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Hi all, Here's a first for me - A vacform kit... Never built one before - Used to read about grown up modellers building them in Airfix Magazine back in the day, but, as my age was in single figures back then, as well as having a rubbish spares box, I had to live the dream vicariously. Fast forward 40 or so years (ahem!) and I'd won my first ever auction on an internet auction site and found myself the proud owner of a Rareplane Supermarine Spiteful. Not wanting to trash the Spiteful as a first time project, I won another auction for this, a slightly more available kit which I could use as practice. Think it cost a fiver. Although a late discoverer to the charms of building Supermarine's finest and having amassed a few spares recently, I still needed some more, so what could I do? Back to the internet auction site and I placed a bid on this... A whole box of spare parts! The ancillary sprues cover every permutation of canopy, rudder, propeller and suchlike and then you just get whichever airframe for your Griffon engined Sea/Spitfire that's labelled on the box, from this I can plunder the contraprop, cannon barrels, exhausts, cockpit parts if I want and hopefully have a few bits left over for the Spiteful. Some of the voices in my head are questioning the logic of all this given that injection moulded Seafires are available, but they're being drowned out by the other voices pointing out where would be the fun in that So, what's in the Rare Plane packet? One sheet of glossy styrene and a brown tinged canopy taped to the back of it. Guess I might need the canopy from the SH kit. After watching an instructional video online, I traced around the outlines of the major parts with a fine pencil and then, with a certain amount of trepidation, cut a wing half out carefully with a Stanley Knife. I then cut progressively closer to the actual wing parts and when I felt I was close enough, rather than rub the mating edges of the wing down on a sheet of sandpaper in time honoured style, I used a file to take the majority of the excess plastic off until i could see the pencil line through the plastic. A quick rub on the aforementioned sheet of sandpaper and I had a wing half... Took about 5 mins, less time than parts preparation on a Ventura Seafire XV that's also being built. This one will be built wheels up to avoid too much complication first time out. More as it happens. IanJ