Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies

I think it's the float that detaches just as they clip that tree with their starboard wing tip. That will have given them a kick and a half of right-yaw.

Hi Paul, As you can see it's going together very, very well. A decent set of nippers to separate parts from the gates are in order, but other than a few small parts (not many really) any apparent difficulty is mostly psychological I think as there's a desire to preserve and protect the fine detailing that perhaps isn't there on some more basic kits. Usually if you hack a lump of of the leading edge of the wing you can smear it in filler, sand it out and you're good to go. This kit just encourages me to be more careful and, for instance, take 4 or 5 fine slices at a gate to remove it cleanly bit by bit rather than trying to chop through it right on the part in one go.

Sometimes you'd think you could find 5 or 10 minutes during a normal day to get two simple colours airbrushed on, but the day job must take priority so it's only just been done now. So far, the parts breakdown of the interior does make painting fairly easy with simple bits of masking tape reused from one object to the next sufficient to get the colour on. Keeping the airbrush pressure nice and low prevents overspray ruining everything around it or creeping under fairly unsophisticated masking.

I agree with you Rob, this photograph, if it's the one you're looking at, is not white and WA blue. <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205120145" target="_blank"> <img src="https://media.iwm.org.uk/ciim5/18/529/mid_000000.jpg?action=e&cat=Photographs" alt="HMS LOYAL"> </a> <span> HMS LOYAL <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright">© IWM (FL 1375)</a> </span> Interesting looking at the stern, it's not a symmetrical pattern

Hi folks, Last (planned) comment from me about the fit of the landing lights which I meant to include previously but forgot the image... When fitted properly, the two little tabs indicated by the prones on my tweezers fit into those little gaps in the alignment aides on the bottom half of the wing. The inboard riblet is larger than the outboard in depth and length following the taper of the wing, so even if you completely mix up the part numbers, it should look like this in my photograph if you've assembled it correctly. Right then, I was out yesterday so got very little done, but not nothing. The example of the kit I received includes limited edition 3D printed parts not for review (there's a piece of paper saying so ) so whilst I plan to use my 3D printed seat I thought in the interests of a decent build review, you'd perhaps like to see the kit's plastic seat assembled for comparison. I think it's actually quite nice. It includes decals for the seatbelts which are better than nothing which is what the vast majority of kits give you, but I think I'd go with photo etched brass belts if I were going to use that seat. The 3D printed seat has very nice seatbelts with it and I got fairly good at painting those with all the Ultracast seats I've used and when painted nicely I prefer how they look compared to a mediocre job with PE metal which is what I usually get. I've tried the fabric ones and dislike them for this scale - YMMV. I happened though and whilst trying to be very careful, I managed to break off the tops of the shoulder belts which separated from the printing support they're attached to and vanished. I found the piece of support. The top of the belts were not attached. Oh well - something for me to repair shortly! Cockpit construction progressed by 3 pieces including the pilot's feet supports and a tiny little handle with a red knob on top. For those who like me haven't built Arma Hobby before but also like me do build model ships, the other brand this feels most like is Flyhawk. That's not a bad thing by any means, but please be aware that the price gets you exquisite detail; far, far superior to a modern Tamiya or Airfix kit. On the flip side, there are many more pieces and many of them rather smaller than you'll find in a Tamiya or Airfix kit. If you like detail and are patient and have developed some small parts handling skills along with some technique in precise application of glue that's a good thing. If you expect to be able to handle all parts between forefinger and thumb you may not enjoy this kit so much. Not all products are aimed at all people The cockpit side framing goes on next but I want to get some detail painting done first. Before that however, I'm going to airbrush the Interior Grey-Green parts (ACRN28).

Hi everyone, thanks for looking in. I need to go out today to spend a bit of time with my dad, but I wanted to update the thread slightly before I head off. It turns out that rather than congratulating myself for remembering to dry-fit I should have spent a little longer reading what the correction sheet actually says! I had a private exchange with Grzegorz last night who looked into this and confirmed that the photograph I myself had posted actually shows the very same correction in it. D'Oh!

I shall fix that thread soon. I am able to get the pictures back but it is a tedious exercise rehosting images and relinking them to all the threads which were broken when VillagePhotos stopped paying their bills.

