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So last time I had completed priming, and had masked off the SEAC white identification stripes.

The next task was to apply the camouflage colours of the Temperate Land Scheme—Medium Sea Grey undersides, and an RAF standard pattern of Dark Earth and Dark Green above. It’s always a puzzle how sharp-edged the camouflage patterns should be. Some patterns were reputedly applied using large paint masks, and so could be expected to be extremely sharp-edged at 1/48 scale. On the other hand, if camouflage was applied free-hand with a spray gun, one could expect to see softer edges, even at 1/48 scale. Looking at contemporary photographs wasn’t much help—some of the patterns on RAF Thunderbolts seemed to be very sharply defined, while others were very diffuse. So I decided I’d try for a softer edge by placing my masking a millimetre or so above the surface of the model, in an effort to simulate the effects of a free-hand spray job.

After painting the underside, I applied Dark Earth to the upper parts, and then laid on paper masks supported by thin rolls of Blu Tack. After an immense amount of fussing around getting the paper edges a reasonably uniform distance from the surface of the model, I sprayed on Dark Green. I had to keep reminding myself to keep the spray as much as possible at right angles to the edges of the masks—the last thing I wanted was to spray under the mask and get a thick line of pooled paint along the edge of the Blu Tack.

But this technique certainly removes a lot of the anxieties about paint leaking under the masking by capillary action. Except, of course, for my white SEAC stripes, with their closely applied masking tape—the white would show up any masking leaks all too noticeably. So there was the customary flicker of anxiety as I started to peel off all the layers of paper and Blu Tack and tape. But it worked out pretty well—a couple of tiny trickles along a couple of panel lines were swiftly removed using a little gentle pressure from a wooden cocktail stick, which didn’t disturb the underlying white paint. Then the whole thing was coated with gloss varnish, ready for the decals.

SEAC markings are surprisingly difficult to come by—those unobtrusive little Dull Blue and Light Blue roundels seem to be unpopular with model builders. I’ve previously had an unfortunate experience with a rather elderly set of SEAC decals, bought on eBay, which leaked some unpleasant gunk on to the paintwork while simultaneously refusing to bed down properly. But this time I was well served by Xtradecal’s sheet X48115—variously called “P-47D Thunderbolt in RAF/SEAC Service” or “Yanks with Roundels Part 4”. This not only gave me the roundels and flashes I needed, but as a bonus had the tail serial number for HB982, the aircraft immediately after mine in the RAF code sequence. With a “1” stolen from another set of codes, I was able to assemble the serial number I wanted using only two decals, rather than going through the usual performance of teasing five individual characters into alignment.

The WK-H squadron letters for this aircraft posed another. The official Temperate Land Scheme required code letters to be marked in Sky—a sort of duck-egg green shade. However, according to Geoff Thomas’s book, squadrons tended to mix their own paint from Dull Blue and White, “the resulting colours varying from Deep Sky to light grey-blue”. I’ve yet to find a colour photograph showing this, and looking at black and white photographs is of course no help at all. Here’s a 135 Squadron aircraft from a little earlier in the war:

Are those code letters pale grey-blue or duck-egg green?

The problem was resolved for me, though not to my particular satisfaction, by how difficult it was to obtain RAF letters of the right size (18″) in any shade but Sky. Although pale blue letters are available for particular aircraft on the Xtradecal sheet, they didn’t match what I needed, and I couldn’t track down any white letters of the right size, which I could have tinted. A truly dedicated model maker would have produced his own stencils and sprayed the letters on, or printed them on to white decal backing and cut them out, and I actively considered those options for a while, before deciding that whatever I did, it would not be a match for the unknown original appearance. So I went with the standard Temperate Land Scheme—the letters I used are from Fantasy Printshop.

I added the various small stencils for fuel fillers and electrical connections supplied with the Tamiya decal sheet. I couldn’t find any photographs suggesting that a red “No Step” panel on the inboard flaps were used in RAF SEAC aircraft, so I replaced the panel provided on the Tamiya decal sheet with a plain stencil from my decal cache.

