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Hi fellow modellers Here is Revell’s 1:48 Mosquito B MK.IV well the less said about this kit the better poor fitting parts and vague instructions and please don’t get me started on the undercarriage absolutely awful. this model nearly ended up in a bin on more than 1 occasion, anyway I’ve not let a kit beat me yet and I’m certainly not going to start now. hopefully I’ve done it some justice Finished as DZ415 of 627 Squadron RAF Woodfall Spa in early 1945 Tamiya paints used throughout thanks for looking and happy modelling

source: czech forum A.R. from Special Hobby confirmed Mosquito project publicly announced some time ago is in progress and people from AZ/KP know it. The next battle in the war.

Photos of this aircraft from April 1945 show a strike camera/gun camera in a nonstandard fairing on the midline of the nose just above the machine guns. I have some questions about this fitting. Are there any drawings or detail photos available that show the size and shape of the fairing, and how it was fitted to the nose piece? Is it known whether this camera arrangement was first fitted as part of the trials with the tiered rocket launchers and drop tanks, or was it fitted to this aircraft for use in documenting the Strike Wings' attacks? Thanks for any information you can share. David

I'm not going to get into a lot of build details because there's a WIP for this build here I will mention that right after the last WIP installment I had a disaster. With everything done but the dangly bits I back flushed my airbrush to clean it and spattered silver lacquer all over the horizontal stabilizers and the fuselage spine up to the first invasion stripe. Not only did I get the plane three feet away I also got the plastic container with all the subassemblies too. You can see the line of silver spatter running the full length of the container. Livid and more concerned with fixing the damage I didn't take pictures of the plane's damage. Today I took this picture of the container to show the spatter. Needless to say I was very upset with myself. I was hoping I had enough clear coats protecting the underlying paint to wet sand the silver off. Unfortunately the silver lacquer ate past the clear coats. I had to wet sand and touch up paint the stabs, fuselage spine, two tires and a prop assembly. So I almost botched this plane completely in the final home stretch. Typical Ron move. The build itself was inspired by a Rikyu Watanabe illustration. I've wanted to build this plane for decades as per the illustration. Although I love the illustration it lacks a supporting photograph so I built it a slightly more plausible scheme. Mainly leaving the black undersides off. That was difficult for me because I really like the way the black undersides look. Always the modelers dilemma, accuracy vs aesthetics. The kit is the 1/48 Tamiya MkXIII/XVII built nearly OOB. The only additional work and pieces was Brass wing dipoles for durability and the Monica (?) lens and relieved fairing. The kit was the best fitting and engineered model I've ever built. A big thanks goes out to all the helpful gentlemen that provided the references I needed to build this plane. That's it. My first build completed in 2025. I started it December 1st so it's also one of my fastest build in years. I don't know what I'm building next, but I can tell you it will be a Tamiya kit. I'm thinking something like this with folded wings. Or their Ki-61 kit. Hmmm? Decisions, decisions. Be well and a belated Happy New Year. Ron

The Beast is done - for a long time now. The slender two engine is racing gracefully to completion. Work-from-home is was fun, then it was gone and now back again. Bench time was ample, then gone, and maybe coming back. It time for the next one: This one comes with a whole lot of plastic: So, frets cleaned up, transparencies soaked in future and drying, workbench is being organized. Hope building will start soon. Ran

The Mosquito NF.36 was a development of the NF.30, with updated Merlin engines and a more powerful American radar. Number 85 Sqn flew this version of the venerable ‘wooden wonder’ from 1947 until re-equipping with Meteors in 1951. This is the Airfix NF.30 kit, built pretty much oob except for the superb Freightdog decals, plus I added a few extra aerials and cockpit detail, and cut the crew door open.