Hi folks, I have received a box in the post from @GrzeM at Arma Hobby containing an early example of their new Hurricane IIc kit, and I'm building it. The parts on the frames are exquisite, and known subject matter experts have their fingerprints on the kit so it should prove to be accurate. It's not until one tries to build it that we see how it really is though. If the parts all fit properly, then it's just my own skills that might let it down, but let's begin and we'll see how it goes... Attractive night fighter box art The box includes detail fit instructions and decals for 3 distinct schemes; a night fighter in Special Night (i.e. matt black), a Temperate Land scheme and a Day Fighter scheme option The wings come in a single top and bottom half with good use of under-gating to help the careful modeller minimise or eliminate damage to the exterior surfaces of the parts The kit features raised and recessed rivet detail The rivet detail is extremely fine, which should look superb with subtle highlighting effects over a lightly airbrushed finish. Fire-hose airbrush users, aerosol can users and brush painters will need to take care not to drown the subtle detailing. Internal detail is likewise very fine. The tail surfaces feature very subtle doped fabric waisting between the ribs, but the kit has not attempted to portray fabric texture which in my personal opinion is a very good thing as even the best I've seen has been grossly overscale. Another view of the interior parts and tail surfaces. The fuselage features more excellent surfacing to portray doped fabric shrunk over stringers, whilst metal panels feature beautifully fine raised rivets. Internal view of the fuselage parts. Ejector location is thoughtfully placed to avoid spoiling anything you're going to be able to see. The surface detail on the radiator parts is excellent. Clear parts are crystal clear. Instructions are given in Polish and English. There is one small sheet of corrections/additional notes which I shall cross reference. I've since this photograph gone through the instructions with a highlighter pen picking out the detail fit notes for the chosen scheme. Lastly, canopy masks are included in the kit. On to construction then... The gating isn't bad, but it's slow going as the surface detail is so nice I'm trying really hard not to cause the need for filling and sanding. Construction starts with the wheel wells. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the fit, but the joints circled in red will fall apart without glue so full dry fitting to check the wing closes up requires a couple of blobs of blutac or some other solution of your own devising. On my one here, it does all fit though. I did find that despite care, part A47 (landing light insert) on my example did not let the wing halves close up properly... There is a sheet with correction notes enclosed which says to remove this stiffener behind the landing light which I had already done. I tried part A47 (landing light insert) the instructions say goes in the starboard wing over in the port, and it fit perfectly. Likewise part A48 actually fits the starboard wing perfectly. I marked up the instruction sheet to remind me what I intend to do. I suspect there is a typo on the instructions or maybe something happened between the 3D modelling and the final parts layout and numbering, but swapping the lights over achieves a perfect fit on both sides. Here's that dry fit I wanted to check before painting... All good, I am happy to report. The leading edge at the wing root is nicely designed, leaving minimal seam clean-up along the leading edge. The wing faring joint is where the joint is on the real thing so no work needed there. So far, I am impressed. A base coat of aluminium (my C05 aluminium enamel) airbrushed... I think this may be a kit where excessive paint thickness on internal parts may give some issues, but so far the location of parts has been good but not tight, so perhaps no need to worry there? Still, it's good practise not to plaster the kit parts in thick paint. As you'd expect by this point with the wheel well assembly glued in to the top half of the wing, it closes up nicely and remediation work along the leading edge should be minimal. There are some areas of slight softness where sharp corners should be on the leading edge around the guns and landing lights. I believe this specific kit Grzegorz sent me may be pre-production, and perhaps this can be fixed for the main production. As it is, I can deal with it but in the interests of showing integrity having had a nice kit arrive at the door courtesy of Arma Hobby, I'll continue to mention anything I find so you don't all think I'm a shill So far, I really like this model kit. Thanks for reading!

I really like your project and the construction technique is working well. I do not know this specific ship well, but I do know that much of what the Imperial Japanese Navy learned about naval architecture they learned from the British, so unless you have body form plans you trust which show otherwise, I think it is a reasonable assumption to think the shape of the hull would be similar to British designs. Here are the cross sections for one of our Leander class cruisers with a similar keel and stern design. In most cases of British design, the stern is rounded here:

I think it looks great actually. A really lovely little model. Some draught markings might be nice on it - they're visible on your reference photographs. If displaying on the water some little figures might look nice on the bridge too. Overall though, I really like this.