Once the decals had bedded in and dried thoroughly, I added another coat of gloss varnish and started marking up the (many, many) panel lines. As with previous kits, I used Lifecolor’s Liquid Pigment for this. It settles neatly into the engraved lines of the kit, and any excess can be removed (even when dry) with Lifecolor’s removal fluid. Careful wiping of partially removed pigment produces a nice preliminary weathering of the aircraft’s surface. The main trick to using this stuff is to keep shaking the bottle—it settles out very quickly, so the black liner will slowly turn blue if you don’t keep remixing the pigment.

Once that had dried, I applied a couple of coats of matt varnish, ready for final weathering and the addition of final bits and pieces like the undercarriage, propeller, guns and external fuel tanks.

And that’s where I’ll pick up next time.

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I’m using the Tamiya kit to model a specific aircraft, again. This is going to be a Republic P-47D-22-RE Thunderbolt, on the complement of 135 Squadron RAF in Burma from April to May 1945. Its American serial number was 42-25818, with a British serial of HB981. It was what the RAF called a “Thunderbolt I”—what’s commonly referred to as a “razorback”, to distinguish it from the later “bubbletop” models, which the RAF designated the “Thunderbolt II”.

It met its end at Akyab airfield, damaged beyond repair, on 2 May 1945, when it lost power on take-off, crashing and ground-looping some distance beyond the end of the runway. The squadron Operation Record Book has a laconic record of the event:

I’ll fill in a bit more detail as we go along.

The Tamiya kit is nominally a P-47D-20, but includes the parts I needed to make the one big change necessary to turn it into a P-47D-22 version—a larger propeller. The RE code indicates that my aeroplane was built at the factory in Farmingdale, Long Island, which fitted Hamilton Standard propellers to their block 22 aircraft. Despite the fact it’s not called for in the kit assembly instructions, a Hamilton propeller is actually included on the kit sprue, with appropriate maker’s marks on the decal sheet, too.

This is my first Tamiya kit, and I have to say I’m seriously impressed. Coming to it after my recent forays into ancient Revell, Airfix and Lindberg toolings, it’s a joy to work with parts that just fit together properly, and mouldings that place the gates in sensible places (rather than slap in the middle of a complicated and highly visible surface).

I added a couple of photoetched sets from Eduard—their P-47D-20 detailing kit, and their P-47D placards. There’s a bit of overlap between these two sets, but they each included something I wanted. I also needed to track down a 1/48 scale Sutton harness—the RAF reportedly (though there’s some debate) replaced the American-style harness in American aircraft with their own standard type. I settled on a “fabric” version from HGW Models, which looked promising but caused me a fair number of problems.

The Tamiya cockpit is nicely detailed, and fits together perfectly. I slightly vandalized it by accidentally setting my airbrush at too high an operating pressure for my Alclad primer, lending the surfaces a slightly pebble-dashed appearance that shows up rather too well in the detailed photos that follow, particularly the bright metal areas. Trying to strip off a laquer layer seemed like too dangerous an enterprise, and the result will anyway be much less visible inside the assembled cockpit, when the light necessarily comes from within a pretty narrow angle to the viewing direction.

I added the Eduard cockpit placards and instrument panel, and a selection of levers and nobs. The HGW harness seems to be made of some sort of stretchy neoprene, admirably detailed, and supposedly thin enough to thread through the various photoetched buckles provided. It comes on a white backing paper. When I tried to remove this, a couple of straps separated into sections; when I tried leaving it in place, it proved too thick to thread through the buckles properly. Eventually I used parts of two harness sets to produce one slightly bodged final result.

I made one modification to the Eduard detail—revising the throttle lever with a couple of plastic strips to produce the brown-and-white object that looks a little like an ice-lolly sticking up from the left side of the cockpit. I’m not entirely sure about this. The P-47 throttle lever went through at least three iterations during production, shown below in details taken from various pilot’s manuals.

The reference works I have are inconsistent with each other, and the manuals sometimes show more than one style of quadrant. Eventually I made a “best guess” to model the middle illustration above, with a large vertical throttle handle supporting a water-injection switch on its top.

