At Sea

Thanks for that, I cannot remeber why I messed about with IX wings on a VIII fuselage to give me a VII. I do need to mess about with pictures, thanks for the tips. I did mean to take it to Culmhead & take a pic there, I may yet now you have given me some tips!

Nicely done. 3 tone finishes are hard to get right & that looks perfect.

Thank you.

After kitbashing my VII (which I was quite pleased with) I reckoned the left overs would make a good MH434. So off I set and intrepidly built the cockpit according to pictures, no armour but a gun sight etc etc. Lovingly tended to all the seams, trimmed and filled and flushed the .50 cal stubs, carefully painted it and then realised the over wing cannon bulges were completely the wrong shape. I used the 'fat' early ones not the slim 'later' ones. Rats. So I then brooded for a bit and thought I always liked the Spitfire Vb with US stars and the Day Fighter scheme,

My build of a Czech Spitfire using the Eduard weekend kit & some Xtra Decals I had in the stash. Enjoy!

Hi there, Here is my kitbash of an early Spitfire IX and a VIII to make a VII stationed at Culmhead near where I live at the time of D-Day. Air compressor intake on stbd engine cowl made from a cut and filed bit of sprue.

Hello! Many moons ago I picked up a 1/48 Revell Sea King (Hasegawa re-box) for £18 on eBay with mangled decals and a tatty box. Sometime later if I remeber correctly Crisp @Ex-FAAWAFU send me some spare sponsons and a radome he had. This sat lying around for ages waiting and I thought 'To hell with accuracy, just build it!'. Decals from my spares box, RAF blue grey made by mixing up tamiya acrylics until the got the right hue. The Cab number 57 is completely my own invention, but the underwing serials from a spare Phantom XV575 were about the right size and

The AAR probe is essentially a bit of bent pipe. A Tornado AAR probe white metal end (easily available from Master) will work on the end and the original kit part to fill the hole works as the cover.

It's a shame that all the work that AMK put into their Tomcat didn't go on a Tornado because I guess their market share of 1/48 Tomcat's at £70 has been seriously pinched!

All steel ships are made of mild steel. The curve of the ductility graph, the tensile strength graph, the weight graph and the cost graph all intersect at fairly common or garden mild steel. In high wear places on many ships they may use Hardox or stainless but never for structure. As an aside there is a pattern for lifting gear ashore to be supplied as Grade 10/100 or Grade 12 Master links; which may be marketed as having superior qualities to the established Grade 8/80 material in common use. Whilst is it true that for a given size of item, Grade 10/100 or harder material

IMHO the Tornado suffers from the fact that it is a swing wing aircraft with lots of moveable surfaces. Comparatively the Phantom has just as complex a fuselage cross section, but the wing can be kitted as a 3 part unit that includes most of the underside. The Tornado requires the wings to be posable, plus the attachment points are in the way of the intake trunking. It has an aerodynamically complex wing, a all moving tail and a big glass house. Even Hasegawa couldn't make the F-14 an easy kit to build well. It took Tamiya and a lot of modern tooling to do that

Hi there, Very late to this party but I have quite a few 1/48 Revell Tornado kits and this it the prompt I need to build one or 2! Let me have a look at my stash and I'll revert soonest.

Yes but look at old tool 1/48 Sptifire Vb prices... The 'Queen Salote of Tonga' markings. Admittedly it's a great kit, but still very firm.

B,C,D,J,S & E... ...Not too far from K & M now!

I like how it's been carefully built but obviously no filler or tricks so you can see how well the moulding works. I also note that not even Airfix's own test build team can get their decals to lay down in a panel line!