I'm considering removing the invasion stripes from my MkXIX Mossie build if I can accurately put invasion stripes on a rocket armed Coastal Command FBVI. For some reason I think the stripes were removed before CC started using rockets on Mossies but I'm not sure. I tried googling it and got nowhere. I'd appreciate any help. Thank you Ron

I'm modeling a mosquito and there's a big rib down the starboard side of the fuselage that complicates the markings on that side. The rib's thickness will eat some height out of my roundel decal and code letter masks. That will make the roundel oblong and codes shorter. Does anyone know how this was handled on the real plane?? I cant really move on with my build until i know how this was done so I can duplicate it. Any helpful tips on modeling these starboard markings would also be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Ron

Hi guys, I'm building a MkXIX. Serial MM650 to be exact. I opened up the holes in the kits lower wings for what I believe is Altimeter radar aerials. Then I found this photo of a fresh plane 2 airframes later without these aerials. Is it possible they get added later or should I plug the holes and omit them from the build? So far there's no photos of MM650 to confirm our deny their existence. Also, were the radar dipoles on the wingtips bladed or round? The kit parts look round and a little thick. I wanted to replace them with thinner stainless wire to make them more scale and durable. If they were bladed it will require a different solution. Thanks Ron

Picked up the new tool Airfix Mosquito whilst on a visit to the de Havilland museum last year (couldn't really not come away with a Mossie, could I??). I don't often end up building newer Airfix kits for various reasons, preferring instead to constantly make life hard by building old Matchbox kits or various Sword things, so this was going to be a nice relaxing build 🙂 And it pretty much was. Construction was straightforward, I ended up ditching some of the transparencies for the camera ports and using Krystal Klear instead (which looks way better). Completely OOB apart from a set of Eduard canopy masks and some tape seat belts. I'm a massive fan of the exhausts, I think they look really good for some reason. I made life hard for myself with painting. I usually adopt the approach of paint the lighter colour first and then progress to darker. Hence I did the white of the invasion stripes, and then the black (cos going blue and then back to the black would have been mad!) before doing the blue. There's a lot of masking either way, but I think I should have done the blue and then the invasion stripes. The invasion stripes are also probably far too neat for something applied with a broom in a hurry at 3am on June 6th, but never mind! Painted with Vallejo Model Air PRU blue which I found sprayed really nicely with a couple of drops of flow improver. I think my Mr Hobby matt varnish has frosted the red tail slightly which is a little annoying but I'm not sure what I would do to fix it that wouldn't entail a bunch of work so I let it be. Weathered with Flory wash, Winsor & Newton oils and some Tamiya smoke for the engine exhausts (very subtle - probably needed a couple more passes). Anyway, on with the pics. That's 4 builds I've completed this year! Some kind of record! Although this is the only one that was actually started this year.. Thanks for looking, Al.

Evening all. I'd like to join in with Airfix's recent small-scale Mossie in its bomber guise. I'm going for the airframe on the box art because 1) I don't need any AM decals but mainly 2) Its the subject of a big poster I had on my bedroom wall when I was a model-mad teenager. Of course at the time, I dearly wanted to build a model of it so its great to now have that chance. Thanks Airfix! Here's the usual box & sprue shots. Here's the poster which I bought from the RAF Museum shop in the late '70s. It is, of course, one of Charles E Brown's wonderful wartime air to air photos. At the time, my friends all seemed to have rather different posters on their bedroom walls. Many involved models but were definitely not de Havilland or Airfix products! I'm planning to build this one out of the box but we'll see how that goes when I get to the bomb bay doors/fairing and the tailwheel. Here's hoping this thread gets further than my last one. I posted the same sort of photos for an Airfix 1/48 Chippy in the last DH GB then found out later the same day that we were moving house imminently. That stalled my modelling until now. That move went well so I'm confident I can actually start building this time. All the best, Phil.