Next, the engine. The Hurricanes I’ve been modelling had their engines decently concealed, but the Thunderbolt had a fair part of its complicated air-cooled radial engine on display. The Tamiya kit provides parts for the front half of the engine (all that’s visible in an intact aircraft), to which I added a photoetched ignition harness from the Eduard detailing set. Here it is, during a trial fit, which also demonstrates the lovely moulding Tamiya produces:

It’s a challenging object, comprising 36 cables, each of which has to be connected to the front or back of one of the Pratt & Whitney R-2800’s eighteen cylinders.

That came after painting, weathering and detailing the kit engine. Here’s the final assembly, with ignition harness in place:

Notice the tiny Pratt & Whitney eagle logo on the front, provided by Eduard.

Then it was a matter of masking and priming the aircraft fuselage. I put the undercarriage covers in place with Blu Tack, to mask the wheel wells and prepare them for the underside paint. The cowling has a nice locating mechanism that means it’s easy to paint it separately and put it in place later. I’m also modelling this aircraft with flaps down, so they’re being primed and painted separately.

The white primer is chosen because this aircraft sported SEAC stripes—white identification markings on cowling, wings and tail adopted within the South East Asia Command area in 1945. I’ve left my primer a little thin—I didn’t want to layer the stuff on and obscure detail, and any slight variation in the lightness of the overlying paintwork will be compatible with the weathered appearance that’s evident in photographs. I’ve also sprayed the area of the SEAC stripes with a final coat of matt white, which I’ll then mask to protect it from the application of later camouflage paint. That’s a reversal of the order in which this paint would actually have been applied, but again I want to preserve surface detail by avoiding having to apply multiple layers of white on top of dark camouflage colours.

There’s a bit of a problem with the SEAC stripes for this aeroplane. According to Geoff Thomas’s excellent reference book Royal Air Force Thunderbolts, HB981 was part of a batch delivered between 12 March and 12 May 1944. But it doesn’t appear in 135 Squadron’s Operations Record until 4 April 1945, despite the fact that from the end of the previous year they were operating other HB and HD aircraft delivered in the same time frame. Where had HB981 been prior to its arrival at 135 Squadron? Maybe with another squadron, or perhaps in store, ready to be dispensed as a replacement aircraft. James J. Halley’s history of the H* serials doesn’t list HB981 anywhere else but with 135 Sq., but there are often gaps in the record.

Why is any of this relevant to the SEAC stripes? Because they were first used at the very end of 1944, when the original Instruction stipulated that stripes should span the whole chord of the vertical and horizontal stabilizers. After a protest that this extra layer of paint might interfere with the operation of the control surfaces, a new Instruction was issued in March 1945, stating that the tail stripes should not impinge on the rudder or elevators.

If HB981 had come straight from storage, it would have been painted up with the later pattern of SEAC stripes; but if it had been in operation earlier in the year, it might still sport the full-chord stripes on its tail. (Thomas says that some aircraft had their tail markings stripped and reapplied, but there are plenty of photographs showing full-chord stripes still in place, right up to the end of the war.)

So, in the absence of contrary evidence, I decided to give HB981 the later pattern of stripes. I masked off the relevant areas, and then applied another thin layer of white around the edges of the masks, to try to ensure that the subsequent layers of camouflage paint don’t leak into the white areas.

And that’s where I’ll pick up this build log, next time.

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So I finished the first part of this build log with the model primed for painting.

This one wears the desert camouflage scheme, so it got a layer of Azure Blue on the underside, which was then masked off, followed by a layer of Mid Stone on the upper surfaces. Then there’s the tedious business of masking off all the curves for the “A” pattern camouflage, before applying the final layer of Dark Earth. Here she is, masked and ready for the final colour:

And with the full camouflage pattern in place, and the whole lot coated with gloss varnish, ready for the decals:

The decals were a problem. Although some of the kit decals could have been used for the particular aircraft I’m building, they turned out to be freakishly fragile, falling apart on even the gentlest of handling. So I used Xtradecal for the markings, and Aviaeology for the airframe stencils, including all those wire terminal bonding marks that bedecked British planes of this vintage. (Later, I was going to partially sand most of those stencils back off again, as part of the process of turning this into a well-worn airframe.)

Here she is with the decals applied:

Annoyingly, there’s a stonking great paint seam that shows up beautifully in the shiny surface of the starboard roundel. I thought I’d checked and sanded these, but apparently I didn’t check well enough. At least it will be less noticeable once the surface is finished in matt.