Between the Glowworm and Hesperus kits you can make a G class, a H class or a Brazillian H. If you're happy to bodge together a round forward funnel the Hesperus kit with the Brazilian H bridge, an extension of the aft funnel (as appropriate by timeframe) and pentuple torpedo launchers (although I understand the middle tube was removed in early WWII so my model is wrong) then you can get a decent representation of an I class.

Drat. I certainly wasn't!

I'll @iang about the colours, but I think the answer will either be S1E scheme or Temperate Sea scheme. Were it my model, I'd be going with Temperate Sea Scheme I think - Extra Dark Sea Grey and Dark Slate Grey over Sky undersides. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205138538 Had it shown an upper/lower colour demarcation line mid-fuselage like the Walrus photographed aboard HMS Rodney, I'd probably have been inclined the other way and sided with S1E scheme which you're probably aware was Extra Dark Sea Grey and Dark Slate Grey on the upper wings with an identical pattern but in Dark Sea Grey and Light Slate Grey on the lower wings, usually with Sky Grey as the underside colour. I don't think it would be accurate to say that the demarcation line is definitive though - rarely with British stuff in 1940-1941 is it ever as cut and dry as that unfortunately. My view on which of the two most likely scheme candidates it's wearing is weakly held, so if Ian disagrees with me then I'd suggest you place his authority above mine in the matter!

I agree with this. The quality of the flying displays which were performed within the limitations the weather inflicted were superb as always. Good views were possible. I am however glad I only bought tickets for one day as it was a thoroughly boring day from 8am until the flying started at 2pm for me, let alone my family in tow. There was just very, very little to do. The back-end-loaded timetable worked well at IWM Duxford as there's so much to see and do and so many places to pass the time outside or in the shade, and such a diversity of traders and exhibitors to visit. Indeed you know you've got about 6 hours to do this stuff without missing a flying display you wanted to see as can sometimes be the case at airshows, but without all the stuff on the ground to do you're pretty much just sat there whincing at the prices on the food van menus wishing the hours away to 1400hrs. My wife remarked that if Church Fenton remains the venue for this airshow then it perhaps needs to move to a more traditional airshow timetable beginning flying in the morning and spreading it out throughout the day. I think I agree.

It's certainly a lot of work - I've drawn a few now - you've probably seen them - with much input from Richard and it takes an amount of effort that always seems to take me by surprise. Often the sources as Richard defined above just don't really exist with the sort of gravitas that one would like and where they do exist it's either an obscene amount of time hunting and often pot-luck whether anything is found. It's also true that it's much, much easier to make a compelling argument against a camouflage colour drawing than it is to make a compelling argument that your own one is correct as it's much easier for example for Richard to correctly point out that MS1 is unlikely to have been found on a scheme other than a proper Admiralty Disruptive pattern scheme and therefore the basis of the illustration is pretty ropey from the outset than it is to deliver an alternative drawing with all the proof needed to support it. Unfortunately where you can probably see I'm heading with this is that most of the books which do exist showing page after page of camouflage illustrations of different ships at different times, e.g. Mal Wright's volumes but he's far from alone in this, are unable to be justified when the author is asked for some demonstration of where the ideas shown come from or they're simply regurgitations of someone else's drawings (which themselves are pretty thin on supporting evidence). As an example: here we have an illustration from a published book on retail sale which you can expend your hard-earned money on. You'd be forgiven for thinking that an editor would prevent nonsense from being published but in truth the editors are not competent to recognise bad from good in this field of extreme specialism and fragmented data. Worse, stuff that's fairly easy to flush out gets published like the above. The first potential source I'm aware of showing an olive green B30 is Alan Raven's Warship Perspectives Camouflage Volume Three: Royal Navy 1943-1944 which has watercolour paintings inside (done by someone else) which correctly show blue but on the back cover of the book there's a colour palette showing some very weird colour chips. I'm not convinced this is how Alan Raven thought they looked, but there have been others since (including Eric Leon and Mal Wright) who have likewise named B30 on schemes showing olive colours. You can see from the formula for B30 which I've embedded there that you'll have a jolly fun time trying to concoct an olive shade like that shown on the illustration using the ingredients for that paint! Surely no independant primary source research could have led several individuals to make this same absolute howler of an error? This demonstrates a frequent lack of own research in the book writing industry and instead a tendency to reillustrate someone else's work complete with all their mistakes. Given the number of illustrations published in some books and the time and difficulty in coming up with something coherent that isn't shot down or at least had some reasonable doubt cast on it by extant evidence as you'll have seen in this very thread, one really has to wonder where all the supporting information and the time needed to gather and carefully scrutinise it all actually came from. It really isn't everyone though, but frustratingly it's very difficult for newcomers to the vaguaries of Royal Navy camouflage to be able to tell what's fact and what's fabrication. A common problem is that the paints themselves are perhaps quite a geeky subject which modellers and authors try to skip wasting too much time on, but with authors in particular that leads them to effectively guessing which paint colour name to write down on their camouflage profile without ever bothering to properly understand what the paint with that name actually looked like or the timeframe in which it existed, and failing to appreciate why their guess isn't as reasonable as they think it is.

