is moulded in a variety of appropriate colours.  Here are the parts:

 These are the cooling fins and the ribbed parts on the support arms.

 Main parts of the body.  The parts are cleanly moulded, although the nose cone and cooling fin section have obvious seams to clean up.  There are recessed areas for the rockets, allowing them to fit perfectly.

 Three identical sprues for the engines, support arms and the lower part of the cooling fin section.  Only one of the latter is needed, the other two are spares.

The white parts are for a choice of three docking rings and the upper & lower parts of the rockets.  The dark parts are for the bottom of the main hull and the retro-rocket ring.  The support part for the stand is also on the dark sprue.

The display stand is an old friend, having first appeared with the Imai Thunderbird 5 kit.  It was later included with the 'flying' version of the 1/350 Thunderbird 2 kit.

Construction is actually fool-proof, with the parts being keyed, so it's basically very difficult to build the thing the wrong way.  You can see the flat edge to the raised portion on this part of the kit.  This is a feature of practically every part.

The decals are cleanly printed and make finishing the model a snap  The long blue parts are for the cooling fin section, while the yellow chevrons are for the ends of the fins.

To allow correct engine alignment the instructions provide a template...

This will now wait until the cold dark winter nights for me to start building it.