Panel lines and a little preliminary weathering, next. I used LifeColor’s Liquid Pigment again, and was again pleased with the result. If you want to read more about that, take a look at my description of its use in a previous Hurricane build.

I lightly “bleached” the horizontal upper surfaces with a thin application of white paint added to my next layer of varnish—this aircraft had been sitting around in the desert sun for quite a while by the time it arrived at Ismailia.

I then added a little smoke staining on the upper wings, streaming back from the barrels of the inboard guns, before painting in a reddish rectangle of what would have been doped linen in the real aircraft, placed there to protect the gun barrels until they were fired. (The Mark IIB also had two pairs of outboard guns, which weren’t consistently fitted. The Hasegawa kit comes with the option of omitting them, and I decided to do that—they don’t seem to be evident in the picture I have of a similar Hurricane at Ismailia, and it makes sense that these guns might be removed when the aircraft was transferred to a training unit, both to improve stability and because they would be more usefully retained in active service.)

Then I dotted the aircraft with silver paint, to represent paint chipping around panels that would be removed during maintenance, stone strikes to the leading edges behind the propeller and general wear and tear at the wing roots and around the cockpit. (When creating this sort of “exposed metal” on the Hurricane, you do need to keep a structural diagram at hand, to remind you which parts were made of wood or covered in fabric.)

Finally, some exhaust and oil staining. I have pictures of desert Hurricanes with very dark plumes of exhaust stain showing up against the light camouflage:

And I have some interesting images of what happens to the oil that seeps out of the engine compartment and plumes back around the Vokes filter, across the wheel-bay and on to the underside on either side of the radiator cowling. In contrast to many Hurricane models I’ve seen, the underside seems (in some situations, at least) to be stained more on either side of the radiator, rather than directly behind it:

So that’s the appearance I tried to reproduce, which makes for a rather grubby looking final product—not to everyone’s taste, but then again a deliberate effort to depict a rather war-weary airframe.

Here’s the completed model:

So this is my next project. I’m building another aircraft my father might have flown—a Hawker Hurricane IIB that was on the complement of No.71 Operational Training Unit, Ismailia, in the first few months of 1944.

It’s actually quite difficult to track down details of aircraft at Operational Training Units. A few pilot’s logbooks have made it on-line, but they’re either the wrong dates or list aircraft other than IIB’s. And the Operations Records of most training units have yet to be digitized, so they’re not available on-line, and in any case rarely mention specific details of aircraft flown. I have one photograph, from the Haynes Hurricane manual, which shows a IIB at Ismailia in late 1943, giving me some idea of the appropriate markings:A copy request to the National Archive brought me some relevant pages from the Operations Records for 71OTU, and from them I tracked down exactly one appropriate aircraft, courtesy of Lieutenant Hanson (SAAF), who on 2nd February 1944

… whilst carrying out his cockpit check on the ground, selected undercarriage ‘up’, causing the aircraft, Hurricane BN.173, to collapse. The resultant damage was Cat.I to airframe.

So BN173 was at Ismailia when my father was there, training to fly Hurricanes. The aircraft had originally been used in the Western Desert by 274 Sq. RAF and 1 Sq. SAAF, was transferred to 71OTU in time for Lt Hanson to have his minor mishap, and then seems to have served the rest of the war there, being Struck Off Charge at the end of May 1945, just after training stopped at 71OTU  and just before it disbanded. A helpful poster over at Britmodeller tells me that BN173 was coded A-5 in late 1944. Given that the Hurricane in the late-1943 photo above is coded A-14, I have confirmation that 71OTU was using squadron code “A” and numerical aircraft codes in my relevant time span.

So I’m building BN173 A-5. The kit is from Hasegawa, and so has many of the same features (good and bad) as the Hurricane IIC kit I built previously. I’ll largely discard the decals that come with the kit and apply my own custom markings to match my best understanding of how this aircraft would have appeared in early 1944.

I’ve spoken before about how kits I buy on E-bay always seem to come with surprising extras, and this one was no exception—when I opened the box, I discovered a discontinued version of one of Eduard’s large photoetch detailing sets inside. So that decided me on another open cockpit model, using the spare vacuform canopy I got from Squadron when I built my previous Hurricane.