Here's my latest - and only my second - completion of the year, the Tamiya 1/48 Mosquito PR.IV as DZ383 of 540 Sqn RAF at Benson, Oxfordshire in 1943. My Dad mentioned that he likes Mosquitos so I thought I'd build one for him, my first thought was the HK Models 1/32 Mk.IV but it quickly became pretty obvious that 1) I wouldn't be able to transport it up to Aberdeenshire on the train and 2) if I did he'd have nowhere to put it So I opted for the Tamiya 1/48 kit as being large enough but not too much. It was a nice kit to build, apart from the transparencies which gave me quite a bit of grief. I used the Eduard T-face interior and exterior canopy mask set - the exterior matching the interior exactly, so I had to do a bit of extra masking so that the internal framing to the rear of the main canopy remained internal and wasn't duplicated on the outside - the Eduard 3D printed instrument panel and radio gear (lovely, but you can't see it at all) and the Eduard resin wheel set (couldn't face trying to clean up the central seam of the kit parts with all that block tread and all). It may be that the internals would have been more visible if I hadn't used the Tamiya crew figures but they were very nice and painted up okay so I didn't want to leave them out. I replaced the pitot with Albion Alloys Brass tube 0.3mm inside a sleeve of Aluminium tube 0.5mm and drilled a hole in the fuselage side for the camera window that isn't represented in the kit - I may have done this slightly too small but I felt better with it than if I'd just left it out. I also drilled out the indentification lights under the fuselage and glazed these with Micro Krystal Klear topped off with Tamiya Clear Red, Green and Orange as appropriate. I added the R/T cable from some fly-tying lycra thread, tinted with some Citadel black wash to tone it down a bit. It was finished in Colourcoats ACRN14 - PRU Blue overall and I used the kit decals apart from the red 'KEEP OFF' boxes on top of the radiators, these came from the Barracuda Mosquito stencils set. They all worked fine apart from the serial which on drying out developed a strange kind of semi-silvering which shows from certain angles and not from others. I opted not to use the majority of the stencilling as some of it appears to be absent from the original aircraft - true, you only see it from one side but it looks suspiciously clear of trestle position markings etc. The final coat was some AK Interactive acrylic varnish, a mix of Ultra-Matte and Satin. Anyway I'm reasonably pleased with it and I hope my Dad will be too. The Mark IVs were in my opinion the best-looking of all the Mosquitos and the Photo Recon ones in particular do look lovely in their PRU scheme. Thanks for your attention Cheers, Stew

Hi folk's should be enought time to do another 1/48 build for this GB so instead of the common sense route of Tamiya's offering's I'll head back to Happy childhood days and Airfix's at the time much lauded release.KK have a dozen in stock so not sure which boxing will arrive if the decals are unusable AM will be bought.

Airfix 1:72 Mosquito in the kit scheme of No. 571 Squadron from the Pathfinders. Airbrushed with Vallejo Model Air, weathered with Abteilung 502 oil paints and varnished with Tamiya matt and gloss varnish from a rattle can. Overall the kit went together well. I used a masking set from ASK for the transparencies and CMK resin flaps and elevators. I did a fair bit of scratch building of parts in the interior (such as new radio set replacing the unit supplied with the kit; new bombsight, seat belts with tape and wiring and various gubbins. I also corrected the bomb bay doors, redrilled the red, green and amber lamps and added brake lines to the wheel hubs. I also modified the tailwheel to the anti-shimmy version and added ice guards to the Merlin second stage intakes (though they are a bit out of scale). i also drilled out the wingtip lights to add the green and red bulbs. What went well? Canopy transparencies and masking, learning how to fit aftermarket resin control surfaces (though in retrospect I didnt thin the trailing edges enough); redoing the bulged bomb bay. What could be improved? Interior painting was too thick, my scratch built radio set was not accurate for the airframe in the end (despite spending weeks pontificating on reference drawings in Richard Franks Modellers Datafile); the paintjob could be improved e.g. brush painting the u/c legs was a disaster; i was too heavy handed using the spray can and had to redo the camo template several times resulting in a poor paint finish with dust and hair all over the place. also over did it on the weathering underneath. anyhow thanks for looking Neil

