Well, I've finally completed it! An Airfix 1/48 Seafire FR47, completed in the classic scheme of an 800NAS aircraft with Korean War recognition stripes. Is there any other scheme that anyone would reasonably consider for this aircraft? ;-)
I started this kit on March 4th. Admittedly I was away for ten of those days and didn't get any modelling done during that time, but that's still 38 days to build this model. The whole build was a catalogue of disasters, one after the other. If this had been an ordinary kit, I would have seriously considered abandoning it. But it took me a couple of years to actually find one on eBay and win it for a reasonable price, so there was no way I was going to abandon the build. Oddly enough, it seems Seafire kits are like buses. You wait ages and there is nothing. Then suddenly three of 'em come along at once - yes... I have another two in my stash! :-)
So, here's a list of the disasters:
- I intended to use the Aires cockpit set for this as I related last month in my post "Disaster Strikes!" The Aires parts are beautifully detailed and look absolutely superb when they are painted up. The problem is... they just don't fit the Airfix kit! I tried thinning the kit fuselage halves... thinning the resin parts... and still the resin simply refused to fit properly. I trimmed here. Trimmed there. Trimmed every flippin' where. No joy.
And then disaster struck. I thinned the fuselage halves and the resin so much that even applying gentle pressure caused the rear fuselage to break away and the cockpit sides to collapse! But all was not lost. I have six Airfix Spitfire 24 kits that were intended to supply the engine parts to be added to a Hasegawa MkIX. I took the fuselage halves from one of these. The broken bits from the Seafire will still be perfectly usable for a MkXIX. So then I started again with the cockpit. The odd thing is that I thinned the resin cockpit sides so much that much of the moulded in detail - fuse boxes, switch panels, throttle quadrant - had become a selection of parts in their own right! So I used those to detail the Airfix cockpit and added a cockpit floor and other minor components from a Hasegawa MkIX. For anyone else using this Aires detail set - beware! It simply does not fit!!! Anyway, having said that I was very pleased with the way the cockpit turned out. I got the fuselage together. Everything should be plain sailing from here on, right?
- Wrong! The next problem was the wings. The kit has two sets of wings - non-folding for the F46 and folding for the FR47. Naturally I wanted to build the FR47. The problem here is that the inner wing parts simply do not fit to the fuselage!. I was surprised at this as having earlier built a Spitfire 24, I had had no such problems. I dry fitted the F46 wings to the fuselage and they fitted quite well. But the FR47 stub wings have an atrocious fit! So, it was out with the Milliput and a lot of plasticard shims. After cleaning up, there was also a lot of rescribing to do. This rescribing is very necessary as the panel lines (or lack of them) will show clearly on the Sky colour scheme.
- Next up - the outer wings. I thought that this would be the easy part, but no. It turns out that the kit is designed to be built with the wings folded. There is no easy way of fitting the outer wings in the flight position. One would have thought that Airfix would have provided a spar moulding to replace the wing internal structure parts and impart some rigidity, but there isn't such a thing. I built up some spars of my own from thick plasticard but no matter what I did, there was a distinct step on the upper and lower surfaces where the outer and inner panels joined. Out came the Milliput again. Lots more rescribing to be done, but eventually I got a decent joint and managed to restore the panel lines.
However, I have to take a fair proportion of the blame for this one myself. If I had put a little more thought into it I would have realised that the correct way to do this would be to join the outer wing parts to their respective inners *before* completing the wing assembly. That would have allowed me to strength the wing surfaces and have them set while lying on a flat surface, so minimising any step. Instead I was too focused on replicating the build process of the real aircraft. A further thought that came to mind was that I should have used the wing lower surfaces from the F46 and just added the uppersurface parts from the FR47. I would have had a bit of rescribing to replicate the lowersurface joint line but at least the whole wing assembly would have been robust, and it might have helped the fit around the wing roots. Ah well... hindsight is always perfect! On with the show...
- That didn't take long. I cleaned everything up and primed the model in my usual manner with auto primer from a rattle can. I then sprayed the model Sky overall. I was concerned that such a large expanse of one colour would make the model look monotonous and toylike, so I took steps to rectify that. I masked off various panels and resprayed them with Poly Scale "RLM 84 Sky Green". That colour came out far too light for my purposes, but I was expecting that. Removal of the masking and a gentle overspray of Sky led to these panels having a subtly different shade to the rest of the aircraft. Masking removal caused a small amount of the paint to lift, which should have rang some warning bells...