I have to say the Eduard set was a lot more fun to use than the Aires resin-and-photoetch cockpit I used previously. The Eduard parts build on to the Hasegawa kit components, which makes assembly into the fuselage much easier—no internal engineering with broken matchsticks this time. And they’re also lovely. Here’s the assembled instrument panel:

About 15 parts have been attached to the basic Hasegawa frame, there.

Here are all the cockpit components, detailed and ready for assembly:

And the cockpit cage before adding the seat and inserting into the fuselage:

Eduard also includes some detailing for the side walls of the cockpit, which are a little difficult to photograph. Here’s the starboard side, with the fuselage assembled. I tucked a sliver of folded paper into the map pocket, just for fun:

And the port side:

The big Eduard kit also provides an array of bits and bobs for external detailing, including something that had irritated my slightly in my previous Hasegawa build. In the real aircraft, the cables that control the rudder emerge from fairings in the fuselage and attach to a lever arm on the rudder. In the kit, the rudder and fuselage come as a single part, and the fairings, cables and lever arm are all moulded together without much detail—they resemble nothing so much as a splint that would prevent the rudder moving. Here they are on my IIC kit:

This time, I cut away the central part of the moulding, to reconstitute the fairing and lever arm, scribed in panel lines, and added the control wires from Eduard. Here’s the kit, pared away, filled and scribed:

And the wires in place:

I also cut away the moulded radiator flap from the kit, and replaced it with Eduard’s metal version, so that I could model the flap in the open position, as it appears in the Ismailia photograph:

This also involved added some internal struts and actuator levers (built from 0.5mm brass rod) and an Eduard photoetch stay on the air intake:

Assembly of the fuselage and wings was easier this time, because I was putting together nothing but kit parts, instead of the uneasy mixture with a resin cockpit and wheel bay I had in my Hurricane IIC build. But the engine cowling was still a challenge to fill and smooth, to obscure the midline seam without obliterating moulded detail.

Priming showed up a couple of problems along the wing leading edges which responded easily to a little more filling and sanding. So here she is, ready for the camouflage pattern to go on:

 

So far, so straightforward. We’ll see how long that keeps up.

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I left you last time when I had applied the primer coat successfully. Next, I sprayed on the Temperate Land Scheme colours, using LifeColor paints. First, I applied Medium Sea Grey to the under surfaces, then masked that area off, applied Dark Earth to the upper surfaces, and then masked that off for a layer of Dark Green. The RAF had two standard patterns for fighter camouflage, factory applied—the A and B schemes, one the mirror image of the other. This plane, being an odd-numbered Hurricane, needed the A pattern.

Unmasking at this stage is always slightly anxiety-provoking, but on this occasion I managed to carry the whole thing off with only a couple of tiny, trivial leaks under the masking, easily fixed.

Then a coat of gloss varnish, to prep the surface for decals.

That red propeller spinner you can see above is something of a vexed issue. There’s evidence that coloured spinners were discouraged in the South East Asian Command theatre, but it’s also reported that 135 Sqn. RAF (which used the aircraft I’m modelling here) was using red airscrew bosses for A flight and blue bosses for B flight when they were issued with Thunderbolts just a little later in 1944. (I got this information from Geoff Thomas’s Royal Air Force Thunderbolts.) And I have a black-and-white photo (in Bryan Philpott’s RAF Combat Units: SEAC 1941-45) of a 135 Sqn. Hurricane from earlier in the war that seems to have a spinner that is neither black nor white nor metallic. On the strength of that, I gave this model a red spinner.

I used some of the original Hasegawa decals for detailing, but needed to add SEAC roundels and tailflashes, and the specific lettering for my aircraft, from other sources. I bought a very elderly sheet of SEAC markings by Almark Decals online, but struggled with them. They had developed a mottled appearance with age, and seemed to leak something white and slightly corrosive when treated with Microsol setting solution—this left me with a vague waterstained appearance on my varnish here and there, which has dogged me right through to the final model, although I could probably have sold it to you as deliberately simulated weathering. The lettering I sourced from the wide range at Fantasy Printshop.

The Rotol prop blades had their logotype labels added using Kora Decals.

