Sorry for being absent the last few months but I’ve spent a lot of time pursuing other interests (learning to fly again after 35 years!), with autumn weather setting in there is more time to spend at the hobby table though!
This story starts with friend Ragnar posting photos of his Ventura Seafire 47 build at the IPMS Stockholm forum. A few people knew what it was while many others had no idea of the existence of these kits. I immediately donated two further kits to poor Ragnar when I realised that I (for some strange reason) had collected close to 15 Ventura Spitfire kits that have just sat in the stash since the 1990s and the chances that I should build these were slim. A better use of these was starting a group build and giving the kits away so a few weeks later there were no kits left except half a Spit XIX where one of the sprues had gone missing and a Seafire XV and a Spit XVIII that I had started many years ago.
You will only get to follow my build in this thread but the above pic illustrates what I sent out to a bunch of fairly unlucky Swedish modellers 
!
As I mentioned earlier, this is the box of my Spit XVIII that I started almost 30 years ago, I think the last things I did on it was in 1996…
The major airframe parts are like I found them in the box, complete with resin sidewalls (thanks to Cooper Details) and so on, the rest of the parts are spares from Eduard and Airfix’s Spit 22/24.
Radiators were cut away (they were cast in one piece with the lower wing, I remember spending huge amounts of time trying to clean them up with a so-so result) and will be substituted by a pair of Airfix spares.
There is (of course) no wheel wells whatsoever so there was no way avoiding building my own. I added lots of tiny scraps of plastic around the edges to get some support for the walls. With the walls in place, they were secured using liberal amounts of black CA glue.
Eduard and Airfix cockpit parts, complemented with what I suspect is a Cooper Details seat. Also. the wheel well walls have been trimmed to fit the top wing. This was my main worry but it was a lot easier than I had feared.
A few thoughts about these kits: models were not better 30 years ago! The reason we built these kits in the 1990s was that we compared them to the Frog Spitfire XIV or the Matchbox Spit IX. Comparing this kit to the Eduard Mk IX kits, it does come up a bit short…Note that there was no scrap box full of Eduard or Airfix parts to dress up these kits with then either!
So, please feel free to follow this not-so-pleasant piece of 1990s nostalgia !
Magnus
