WLJayne

Those are brilliant, Troy! I just got the first test from Antonis where we used the Air Ministry chip MSG (or as close as we could get.) I must say, it does look pretty close to the photos you posted, what do you think? I'm probably going to move this over to the profiles thread now as I think we've got some good leads on the grey. Will.

The side ones definitely weren't, yes. Though on the Duxford photograph, you can just about make out the wing roundel extending from the leading edge to the aileron which would make it the 56" Type B which was standard from then on.

That's the conclusion I have reached to. Wartime MSG doesn't appear to be the same, though close.

I think at 1/144 the result will be pretty much imperceptible, but yes I can see what you mean! Yeh I have noticed this too, the decals are being designed separately and I will be sure to match the serials as closely as possible. I'll see what I can do about the profile in photoshop :).

The latest from the front! November is rapidly approaching, and progress is being made on our ten initial Spitfire and Bf109 kits. We have wonderful new artwork to show you, and are putting the finishing touches to many profiles that will be included with the kits. Decals are in development and tooling is proceeding. However, we have decided that is best if we begin to manage expectations now; due to circumstances beyond our control, the cutting of the steel tools is taking longer than anticipated. Much of UK industry is currently experiencing delays and setbacks caused by a few factors that are all coming together to make things difficult, and we have been affected. It no longer seems realistic for us to be shipping orders in November, but we will work as hard as we can to let you know a realistic timescale that we will do everything we can to keep to. We will make more announcements on this as and when we can. We will of course ensure that all pre-orders will be dispatched before the kits go on general sale through our web sore and retail partners. Our pre-order customers are our priority. As always, your patience and support is appreciated and we hope we will be able to show you some plastic in a future update! New RAF Box Art: We are delighted to be able to show off some of the box art that we have commissioned! These will be on the cover of our boxes, and are the first five of ten art pieces that we are working on. We are now starting work on the Bf109E box art pieces. The credits are: 1/144 RAF Dispersal Set - Chris Freeman. 1/144 Spitfire Mk.I Early - Antonis Karydis. 1/144 Spitfire Mk.Ia "Spitfires Into Battle" - used with kind permission from Mark Postlethwaite 1/144 Spitfire Mk.II - Antonis Karydis 1/144 Spitfire PR Mk.I Type G - Antonis Karydis. Tooling Updates: The 1/144 Bf109E is now in tooling, however our toolmaker has advised us that there are material shortages and supplier delays, which is hampering efforts. The 1/144 Spitfire data is in the tooling queue and will be next to be made. Bryan is now in the very early stages of develop a 1/144 Heinkel He111, which we hope we will be able to show you more of in the coming weeks. For now, both of us are doing all we can to move the production of these first two kits along. Website Updates: As always, we are refining and improving our website, and we are beginning to populate the product pages with better images as well as optimizing the customer experience and navigation. We hope that you are all well, and we appreciate your continued support, as well of words of encouragement through Facebook, Instagram and Discord. We really appreciate it, and it's so wonderful to have such dedicated early customers. We will have more to show you in the next newsletter, see you then! Take care, Will & Bryan.

Thanks Graham! Steve from Warbird Colour has very kindly offered to send me some paint chips, colour matched to original air ministry swatches in the RAF Museum archives. He also agrees that the Air Ministry MSG is a little more blue than the British Standard MSG. I'll get them properly digitized and from that I should be able to produce a CMYK colour for screen printing that has minimal if any colour drift. I'll certainly sleep easier!

I'm very glad you agree Jack!

Hi All! First a thank you to Julien and the team, we are now proud to be a a Britmodeller vendor and we'll have our own corner of the forum soon, where we'll be showing work in progress, posting updates and inviting comments and help with research. Over the last few days I've been working on coming up with a colour palette that we'll be using to make decals for all our BoB era RAF fighters. To that end, I've been digging around for guidance on the correct colours. There have been lots of useful threads which have turned up invaluable information, and this is essentially just me trying to get my head around them and check whether I've grabbed the right end of the stick. Particularly when it comes to RAF Medium Sea Grey which was the colour used for squadron codes before the change to Sky in '41. According to sources like "Camouflage and Markings (No.1)" this was the Air Ministry's orders: Later evidence refers to this colour as Medium Sea Grey. I managed to get hold of "British Aviation Colours of World War Two" and the paint chips at the back (which I have read while searching here are apparently as close to a gold standard as we are likely to get) list an MSG. Then there us British Standard 381C 637 Medium Sea Grey. I compared a couple of versions of this grey, bear in mind that monitor profiles may not produce an exact colour but hopefully it will illustrate the more obvious differences. So having done that, my instinct was to try the two on the left - being the British Standard colour and the colour matched scan of the paint chip in the book. In the end my feeling was that the paint chip looked "better" against Dark Earth and Dark Green, it has more blue in the hue and I've picked up on some references to hints of blue in it while reading around. Also I had a chat to Warbird Colour, and he says that he uses a colour match of this paint chip when doing squadron codes on real aircraft restorations. So I fired up my rendering software and tried a mockup. Here it is in colour and in greyscale as would be seen in period photos. Here's N3200 which seems to look very similar indeed and I suspect is based on the same chip: Ultimately, what I'm hoping is that you very knowledgeable chaps will be able to tell me whether my deductions on this are in the right place, or whether this is off the mark. If this is going to be our palette for quite a few RAF aircraft, it pays to get it right before we progress much further! Apologies if much of this covers old ground, but it's essential for us to do our due diligence on this and both Bryan and I are learning so much as we go while designing these kits. Many thanks and I hope you'll think it looks good. Will.