Another coat of gloss to seal the decals, and it was time to pick out the panel lines. For this I used LifeColor’s Liquid Pigment, which was a great success—a gentle stroke of the brush along a panel line, and the pigment settles into it neatly, leaving almost no residue on the panels. Any pigment in the wrong place can be taken off using the removal solution, which works even after the pigment is dry. The only downside is that the Liquid Pigment separates and settles quickly—without regular stirring, I found my black panel liner turning blue and pale after just a couple of brushfuls.

The underside also got a little preliminary staining behind the radiator, so that I could glue the radiator cowling in place over the top of it.

More varnish to seal the panel lines, and it was time for some weathering. I used silver paint to add the appearance of fine chipping to the paintwork on the wing roots behind the propeller, to the access panels of the engine cowling and gun mounts, and to the areas that saw foot traffic as the pilot got in and out of the aircraft. Engine oil used to leak out of the underside of the engine compartment, and then blow back in the airflow, producing characteristic stains on the Vokes filter, and then in a fan across the undercarriage covers and the central wing section. And there was an exhaust plume down either side of the aircraft that was deflected downwards in the airflow over the wings. To these specific forms of weathering, I added a little grubbiness in areas where hands or feet would most commonly touch the aircraft, and some earth staining to the underside of the tail and the landing gear.

Then it was all over in a rush. Matt varnish over all, and I could finally put the undercarriage in place—I’d been holding off on that so I could airbrush even coats of varnish over the undercarriage covers and drop tanks, which sit quite close to each other in the assembled model. With the varnish on, I could also unmask the landing and navigation lights. The cockpit canopy was dropped into place, and the last job was to rig the radio antenna between the mast and the tail. There are various ways of doing this, but I chose to use stretched sprue*, cut to length and held in place with tiny droplets of Micro Kirstal Klear. You can find various instructional videos on-line, explaining how to stretch sprue—they show everything from people performing delicate manoeuvres over candles, to guys apparently trying to set fire to themselves and their workbenches. I use a tea-light candle, hold the sprue a few millimetres above the flame until it starts to go glossy and sag, and then pull firmly while lifting the plastic away from the flame and rotating it so that I’m stretching it vertically—that way I get long straight sections when it hardens.

There’s always a little sagging when you rig a long section of this stuff, so the final act is to tighten it up. I light a match, blow it out, and run the still-hot matchhead along the centre length of the stretched sprue, just a millimetre or so below it. Sometimes I need to repeat the process several times, but eventually the sprue gives a tiny quiver, as if alive, and pulls itself tight between its two anchor points. It’s one of the oddest and most satisfying moments in model-making. (Some people achieve the same effect with soldering irons or heated screwdriver blades, but I flinch at the thought of brandishing large hot metal objects near my delicate plastic model.)

So here’s the finished product:

Next up, another Hurricane, even more obscure than this one—a Mark IIB attached to Operational Training Unit 71 at Ismailia, Egypt, in early 1944. After that I’ll go back to my Saturn V, I think.

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* Sprue is that framework of plastic to which the kit parts are attached, which normally gets thrown away after the model has been built. It’s there because it fills the channels through which the molten plastic runs when it’s injected into the mould. No-one knows where the word comes from, but it appears to be unrelated to the tropical disease of the same name.

By way of a break from the slow building of my Saturn V, this one is an attempt to model one of the aircraft my father flew during the Second World War.

It’s going to be Hurricane LB545, stationed with 135 Squadron RAF at Minneriya, Ceylon, in August 1944.  It’ll be a reconstruction, rather than a reproduction—this doesn’t seem to be a very well-photographed time in 135 Squadron’s history, so I’m piecing together the likely appearance of the aeroplane from various bits and pieces of evidence that I can glean from books and on-line research.

I want to build it with an open cockpit, so I’m replacing Hasegawa’s moderately detailed kit cockpit with a more detailed photoetch-and-resin version from Aires. In particular, Aires provide a nice photoetch Sutton harness, something that’s missing from the Hasegawa cockpit. That also means I need to replace the cockpit canopy—the Hurricane canopy slid back over the fuselage, and the chunky kit canopy is too thick to do that. So I have a nice vacuform replacement from Squadron. Here it is, beside the Hasegawa kit part:

First thing, then, is to paint up and assemble the cockpit. Which I’m making suitably grubby for a tropical theatre, using Lifecolor’s Liquid Pigment range—a thin suspension of particulates that you can brush on. There’s a removal agent that lets you undo any mess you’ve made, which is a particularly useful thing for someone as thick-fingered as me.

