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This is a build I finished last year, but because I am slow I have only just got around to putting up. The model is from the Maintrack ‘Protojets’ range and has been sitting in my stash since it was bought in 1991ish. It is the first vacform I have finished in a while and enjoyed building it in vaguely masochistic way. The Hawker P1121 was a private venture project for a strike/airdefence fighter and was not designed to any official specification, although it was part of a whole series of studies that eventually led to an unsuccessful bid for the specification that gave birth to the TSR2.Hawker decided to build a prototype, which was to be powered by the most powerful turbojet of the period, the De Havilland Gyron. Work started on the prototype (which never received an identity) and progressed slowly to the stage of a partly completed fuselage and one wing before being abandoned in December 1958. The partly completed fuselage is in store at RAF Cosford after being given to the Cranfield Institute of Technology in 1961. Any production version would have been powered by an Olympus. A good history of the project is the ‘Hawker P.1103 and P.1121’ by Paul Martell-Mead and Barrie Hygate. Published in 2015 by Blue Envoy Press. My kit is the original made by Maintrack Models, this kit has been taken over by Whirlybird and refined by the addition of resin parts for the intake and wheel bay, which would make it a lot easier The major airframe parts come a single sheet of not overly thick plastic sheet and there are cleanly cast white metal components for the undercarriage and ejector seat that had an Aeroclub look to them. Only one vacformed canopy is provided so no room for mistakes. The decals come as ‘Presfix’ which are cut from the sheet, put in place and then the backing paper is soak and comes away leaving the design in place. Mine looked pretty far gone and I did not use them. The current incarnation has ordinary decals. The markings are of course fictitious. The model was allegedly mastered by Gordon Stevens and is based on the proposed production airframe As a vacform the kit needed a lot of preparation before anything is done. I like to prepare all the parts and then it becomes just like building any other kit. I cut the parts from the sheet after running a marker pen around them to indicate when I had removed enough material. I started with the wings and tail and used a variety of methods to thin them down including scrapping, sanding on a flat sheet of wet and dry stuck to an old smooth ceramic tile and sanding sticks. Doing the wings etc. can be tedious which is why I did them first. Care has to be taken with ensuring port and starboard wings and tail are of the same thickness. The fuselage has a bit of an issue in that my sample was quite thin walled in places and this caused problems when I joined the fuselage as the despite strengthening I had difficulty with eliminating the bottom seam and resorted to a cheat by pretending there was a duct under the fuselage. Once cut out and prepared most of the parts fitted together reasonably well although filler was needed but I do not feel that is unreasonable given the nature and age of the kit. The wing has a spar which helped and I used brass and plastic rod to help locate and hold the fin and tailplanes. The interior was pretty basic and well-nigh invisible beneath the canopy which only had a small glazed area. The undercarriage bays were strengthened as they had very thin walls and to provide a better key for the undercarriage legs The undercarriage itself was a bit bare and so I added some more detail using the above mentioned book as a guide. The intake was a bit of a swine to cut out accurately and to fit to the fuselage, but I got there in the end. The aircraft was finished in the standard camouflage and markings of the early 1960’s with decals from various sources, the squadron markings came from Modeldecal sheet and are for 31Sqn. Hope you like it. I have the Supermarine 545 out and looking at it for a future project, but so many models and so little time.