I started this project a while ago so this first post will cover quite a bit of the build.
Some background first: when I was 14 (in 1986) I got to visit the Swedish Airforce Museum with one of the SwAF youth groups (a bit like the scouts but with plastic models and RC flying instead of bonfires and marshmallows…). We got picked up by a Hercules at Ljungbyhed in the south of Sweden and flew for a bit less than an hour to Linkoping, around 350 km to the north. All for free (OK, our parent’s taxpayer’s money but anyway…) and the only requirement was that a parent signed a paper. I got to fly in the SK 60, SK 50 and HKP 3 and 4 (Huey and Vertol helicopters) later with the same minimal requirements. Things were different 40 years ago!
What does this have to do with the build then? Well, I bought one of my very first aviation books there, a thin volume on the Spitfire Mk I from Aerodata International.
There is a well known photo in that book from a press day at Duxford in 1938 with a mechanic and his dog standing by a Spit with a flat canopy and a two-blade prop. They both look immensely proud over their brand new aircraft. There and then I decided I wanted to build one of these, I’ve only waited for a suitable kit for forty years…
Box art and some 3D-print-goodies…
And some basic building done. I often fill in on other project with this kind of work, if I’m too tired to fire up the airbrush, I can at least get som minimal gluing done on some recently started build instead.
I also realise that I wasn’t totally true when saying that I had waited for 40 years, I actually did one attempt fifteen years ago. AZ Models tried their best with a series of early Spitfires but they were marred by bad canopies.
It got this far but was scrapped soon afterwards, photos from January 8, 2010.
As for your tale about SwAF youth groups, I was a member of a very small sub set of Scouts, an Air Scout. We did the normal camping, wood craft etc but also aircraft recognition and went flying in light aircraft, nothing military unfortunately.
I remember one visit to Biggin Hill which was our “local” and outside the hanger was a biplane, I can’t remember what but it had a blue swastika on the side, of course I was the only one to correctly identify it as Finnish. Wish I could remember what the aircraft was but that part of the memory has long ago faded away.
Magnus, am a bit envious of your build rate: would be lucky to finish one wing thing a year: I signed up to the Torpedoes Away campaign with a Fairey Swordfish build to complete my Illustrious trilogy and I’m already sweating the completion date
The IBG kit looks great, but does having a one piece cockpit take away the enjoyment of building and make painting more difficult? Or does it make it easier and quicker?
@Russelle I have a strategy: I try to do a little each day. Even if it is just five minutes I can at least put some tools back where they belong and maybe sand some little part. It’s only a strategy, meaning that even if I would like to, it doesn’t happen every day but often enough to be able to get a slow but steady progress. Bigger jobs, like airbrushing, are often left for weekend mornings when I’m alert and the rest of the family is still sleeping. I also listen to podcasts at the workbench, making it easier to get through the more tedious passages of a build. Not much of a trick but anyway…
Apart from that, visiting your Punjabi-blog, we all know that spending a fortune in the White Ensign webshop doesn’t speed up progress either !
I’m quite fond of the 3D-printed cockpits and I’m really fascinated by the finesse and amount of detail. Painting-wise they might be a bit more complicated than if they were split in a few more parts (I wouldn’t mind the instrument panel with it’s bulkhead being a separate part in this case) but it does work out quite well anyway. As for the building part, I can’t say I’m missing it much. Once upon a time I was a sworn cockpit guy but not anymore, it’s actually a lot better to spend that time on the outside of the model where the work can be seen. Interesting enough, there are loads of pieces for the cockpit in these kits so the 3D-prints probably are more of a time-saver than a real detail improvement.
The IBG kits are rather complicated builds and fit isn’t as straightforward as an Eduard kit. It pays to be careful. And maybe a dose of healthy suspicion every now and then… That 3D-printed part in front of the cockpit turned out to be a bit small in all dimensions. I shimmed it with my thinnest plasticard and carefully sanded it to a tight fit.
An added advantage was that it then was possible to use ordinary glue, I try to avoid superglue around the surface details as far as possible (another thing I never got the hang of, supergluing the armour-modeller way where everything is neat and tidy afterwards ).
Totally agree Magnus: if it can’t be seen, then why spend the time fussing over it… more than a few modellers burn out on builds concentrating on unseen details…
Yep, super glue ”was” a great way to fill gaps, but with the level of surface detail that Eduard, IBG, Arma are achieving its becoming a risky method to employ on these modern kits… luckily I have plenty of “older” kits in the stash
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