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After just over 4 years on and off (more off than on!) I have finally put this one in the cabinet. It represents Battle P2332 (the same subject as the kit) from 12 Sqn RAF, based at Amifontaine in mid 1940. On 10th May, 4 of the Squadron's aircraft attacked German forces, 3 were lost. On 12th May an order was issued to destroy the bridges over the canals at Maastricht - the whole Squadron volunteered! 6 crews were chosen - One had to turn back early due to technical problems, and the other 5 were lost. P2332, crewed by Flying Officer Norman M Thomas, Sgt BTP Carey, and Cpl TS Campion led the attack on the Vroenhoven bridge which was damaged, but not destroyed. F/O Thomas crashed near the bridge, all the crew survived and were taken prisoner. Pilot Officer Davy in the 2nd aircraft crashed on the way home. The attack on the Veldwezelt bridge was led by Flying Officer Garland, with Pilot Officer McIntosh and Sgt Morland following. All 3 aircraft were shot down with only McIntosh's crew surviving as POWs. F/O Garland and his observer Sgt Gray were posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross, the first such award in WWII to RAF personnel, although for some reason the gunner, Leading Aircraftsman LR Reynolds received no award. On 14th May another attack was carried out. 5 out of 6 aircraft were shot down, and the Battle was withdrawn from daylight operations. Here is P2332 after that fateful raid. Taken from the internet. Copyright, if any, unknown. If anyone objects I'll be happy to either take it down or add credit. This is my little tribute to those brave men. The WIP is here, showing how I went about turning one of Airfix's most notorious kits into something resembling what it should be. It's not perfect by any means, but I am very happy with the result! To sum up, the fuselage, wings, and tail were all corrected for shape and dimensions. The wings were raised by a couple of mm (I didn't actually measure the amount, just matched to the plans) and the wheel wells, bomb cells, and landing lights were moved inboard to their correct positions. The interior is scratch built with the help of an instrument panel and seat modified from a MK I Hurricane resin set from CMK. The main gear fairings, rear radiator fairing, and gun mount are push moulded, Falcon vac canopy, Marabu PE landing lights, Mini World guns, and SBS Model resin exhausts for a MK I Hurricane. Tailwheel is a resin replacement intended for the Airfix Defiant, the main landing gear, bomb racks, and bomb doors are CAD designed and printed by myself. Prop is the kit part, modified for the correct length and detailed. I hope you like her! Thanks for looking in! Ian

Does anyone know the dimensions of the Type 1 Universal bomb rack as fitted to the Fairey Battle? Or better still, was it the same rack as fitted to other types that are available in PE? Thanks, Ian

Hello guys! I'm looking for the photos of TT Battles any pics will be appreciated also interested in Irish Air Corps TT Battle #92 How the Irish Air Corps got that aircraft and what's the story behind this one Cheers!

Hello, I'm new here! I had the good fortune to discover Britmodeller recently and have been reading my way through all the fantastic builds, reviews and discussions presented here. I've been so impressed and inspired by all your talent, humour, enthusiasm, insights and cups of tea that I thought I'd sign up perhaps try to take part in some small way. I didn't want to show up to the party empty handed however, so I thought I'd show some of what I'm working on at the moment. I should probably come out with it straight away and say that I'm rather into 1/144 - for better or for worse! The scale has come a long way since the bad old days of Crown and Revell micro wings. There's some great stuff out there nowadays. Although sometimes things do take the odd step backwards... They say misery loves company. So here's my Zvezda 1/144 Fairey Battle. 😅 ********************** I've been cracking on with this for a good long while now, so I'll break it up into a separate posts to get things up to speed. I've always loved the Battle. It was on my wishlist of Airfix kits as a nipper but never seemed to appear in the shops round here. Decades later, and I was still wanting one. When the Zvezda kit arrived I snatched one up quick, hoping for a fast and accurate build. Instead I got a Monopoly counter. A wargamer's piece that could be assembled in minutes and was best admired by setting it upon a broad table, and standing arms folded and well back! So... Have at it I said. The first thing I did was to sand off the fabric effect from the rear fuselage. The Battle is an all-metal aircraft and only the control surfaces were fabric covered. Once that was done I shaved down the location lugs inside the fuselage to give them a loose fit. It makes it much handier to open and close the two halves doing a lot of test fitting and measuring. The measuring is where things began to get a little out of control. Using Richard J Caruana's scale drawings and a lot of photographs I was able to start taking spot dimensions to check accuracy of the kit. As I went I found that there were quite a few key areas where Zvezda's Battle was coming up short. A little later I also obtained some slightly better drawings by Kenneth Merrick and was able to use these too. Starting out with the fuselage, I took the position of the leading edge of the wing as a sort of datum and began checking everything from there. The length of the nose was good. The position of the forward canopy was just a shade too far forward and easily corrected. The sides of the pilots cockpit were cut too low and needed some work to build them back up. The decking behind the cockpit was meant to be curved rather than flat. These things seemed fairly straightforward and I planned to make a new canopy so I wasn't all that concerned. The further back I went the more serious things became however. The rear fuselage was short be about 2.2mm. Good enough for 144th is a phrase I never liked. It's the same as saying 9mm is near enough for 1/32. Imagine if Tamiya were out by that much on one of their Spitfires. People would be howling! I was able to trace the fault to the area between the two cockpits. Adding a spacer there would make the observers position the correct length when complete too. Below are a few shots of the build thus far. The plan is to open up the cockpits and show them with a new set of canopy pieces in the open position. The cockpits have been cut out and given a more accurate outline. A temporary decking piece is in place (I later decided to make this from brass) and I've started doing the setout for the rear cockpit opening. By now I was getting nervous every time I got the calipers out. The cowling was too sharp. The tailplane too short. The wingspan was pretty good and I didn't think to look much further than that. Later I discovered that the chord of the wings was just over 1mm too narrow. It's that slab of a wing that is one of the key features which really identifies the Battle, so I resigned myself to having to fix it. Shortly after that I also found that the wings sweep back too steeply by about 2mm at the wingtips. Add to that a number of serious issues with the underside of the wings, and I very nearly put the whole lot in the bin at that point. Eventually though I plucked up some courage and got out my trusty jewellers saw. I cut the wings down the centre, then scored the wings at the position of the undercarriage (the width of these is correct for 1/72 by the way) and bent the leading edges until they pivoted forward. After that I added strips of styrene to get the wings to the correct width. Getting there... After all that I began work on the rear cockpit area. I thinned down the sidewalls of the fuselage and corresponding area between the wings so much that I began to break out in a sweat. I couldn't just detail the side walls of the fuselage as the wing root joint would be much too visible from inside. Instead I made a U-shaped tub from brass that fitted up under the sill of the cockpit aperture. I added a floor and some sidewall structure from styrene and sprue. The first try at this was a little too shallow for the plethora of Vickers drums and other equipment, so I thinned things down even further and made a new-improved tub that looked much better than the first (took a quarter of the time too!). Lots of priming and putty followed in order to correct the fuselage profiles. The decking between cockpits was cut from brass and the holes drilled and widened with the tip of a scalpel. Cutouts for landing lights were made, and various other fiddly bits. I'll leave it there for now. I hope you like it. I'll add some more soon. Thank you all!

