Work In Progress

obviously, why else would they make the tooling unnecessarily complicated and expensive? as a rule of thumb the cost of bringing a new injection moulded kit to market is proportionate to the number of parts

Interchangeable noses and tails: excellent news

I've pre-ordered both boxings: for some reason "Volume 1" was £21.87 whereas "Volume 2" was £23.67, so an average of £22.87 which I thought was pretty good given the decals. I have another two Fujimi releases already from decades ago, no idea what I paid for them except that I had a lot more hair back then. I will definitely use up the new Cartograph decals on the four.

Looks to me to be perfectly neutral, faired in line with the rest of the trailing edge, Also, it doesn't have a camo demarcation line across it as the mating wing skin suggests it should

or you could paint it in one of the many other perfectly acceptable and viable ways. I've literally never used a canopy mask set and I am only a very average modeller but have no trouble getting decent results with a bit of brushwork practice and in some cases the use of slices of pre-painted decal strip

This might be true in the Bahamas but certainly not in the UK, where right now you can pre-order the Hobby 2000 kit for £21.87 from Hannants (and I am sure several other places). The many Fujimi Spey Phantoms currently available to eBay buyers in the UK are all priced at between about £22 at the bottom end and over £40 at the top end, with the cost of aftermarket decals on top. So in the UK at least the second-hand route is very much not the low cost way to go

As you say, the Heller Stampe does indeed have its shape problems, the kit being based not on a standard SV4 but on a modified one-off aircraft with a reduced-span lower wing. That said, making it into a Blue Max fighter is an excellent idea and you've made a lovely job of it. I look forward to the Tiger Moth!

What's going on with the port aileron in that pic? Doesn't look bright enough to be the same colour as the wing root patch, rear fuselage and tail

Only if they bring out some new wings without the sawtooth. As flown in the blue stripe over red scheme as G-HUNT by Spencer Flack the aeroplane had a straight leading edge. It seems to have been retrofitted some time after Spencer's ownership. It was, as an F.51, a Danish export equivalent of the F.4, small-bore Avon, so you would need a new fuselage too (or rear fuselage perhaps, I don't have the Airfix kit so don't know whether they have tooled it with all the different rear ends in mind) EDIT Ahh, just checked Scalemates and I find they HAVE in fact done an F.4 boxing as well as the familiar F.6 and FGA.9, For some reason I have never seen or heard of the F.4 kit before, so it seems a no-brainer in that case. Must see if I can pick one of those up

Exactly! This was an RAF one out of RAF Gutersloh. Having seen them in magazines I had a general mental model of them being sort of Huey-class, and I suppose it is, but very differently arranged. The pilot let me sit in the cockpit after our flight and it was like mountaineering getting up there

That's a really effective presentation, a great choice of paint scheme to draw attention and show off the airframe. One of the few helicopters I flew in as a cadet, I remember being quite taken aback by the sheer height of the machine, with the cockpit being the "upstairs flat"!

It's properly exciting, that! Very interested in a kit, if you decide to make them available

What a crazy set-up. It makes a very eye-catching and though-provoking model. Beautifully done!

They are realistically going to be so tiny as to be effectively pointless, which is probably why they never made it onto the sheet. Something like 2mm x 1 mm for the upper one, 3mm x 2 mm for the larger lower one? I'd just cut some tiny rectangles out of some scrap black decal material, or maybe just a bit of fine attention with a black permanent marker pen

It obviously means the two data plates on the engine, which should look like the ones here: black rectangles with very small writing and stamping on them (far too small to read in 1/48). I imagine they were dropped off the final kit decal sheet after the instructions were printed. Anyway, if you can find anything like these on either of your decal sheets, and they are not called for in other locations, then use them here

And when a lot of T-6 variants were repurchased by NA after the war and remanufactured to T-6G spec, quite a few more late P-51 production parts appeared in them

You don't just randomly make significant changes to an aircraft on the production line and send the finished machines off for delivery to the customer with no further ado. The point at which the effects of fitting the 4-blade prop became apparent was during the experimental test-flying of that configuration by Hawker's test pilots. The desired and intended reductions in vibration and increase in low-speed thrust were confirmed and noted, and so was the undesirable reduction in stability. This is a very regular sequence of events when tweaking designs: you rarely get anything for free, and it is common for one performance-boosting change to require additional changes in mitigation of the side-effects. In this case the mitigation was the bigger tailplane, which when tested proved satisfactory with either prop, and therefore became standard-fit. In any case, it is known the production availability of 4-blade props was significantly delayed by the hub oil seal problems, which is why the big tail was going down the line on aircraft being completed with 3-blade props for some time before 4-blade props became available in a modification state suitable for delivery to the customer

There's no reason at all to believe that it ever happened, and it would have been going directly against the intentions of the design office as well as the customer

A rare and welcome sight! That is an interesting technique for the dayglo areas. I've never thought brush painting would work for that, so I am grateful for the ideas. Will try it on a spare fuel tank or something first

I doubt I will see a better P-40 this year. Absolutely superb

I think the general reputation of the research in the Franks books is well known.

sometimes unpainted. However, that doesn't bear on Spitfire trainers because there weren't any until after the war -- in fact, by the letter of the law this entire thread should be in Cold War, not WW2

That looks very appealing, for a big lumbering thing. I've already done some filling to amend my control surfaces and they're looking much better now before I start principal construction. The Vickers K looks worth the money, so I shall have to get one now! Thanks for showing!

They are vac-forms so you have to make your own holes as you see fit.

You are correct: the kit should have a Tempest tail but doesn't. You can get one in resin from Ultracast