Here’s the cockpit seat and harness, painted and dirtied:

And here’s the Aires instrument panel, layered together from various pieces of photoetch and printed transparent film, with a coat of white paint to the back surface to bring out the instrument dials:

And here are all the bits that somehow need to be assembled so that they fit each other and the kit fuselage, without the aid of anything so convenient as locating lugs or flanges:

It took a bit of effort, and a lot of “matchstick engineering” to space the parts appropriately and hold them in position while my epoxy dried. Here’s a view of the underside, through the wing roots:

And here’s the final result:

Unfortunately, the Hurricane cockpit was so cramped, a lot of the detail around the floor is now pretty much impossible to see, and the lovely instrument panel is wasted, tucked away in the shade of the cowling. I think in future I might just add a photoetch harness to the original kit cockpit.

Before assembled the fuselage, I had one bit of external detailing to do. The Hurricane had a handhold built into the port fuselage near the cockpit, which pivoted open when a step under the port wing-root was pulled down. Since I’m modelling this aircraft parked up with the cockpit open, I need to have the step down and the handhold open. Although the kit comes with a step, its handhold is moulded closed:

So I need to carefully drill out, gently file to shape, and insert some plastic card:

Annoyingly, I’ve fixed the flap level when it should be slightly tilted. There’s always something, isn’t there?

One of the nice things about buying model kits second-hand on eBay is that you sometimes find the previous owner has tucked some detailing bits and pieces into the box, in anticipation of the day when the kit was to be built. With this kit, I found not only a set of resin wheels and control surfaces of unknown provenance rattling around loose in the box, but a detailed wheel bay from Brengun still in its wrapper.

The wheel bay turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. The trouble is, the floor of the Hurricane cockpit was the roof of the wheel bay (and there was just a void farther back, either side of the pilot’s seat, through which any dropped objects ended up rattling about inside the aft fuselage). To get the resin wheel bay to fit under the floor of my resin cockpit, I had to thin the chunky resin to within an inch of its life with my trusty Dremel. Most of the aft part of the bay is now so thin it’s translucent, and I actually transgressed a little on the deeper detailing around the emergency retraction air bottle:

With the availability of some free control surfaces, I decided I wanted to model the aircraft with a slight droop to the elevators, something that’s often seen in photos of the real machine when parked. (I pushed the stick slightly forward in the cockpit for consistency.) This meant I had to scribe off the kit elevators, which are moulded in one part with the tailplanes. Here they are before:

And after:

Having exploited the extras I found in the box, I also needed to add extras of my own. The aircraft I’m building needs a Vokes tropical filter under the nose, to protect the carburettor air intake, and a couple of long-range tanks under the wings. I got these from Red Roo and the Aires “QuickBoost” range, respectively. The Red Roo filter needed a little detailing, with a panel line scribed across it.

Here’s the underside of the aircraft with everything finally in place:

And the topside—you can just see how I’ve replaced the tiny, delicate, styrene rear aerial mast on the tail with a bit of half-millimetre brass rod, which is more likely to withstand my handling of the model during painting and decalling:

It’s at this point I begin to develop “primer anxiety”. I’ve done a lot of filling and sanding and scribing, and it all looks a bit of a mess—once I get the primer on, and everything is a uniform shade of matt grey, will it look better, or will all sorts of dents and scores I haven’t noticed suddenly jump out at me?

As it turned out, the primer went on OK—I picked up a couple of tiny gaps I’d missed, but was able to deal with them using just a little extra primer on a brush and then some 1200-grit wet sandpaper.

The cockpit is being masked using the original kit canopy:

I assembled the radiator fairing, but haven’t done more than dry fit it, for ease of painting, so it’s absent from this view of the underside, with the wheel bay masked with a combination of tape and Blu-Tack:

I’ll report back after applying the camouflage and markings.

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