Sometimes I do very strange things... One of them is this - "vintage style" Airfix` Fairey Battle. I think the kit is about 40 years old, it`s very simplified and has lot of errors. The one and only reason was that I could not get an MPM kit of Battle, meanwhile this one (reboxed by Bilek) was widely available. Made out of the box, only extra decals from SP Decal were used, because I wanted it in Polish markings. I changed something in the propeller area, but I don`t remember what. The built takes me only few hours, most of them spent on painting. So here it is: Fairey Battle Mk.I, serial L5597, GR-F, 301. (Polish) Squadron RAF, August 1940.

Hi, Fairey Battle from Airfix is an old mould far from accuracy. Some years ago I tried to made from this kit a model, which will be more similar to Battle. This was more than 15 years ago, anyway - I still remeber that I cut the fuselage in front section, reshaped almost whole wings, and made a different tail. There were minor correction also. Many thanks to KRK4M (present at BM under this nick) for supporting me with plans. To commemorate RAF forces supporting France in 1939-40 I made model in markings of 218 AASF, based in Auberives, France 1939-1940. Have a look and please feel free to comment Regards Jerzy-Wojtek Some more shots:

Here is my greek Fairey Battle, the last model I've made. I hope the chipping hasn't been too excessive! I think it is the most realistic 1/72 aircraft I've completed. I started this model by Christmas, but lack of paints delayed it's finishing until very recently. More pics and a full review here; http://toysoldierchest.blogspot.com/2013/09/airfix-fairey-battle-172-ao3032-raf.html

Fairey Battle Nose for Airfix Kit 1:72 Valiant Wings Airfix’s Fairey Battle is one of the older kits currently in the famous manufacturer’s range. I’m not sure exactly when it made its first appearance, but it’s certainly older than I am. Unfortunately, it has something of a poor reputation as far as accuracy is concerned. To be fair to Airfix though, this was never really their fault. The story goes that Airfix approached the Fairey Aviation Company in order to borrow a set of plans (which should give you a clue as to how old this kit is!), but due to an unfortunate mix-up, they received plans for a pre-production or prototype version. This resulted in a number of issues with the finished kit, including the size of the wings, the shape of the vertical stabiliser, the shape of the canopy and, particularly relevant to this review, the shape and length of the nose. Valiant Wings have now made available a replacement resin nose for the flawed Airfix kit. The single piece of resin arrives packed into a strong cardboard box adorned with a colour photograph of an Airfix Battle with the replacement nose in place. The cream coloured resin is hard but not brittle, and the quality of casting is pretty good. The surface detail is reasonable, and whilst it isn’t a match for the very best resin producers, it’s more than a match for the elderly Airfix kit with its raised panel lines. The nose is attached to a resin wafer about two or three millimetres thick. This must be cut away or sanded off prior to use. The corresponding part of the Airfix kit must then be cut away and the two parts cemented with superglue. The instructions don’t contain any illustrations showing exactly where to make the cut, but fortunately there is an extremely clear written description instead. Overall, this is a handy little correction set and it should help to breathe life into a venerable kit. At the time of writing, Modelzone are offering 50% off the Airfix Battle, so you can pick one up, buy this corrected nose and still have enough left for a sherbet fountain. You can’t say fairer than that! Review sample courtesy of