My first build for the GB will be Tamiya's venerable Mosquito FB,VI in 1/48 scale, this will be my second build of this kit as I did one in 418 Sqn RCAF several years ago, I also built an older Airfix 1/48 one for the last "Less Than A Tenner GB" which was actually a nice build. Here's a picture of this time's box and contents; I have worked for Rolls Royce for more years than I care to remember and before some idiot decided to close it I was on their Ansty site just outside Coventry which was used by Standard Motors during the war to produce around 500 FB,VI's so when I build an FB.VI I like to build one that was built on that site, which means building one from either the HP, HR, RF or TE range. Now Warwickshire (my home county) also has a Royal Auxiliary Air Force Squadron and during the later stages of WWII it flew Moqsuitos on intruder missions and bomber support missions as part of 100 Group and after a couple of months on F.II's it was equipped with FB.VI's and I have found some of their serial numbers that include aircraft built by Standard Motors at Ansty so the build would have two local connections. I have found serials as I say but as of yet no photographs and if I can't find any I will need to either just build one in it's known codes and serial in the squadron's standard camo or build another Standard Motors built aircraft that I do have both the markings for and photographic evidence. I have several options in the decal stash to choose from and also have an Eduard Brassin Look set that I picked up at Telford somewhere, I shall post pics of this and any final choice of airframe later. Off topic but important to me is the fact that this will be my first build without my modelling buddy for the last 13 years, Mabel my black lab who we had to say goodbye to on Wednesday. I tend to do a lot of my modelling in our front room sitting on the floor and she would come and lie next to me, or actually sit on me which is about as comfortable as you imagine, to keep me company. It has been difficult losing her and sitting on the floor to build something will be very strange without her, so this will be for her, Mabel's Mossie if you will. This is her towards the end; Sorry for going off topic but thanks for looking in and any help, comments or criticisms will be gratefully received. Craig.

From the Tintin book 'The Red Sea Sharks'. It's the Hasegawa 1/72 Mossie kit with (heavily modified) Blue Rider decals. Depicting it in flying mode meant closing the undercarriage doors, which required a lot of filling/sanding. The only other deviation from the kit instructions was the re-configured nose gun arrangement, and I added Skut the pilot. My figure painting ability is – appropriately – comical, but he looks OK under glass.

I just hand carried home a 1/32 Tamiya Mosquito from Japan. It’s a steal at 15000 yen tax free price. I had resisted the purchase from past 2 trips but decided to get it before it gets difficult to find one. I would like to ask the mossie experts here what are the mosquito books good for modeling? Is there a kit out there to convert this Tamiya plane to one with the window at the nose?

I was greatly surprised when I found out that Airfix's new tool Beaufighter was better sized that Hasegawa's (at least according to some drawings), and as I do not own any Mosquito specific publication with scale drawings here I am asking the usual question. I have a Tamiya FB Mk.VI and it seems a well behaved kit but I am partial to Airfix's PR.XVI US markings, so would it be a good kit compared to Tamiya's or an Hasegawa one. Thanks folks.

Something nice and easy; a Tamiya Mosquito pretty much straight from the box. I only added some decals from Moose Decals. They are pretty nice and you get quite a few options, but only enough national insignia for 1 aircraft. Sweden purchased a mixed batch of nightfighter mossies post war, that severed into the early 1950s. Some were left in British colours, some were repainted. This machine was one of those that was repainted.

I have never built a two-stage Merlin Mosquito. Likewise, I have never built a bomber Mosquito. Time to put that right. I shall be building the newish Airfix kit. However, I couldn't make up my mind between the bomber and PR versions. There is only one possible solution. Build 'em both!

Having joined the forum recently, I've found myself getting quite into this GB lark! I could have gone with the new tool Airfix Mosquito but, many years ago, I had a 1/48 Tamiya one that I never finished (it got knocked around a bit in multiple house moves as a teenager then a student) so I decided to go with the nostalgia factor. However, I've not got as much space as I used to (family will insist on having room for their own things) so I went with the 1/72 version this time around. I'm planning on a few after market parts for this - so far I've only got one of the Black Dog resin sets (cannons, flaps and bomb bays), but I'm seriously considering the Aires machine gun bay and cockpit sets. I'll most likely go with the clichéd EG-T codes but, like I say, this is a bit of a nostalgia build, and I've already got a Coastal Command Beaufighter in the stash and I'm trying to maintain some variety! Looks as though I need to get a Hannants order in before I can do the cockpit, but I should be able to crack on with the nacelles. I'm also wondering if I can find a matching pair of 500lb GP bombs somewhere to fit into the bomb bay...

Ouch! I see we’ve started!! (As has the Draken STGB that I signed up to). Well I originally said I thought I might do the Mighty Hunter, but common sense says that needs to wait till I have more time. Then this arrived in the post so I’m in with this. More to follow soon

A nice simple little model this straight OOB. The only thing I wish I’d known earlier is how the camo shows through the invasion stripes. A little research shows this aircraft crashed in March 45 killing the RAAF crew of 2. Crash info