These are quite nice books but they focus on structural changes through each ships' career and are fairly light (and sometimes silent) on information about paint: I find them quite helpful in narrowing down date windows or even identifying some ships when they're all painted grey. I'd recommend them overall, but as always Perkins isn't infallable and not everything is absolutely right all the time. They're generally good though.

Hi James, much more "bite" than water dispersible acrylics*, a little bit less hot than some lacquers. I do like a priming coat to get a uniform colour to check my work and act as a basis for painting, but I just choose a colour which suits my purposes. There's nothing special about most primers - they're normally just ordinary paints in the model world - etch primers and zinc primers etc for metalwork and similar specialist / more industrialised usage excepted of course. Depending on whether you live north, south or west of the city you may be relatively close by to me (or not!) so feel free to give me a shout. * The following photograph illustrates the triggering event which resulted in me sweeping the entire lot of the water dispersible acrylics I'd bought because other people kept telling me were better and that I was never going to be a serious modeller if I were stuck in the past with solvent paints, going back to enamels then buying the company shortly afterwards. This was my de Havilland Mosquito T.III conversion canopy after carefully peeling off the relatively expensive Eduard masks and half the Xtracrylix paint came away with them. It was either back to solvent paints or give up modelling and do something else with my time. I may have made the wrong choice there...

Looking good Jon. I think for the deck I probably would use a dark grey like NARN23 in places at least, but I must admit I don't know what walk-way material the early Hunt class would have been built with. The brown shown on the HMS Highlander painting Richard shared above has reminded me that in decks too, this was a period of transition and some overlapping practises as the old gave way to the new. I do not have any as-fitted plans for any of the Hunt class, but I am tempted to think that they would not have been built with Corticene or any other rolled-out-and-fastened-down deck covering materials and may have gone straight for Semtex, Supertex or Aranbee for walkway areas. I wonder what @dickrd's thoughts on this are and how aligned we might be?

Eek. I'd better get some more matt base in and make some Heather...

This seems an attempt to search for an intent to cause offense by the Americans. We have the Eurofighter Typhoon, not the Eurofighter Typhoon II. We don't tend to serialise aircraft names. By contrast, the Americans do. They had the F4U Corsair and the A-7 Corsair II. They had the P-47 Thunderbolt and the A-10 Thunderbolt II. Now there's the F-35 Lightning II. The Americans have had a Lightning before.

General Motors FM-2 Wildcat G-KINL - the Middle Stone over Azure Blue one - has turned over onto its back last night. Apparently the pilot has received serious injuries and was airlifted to hospital. https://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2023-07-07/probe-launched-after-vintage-ww2-plane-crashes-on-way-to-air-showhttps://www.itv.com/news/anglia/2023-07-07/probe-launched-after-vintage-ww2-plane-crashes-on-way-to-air-show

A key part of 6. is realising that >80% of the stash is flawed and there's very little you can just pick up and get started on without every glaring error from 4. staring you in the face.

That's a lovely Corsair

The Infini stuff is excellent. I absolutely love them.

Some may. It's far from ideal though and certainly should not be treated as a valid blanket statement. Mine do not perform well with the stuff at all, displaying poor characteristics like longer drying times and almost acrylic-like fragility in the final cured paint film that can lift under masking tape and wrinkles at the sight of oil based washes. If someone wants to thin mine with Mr Color Levelling Thinners that's up to them, but let it not be said I didn't warn them against it and it goes without saying I will take no responsibility for any dissatisfaction they may find with the concoction. It's not what they are designed to use as a thinner, and it's definitely not how to get the best out of them or even something I'd consider acceptable frankly. It is a testament to how flexible and forgiving alkyd resin enamels are that it tolerates a thinner designed for an entirely different paint chemistry at all.