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Time to start a new kit, and as sadly it seems the ubiquitous Hawk T.1 will soon be retired it can also be a bit of a tribute to the type. My build was actually inspired by reading Mandy Hickson’s superb book ‘An Officer, Not A Gentlemen’, which I cannot recommend highly enough. I’m only half way through, in the chapter about her FJ training at Valley on these very aircraft. So here goes, hopefully I do it justice. Obligatory box shot. Very surprised to find there’s also a T2 fuselage in the bag of sprues. Is that normal? I still have some 4 FTS decals for it. I’ll be doing the standard 80’s red and white trainer, with white fuselage numbers like I remember from many airshows. Might need some aftermarket for that big cockpit.

Greetings Fellow Modellers! I submit for your perusal a pair of small, so terribly small Gnats . Both models are Airfix's newish Gnat T.1 in 1:72 scale. They represent my return to the hobby, in that on these models I let loose every experiment from which I could learn. I initially wanted to build them OOB, but I ended up using quite a bit of aftermarket stuff: the pitot tubes are Albion Alloy Micro Brass Tubes and the nose wheels are from a nice wheel update set from the Hungarian company SBS. The nose wheels make an improvement over airfix's ones which are a little bit too small. The main wheels are from the kit, and the examples left over from the SBS set will be used later for a hangar diorama. The canopy was cut with a Revell precision saw to enable it to be posed open. The interior of the canopy was lightly detailed with thin plastic card and stretched sprue. For canopy work I mostly used bookbinder's glue, which is a strong PVA type. The windscreen was made flush with the fuselage with the aid of Gunze Mr. Dissovled Putty and then Mr Surfacer 500. Same story for smoothing the side walls of the nose wheel wells. Cockpit and ejection seats were detailed with plastic card of different thicknesses, stretched sprue and very occasionally thin brass wire. Paint was basically Gunze Sangyo Mr Hobby, except Vallejo for detail work and Citadel Runefang Steel for the silver. I had lots of trouble with the H1 gloss white, which I applies much too thickly and as a result wouldn't cure well. Thanks to tips from the Tools&Tips section (thanks DuncanB ) I learned some new skills. First matt white, a coat or two, then one coat of gloss. Works beautifully. Decals were from all over the place: lots of stuff from S&M models' sheet, wing stencils came from the home printer, and the rest was basically scavenged. Please forgive the format of some of the photos, I liked the idea of imitating 1970s film, so I edited the model's images accordingly. gnat2-7 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-9 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-13 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-1 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-3 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-15 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-4 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-5 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-2 by J Goat, on Flickr gnat2-14 by J Goat, on Flickr Thanks for looking! Jay