Building a Matchbox/Revell of Germany HMCS Snowberry 

This page will be a build record, in notes and photos, of my construction of a 1/72 scale ship model of HMCS Snowberry, a World War II Flower Class Corvette. The kit is a combination of an original Matchbox kit from 1979 (a gift from my father; date unknown) and a "Platinum Edition" (added photo-etch parts, turned brass parts, self-adhesive wood decks) reissue of this Matchbox kit by Revell of Germany in 2012 (probably bought around 2018).

I had to re-learn some lessons about model building while assembling this kit. As I write this in April, 2026, I don't even know if I will successfully finish this model. This record will be a sort of stream-of-consciousness account.

In the 40-plus years that I have had these kits, I have collected six books/booklets about Flower class corvettes, an after-market photo-etch parts set, other boat/ship kits with useful parts (20mm cannons, for example), multiple tins of Humbrol paint dedicated to painting this build, and after-market decals for the model.

Several years ago, I built a 73" tall, 58" wide and 16" deep aspen wood cabinet, with glass shelving and aluminum-framed plexiglass doors  (in anticipation of displaying the finished model), with internal lighting, for when the time finally came to start. (If all goes well, there is room for a 1/72 scale German U-boot and a 1/72 scale US Navy Gato class submarine, too.)

For four decades, I delayed beginning the model, until after I had retired from full-time employment, in June of 2025, because I knew that for me, this project couldn't be done on just weekends and evenings. I would lose interest long before the model achieved critical momentum for completion. I believed I would need many hours of steady, daily model building time to be successful. Retirement made that possible, but even at that, it was March of 2026 before I began the kit.

On re-learning model building wisdom: It was very fortunate that I owned two of these kits, because within days of starting the hull, I was reminded of the wisdom of studying ALL of my research, thoroughly and carefully, before applying X-acto knife and glue to the kit. In my eagerness to begin, I had rather blindly followed the kit instructions and assembled the hull, including the bilge keels (long horizontal stabilizing "fins" below the waterline), before I studied my reference drawings concerning the correct length of these keels. As designed, the kit was strangely inaccurate at the bilge keels: they were MUCH too long. Initially, I attempted to shorten the leading and trailing ends of the keel parts, but I couldn't salvage this hull. Reluctantly, I started over with the second corvette kit's hull and bilge keels.

I measured the scale drawings of the hull and installed shortened kit bilge keels to better match the proportions illustrated in the reference drawings. What a waste of time and materials, but I know it is my nature to never be satisfied with a kit, once I have spotted a correctible error. While I was doing this better due diligence with my references, I also spotted that the quantity, location, and style of the scuttles (portholes) on the kit hull were also pretty inaccurate. I plugged all of the scuttles with solid styrene plastic rod and sanded off the oversize scuttle eyebrows, ready to locate the Revell photo-etch scuttles on the hull, according to the photos of the actual ship. You can see the wrong bilge keel (lower hull), and the revised bilge keel and plugged portholes (upper hull), in the photo, below:

On references: A key strategy when building models of historic subjects is to, wherever possible, select ONE individual example of that subject and make all of the decisions on modifying and detailing the kit based on that unique example. Historically, there were many instances of subjects (such as ships) that display a lot of variety in construction details and outfitting, particularly as experience is gained by the ship manufacturers and the navy involved. Also, ships were often modified over the lifetime of their existence (HMCS Snowberry, for example). With multiple references, I can get confused about what exactly to build on a model, if I don't narrow my construction to ONE subject at ONE point in time. One option of this kit was supposed to be HMCS Snowberry, and so I used a series of photographs, taken on a particular day in May, 1943, after completion of a refit of HMCS Snowberry, to make these corrections to the kit.

However, there will be many other attempted improvements and corrections as I build the model, and these efforts will be guided somewhat more generically by my photo and drawing references, particularly of weapons and machinery that were fairly common on most Flower Class corvettes. You work with what you have available.

On research of existing full-size subjects: Twenty-one years ago, in 2005, I was able to travel to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada to see HMCS Sackville, a Flower class corvette preserved as a museum commemorating Canada's involvement in the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. The 280-plus photos I took on and around the Sackville proved indispensible in building and improving the build of Snowberry. Below are a couple of photos I took on the Sackville that I used to make corrections to the anchor winch:  

Below is a progress image of the anchor winch I built from the useable Matchbox kit parts, Evergreen white styrene plastic, and brass wire. (I know that the gear teeth are grossly coarse, but again, you work with what you've got...)

On the Building Sequence on a kit build: Generally, I follow the sequence of construction as illustrated in the kit instructions, but I usually do not do this blindly (except see "bilge keels", above). Wherever I see an advantage, I often carefully change the build sequence. One simple example of this is when I often delay installing machine gun barrels or radio masts and antenna on an airplane model, until the very LAST step, because these parts are so fragile when handling the model to apply paint or decals.

Occasionally, I will work on some major subset of model parts from the kit, out of sequence of schedule according to the construction instructions. I do this if I am puzzling out some method to build or improve the subset assembly, or because something about the subset captures my attention and I can't resist diverting from the recommended sequence.

In this build of the Snowberry, the tedium of having to build the entire hull and bilge keels a second time drove me to seek the pleasure of superdetailing the anchor winch, long before I needed to install it on the deck. It was very satisfying to make up for the boring loss of time and energy on the hull by engaging in the interesting effort of adding details seen in the Sackville photos to the overly simplistic and inaccurate Matchbox winch parts.