I then proceeded to mask off and spray the uppersurfaces. I carried out a similar procedure here in that I masked off some panels and painted them in a selection of different dark greys, each time providing a light overspray of the correct Extra Dark Sea Grey, to restore the blue hue. Removal of the masking (again lifting small amounts of paint) revealed a patchwork quilt of subtly different colours, giving a somewhat shabby effect. I had read that
800NAS had severe maintenance problems during their Korean War cruise and so I reckoned that the maintenance crews would be far too busy to clean and repaint the airframes, so the shabby look was exactly what I was looking for. And then, as I was removing the last piece of masking from the port wing, it happened. There was a loud crack!!!! and the port outer wing was pointing upwards at an angle of about twenty degrees! The internal strengthening of the wing had failed on the lower surface and there was now a wide crack across the chord of the wing. Luckily the uppersurface hadn't yet failed, but it was in imminent danger of doing so. Hurried flooding of CA glue into the crack solved the structural problem, but the subsequent cleaning up destroyed a large part of the lovingly differentiated panelling around that area. More rescribing. More masking, spraying and respraying. More touching up as well when the masking removal lifted yet more paint. I wonder why it is doing that...
- The recognition stripes are provided on the decal sheet. I took one look at them and thought "no way!" The decals were way too thick and the stripes would have looked far too neat and tidy anyway. Given my earlier comments about the maintenance difficulties experienced on this cruise, I thought that the deck crews wouldn't have been able to neatly mask these stripes. So, the only option was to mask and spray them myself. It also meant that I could simulate slightly crooked lines ( not *too* much 'cos then it just looks like you've been slipshod with the masking) and subtle overspray here and there. I did this, but it was when I removed the masking that the wheels came off - big time!!! The masking brought up large areas of the previously applied colour scheme! I could have cried. I don't know why this happened. I did everything exactly the same as I usually do. I degreased all surfaces before priming. Used a cellulose auto primer to provide a very stable base coat. I use Tamiya masking tape for the straight edges and low-tack masking tape for the rest. The low-tack tape is *so* low tack that sometimes I have problems persuading it to hold on! And yet the paint *still* lifted!
Aaaaaggggghhhhhh!
More sanding! More respraying... Will this never end?
- Finally, I got to spray on a coat of Kleer (Future). I highlighted the panel lines with a weathering powder intended for model railways (the colour is called "track filth"!) and ran diluted Tamiya Smoke into the joints around the control surfaces. Time to apply the decals. I had already decided to dispense with the kit decals. The roundel colours are totally wrong and they look very thick indeed. It was a good decision. I actually tried them out, just to see exactly *how* thick they were, but I never got to find out. The decals simply refused to come away from the backing sheets, even after prolonged soaking!
No matter, I had found suitable replacement decals on general sheets. The roundels came from Xtradecal. Here's the disaster! The roundels were out of register! Accurate colour... concentric rings... and a great bit white crescent moon on one side of the roundel, which isn't apparent on the backing sheet. Admittedly this wasn't as big a disaster as the others. I simply oriented the wing roundels so that the white bits fell on the white stripes, and oriented the fuselage roundels so that the white fell on the Sky coloured areas, where it is not apparent. However, this doesn't bode well for a forthcoming FAA Phantom build, so I'm going to have to find another source of roundels.
- Decals applied. Weathering done. Small components applied. Top coat of varnish applied. Things are looking good. Nearly finished. Just the canopy to fit. As I - very carefully - removed the canopy from the sprue, it simply dissolved! There must have been some stress fractures in it because it split into three pieces. Again, not a great disaster. I would have considered using a Squadron MkXVI canopy, but I'm convinced that the canopies on the Mk24 and late mark Seafires were a different shape to those used on early bubbletop Spits. So, it was back to the cache of Spit 24 kits to rob a canopy from the same kit that provided the fuselage. Right up until the end, this model resisted me!
Anyway... now it's finished. Was it worth it?
I look at the model and think... oh yes! It looks great sat with the other nine Spitfires and Seafires I have. It looks particularly good when sat next to the Battle of Britain Spitfire I in a "first and last" style display. I can say that I didn't enjoy building it, but I'm enjoying having built it!
This kit challenged me - more so because I simply wasn't expecting the challenge. I've learned some lessons, notably about planning the build somewhat more carefully. Things weren't helped by the fact that the kit I was building concurrently - a Hasegawa F-4E in Israeli markings - also didn't quite go according to plan (something to do with having to use Xtracolor paints rather than my usual Xtracrylix - and then I got carried away with the weathering and put it on far too thickly, so having to remove it all and start again).
But I'm glad I did it and it certainly hasn't put me off building the other two I have in my stash!
The next kit I start will be something quick and simple (he says, knowing full well that it probably won't turn out that way! ;-) ) and I'll be seeking your advice about that in another thread.