That's exactly how I have been thinking about it yes 😁! I will show the complete profile when it is done, and then I'll need to work on QV-H and DW-O. Will.

Thanks Dov! Yes there was a lot of censoring, editing and retouching! For example the serials were painted over (which you can see in another aircraft photograph from this press day) but normally they would have been shown. Sadly without a time machine we can never no for sure, and the more I research these early BoB aircraft, the more it's clear that sometimes there is no conclusive answer just "best educated guesses." But as long as modellers are happy that a model or profile is based on the best evidence we have, then that's good. The descriptive geometry thing is a bit beyond me! I usually just snip images apart in photoshop and measure them if the angle is good, otherwise I try to recreate the perspective in 3D and change the sizes of the markings until it looks like the photo, which seems to work fairly well. But I'm glad you think it looks good, we're happy with it too and I think we will use this to make our profile.

I have been researching WZ-C, using the photos we have of this aircraft with additional references from http://www.rafchurchfenton.com/supermarine-spitfire-camouflage-and-markings/ Testing out different sizes on the vector model, I believe that the squadron code letters were 30" and slightly narrower at 4," with the 25" Type B fuselage roundel. This seems to fit most closely to the photographs of both the left and right sides of the aircraft. I tried 24" letters and they looked far too small, and 5" width looked too bold at 30". The upper wing roundels are clearly 56" so that's easy at least. What do you think? It's a bit of a best guess, but a couple of other profiles I've seen - even in the markings book - don't look right at all to me. The template I've used is our later Mk.1, but don't worry there's a flat canopy and two bladed prop in the kit!

Hi all! Thanks so much for all the help you've given Bryan and I so far. Antonis has been busy creating some more profiles for us to use with our 1/144 BoB kit series! As always, we really appreciate the eagle eyed feedback we get on these and the community is an invaluable asset in making this models the best they can be. The first profile that we have ready for inspection is K9795, thankfully the Wingleader book goes into a lot if detail about this so we've been able to stay very true to the best information out there. So here it is, we hope you like it! Full album here: https://imgur.com/a/qOt1Kte We've decided to change our other pre-war Mk.I Spit to what we believe is K9799, but we're not sure. Can anyone help us confirm, or at least reassure us that it's a likely candidate for the aircraft in the photos taken at Duxford in May 1939. We believe that like the profile for K9806 that is also shown in the Wingleader book, WZ-C would have had night and white undersides but full sized Type B roundels on the upper wings. The serials on these aircraft appear to have been painted over on the press day, however another photo of WZ-C shows "K7" so perhaps this was only a temporary censorship measure? Any tips on this aircraft would be greatly appreciated! We'll have more profiles ready for inspection soon and I hope that you will join in and help us make them as good as we can get them. Many thanks! Will & Bryan.

Yes I had a look through the book and saw the same. I think we're going to go with that one because the photos are quite clear. It does look to me like it's got the three bladed prop in the photos.

I'm also interested in this scheme, because although we have a scheme in development for K9843 DL-N, we're having a tough time finding photos of that aircraft, and this would be just as good as a pre-war spit scheme. Would SD-H have swung the two bladed prop at this time?

Yes I have the Spitrfire Mk1 and all the Bf109E WL books, they're a great help! I think we have a couple of schemes that haven't been done - I thin being able to make all three of the 610 Sqn schemes from that famous photo will be a good selling point. In addition to specific airframes schemes we'll also have generic BoB Spitfire /109 decal sheets with most of the major marking options covered so that people can make any aircraft they want though of course it might not be 100% accurate. The book I have is the On Target Special by the Aviation Workshop Publications. It does have lots of schemes in it though they'd all need to be checked against photos, but the one's I've done that with seem pretty solid.

😂 oh dear! I think what I might do is start a fresh thread when we've done some updates for critiques on our profiles. We have seventeen Spitfire profiles in development and almost as many for the 109, and all of them are going to have to be as carefully produced as we can. Antonis is a very good artist, but we can help him make really good profiles by supplying him with the best references possible. It would be such a shame to spoil the ship for a ha'porth of tar - especially when the whole idea of the range is to collect interesting airframes in different marking schemes. I do have Peter Schott and Gary Madgwick's BoB markings book and it seems good, but I don't want to rely on it completely of course. Photos are always the most useful reference! We just finished updating our K9795 profile which had a lot of mistakes which we've been able to correct thanks to Mark Postlethwaite - but he's a busy chap and very generously advising us in his spare time so I don't want to ask too much of him.

Thanks Ed, I'm not sure who did the XT-M profile, our work in progress is the XT-L one but we know it's wrong as it currently stands 🙂. We're not doing XT-M at this time, in many ways it would be easier if we were however the Stapleton/Von Werra dogfight with XT-L will make for an interesting set. Thanks for the info so far, everyone! I have to say, researching these schemes has been the most challenging part of the entire creative process. Info on this period is hard to find and digest indeed! But we would much rather engage the community and try to get it right than blag it and end up with something people aren't happy with, even at 1/144th. So far then, as a preliminary spec: N3196 XT-L might had had: - 24" codes as per XT-D photo - 35" A1 roundel - 24/30" roundels underwing near tips It's possible that we might never know for sure, but at least this way it will be a plausible deduction based on evidence. We have several other profiles in development and if you're willing, we could really use the help with those too! I devote as much time as I can to research, however I wear so many hats in this business at this stage that extra hands and eyes made the world of difference. Will.

Hi all! As part of our 1/144 "Spitfire Mk1 Vs Bf109E" set, we're including markings for Stapme's N3196 XT-L and Franz Von Werra's "Black Chevron" as documented on their 5th September 1940 dogfight over Kent. However we're having some trouble deciding the most accurate squadron code on the spitfire. Here's our WIP profile (top image,) which shows the letters as per a few oil paintings and sketches, however other 603 spits photographed in the same week show a different config. Which do you think is correct? Are there any photos around? As always, we welcome corrections and constructive feedback 😀. Many thanks! Will.

Brilliant, thanks for the explanation chaps, makes perfect sense!

Hi all, Just double checking before we send decals off to print and thought I'd ask all of you as there are very well read folks here. Some sources are showing that the black walkway line on the wings of Mk.I to Mk.V spits are asymmetrical, with the line on the stbd. wing going all the way to the fuse but the port wing has a dog leg that goes to the trailing edge. However many model kits (even the ones shown in the forum banner!) show them as symmetrical with a dog leg on both sides! What's correct here? Particularly interested in Mk.I and Mk.II spits. Thanks in advance!

These are all wonderful ideas! We would definitely like to do those, I think once we have a well established customer base that we have attracted through offering more mainstream stuff, we could definitely branch out into the interesting areas, as collectors will be quite invested and interested in anything we produce by that point....hopefully :D.

WE GO LIVE ON THE 18TH OF MAY 2021!! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beacon-models/the-few-part-1 The wait is over, we can finally announce the launch date! The pre-launch Kickstarter page is now live, link below. You will have to create an account on Kickstarter and follow the project by clicking the "Notify me on launch" button on the page. You will then receive an email from Kickstarter on the 18th May when the campaign is live and you can make your pledge! As you can see, we have pre-launch stretch goals, with a prize draw and extra free goodies for all backers. To unlock these, we want to reach as many Kickstarter followers as possible. So to all our wonderful early supporters, we now need you more than ever! Please share these posts and the Kickstarter links among your friends and communities, and help get as many people as possible following the Kickstarter page as well as our other social media pages. We will also be doing marketing in the next few weeks before launch, so expect to be joined by many new recruits! Thank you all so much for supporting us for so long. We have learned to much along the way and we hope it will result in a smooth campaign and amazing model kits, with many more to come in future! Will & Bryan.

Always a possibility for the future :). Warplanes are going to be where most of the money is of course, but for the sake of variety I would to do things like that.

Are these 1/144 scale, or are the coins 4:1??? 😂. Juan Villegas has done breathtaking work painting these!

Fabio Santonocito has finished the in-flight Bf109's to do battle with Adam's Spitfires! Just waiting for Juan Villegas to finish the static versions of all these now, and then we'll be able to do all the photography we need :D.