K5054 Supermarine Type 300 Spitfire Prototype - 1:48 AlleyCat

[Mike]

Supermarine Type 300 Spitfire Prototype
1:48 AlleyCat

There can't be many modellers that haven't heard of the Supermarine Spitfire, the brain child of a certain R J Mitchell that went on to become the sweetheart of the skies during and after the Battle of Britain. The "Shrew", as the Spitfire was almost called began life, in spirit at least, in a 1931 design for a fast modern fighter, for which he designed the Type 224, which was far from successful and was trumped by Gloster's Gladiator design in the end due to its poor performance. This seems to have spurred on Mitchell to create a sleek aerodynamic form with none of the characteristics of the 224, into which the newly minted Merlin engine was placed, shown to the Ministry, rejected and then accepted in 1934 with a contract issued for a prototype.

On the 5th of March 1936 the prototype flew for the first time after which the test pilot Mutt Summers issued those famous words "Don't change anything". The did at least change the prop, and she flew again a few days later, testing the landing gear during the flight, followed by changes to the rudder to resolve some issued with sensitivity. She still wasn't much faster than her main competition the Hurricane, so changes were made to the prop, squeezing almost 20mph more out of the Merlin in level flight. After testing at RAF Martlesham Heath by the RAF, the first order for 310 airframes was issued, and construction of the Mark I Spitfire began, as did the problems due to Supermarine's lack of experience with mass producing aircraft.

Sadly, the prototype crashed in 1939 and was a total loss, by which time it was wearing a camouflaged pattern and more closely resembled a production airframe.

The Kit
Although a resin conversion set has been on the market in years past, it has been out of production for some time now, and this is the first kit of the complete prototype that I am aware of in this scale. The kit arrives in a small white card box with a colour painting of the prototype in flight on the top, and inside are three bags of resin parts, a small fret of Photo-Etch (PE) parts, a length of brass rod, a bag of clear resin parts, a decal sheet, and an instruction manual consisting of three sides of A4.

AlleyCat have chosen resin for almost all the parts, but a few, such as the landing gear parts and pitot probe have been strengthened by the addition of brass rod running through them for added strength and to avoid the concerns of thin resin parts deforming over time due to the weight placed on them. Four options are available to the modeller from the box, depicting the prototype at different stages in its evaluation, with colour schemes to match. There are three engine cowlings with different exhaust arrangements, two choices of windscreen, two rudder parts, a tail skid or wheel, and two types of chin intake, with notations next to the parts in the instructions telling you which parts were used by which scheme. The kit has been cast to simplify construction and reduce the number of parts, taking full advantage of the flexibility of moulds that allow undercuts that are difficult to execute in styrene moulding without expensive sliding moulds.

Clean-up of the parts is quite quick, and can be done within an hour or so with razor saw, scalpel and some sanding sticks, resulting in a small pile of parts for your chosen option. Construction is very simple, as the fuselage is one piece aft of the firewall, as are the wings, with integral gear bays. The fuselage has a "skinned over" cockpit aperture to ease moulding, and this is easy to remove with a sharp scalpel, trimming it back to the side walls, which are happily easy to see. Inside the cockpit area is a wealth of sidewall detail including ribbing and ancillary equipment, with the rear cockpit roll-over frame built into the rear of the fuselage. The five cockpit parts consist of an instrument panel frame, cockpit floor with integrated rudder pedals, seat and seat frame with head-rest and the mounting bracket for the seat moulded in. Once built up and painted it is slotted into the cockpit from below, and the wings can be added, once you have trimmed and test fitted them together. It is quite easy to get a good fit at the wing root by repeated test-fitting and scraping of the joints with the edge of a blade until you are happy with the result. The tail planes slot into the sides of the fuselage in keyed fitments that prevent them being installed on the wrong side, and the rudder attaches to the rear, with a section of the top of the fin removed if you are portraying the initial scheme before the rudder was amended. Some small PE parts are added to the top of the rudder, and to the spine just in front of the fin, and then it's just a choice of skid or tailwheel.

The cowling of the Merlin engine changed from an initial short oval individual stack arrangement to flush oval holes, and then a rather odd-looking cigar-shaped exhaust that has no visible outlets, so you must choose which of the three cowlings you'd like to use. The first two choices are single parts, while the third choice has a slot in the sides of the cowling and two additional parts representing the exhausts. There is a slight step between the cowling and the fuselage that may possibly be down to mould shrinkage, but it shouldn't be too difficult to resolve with some filling and sanding of the short seam. The prop is a wide-chord two bladed affair with a squat spinner cap, and glues to the front of the cowling as a simple butt-joint. If you want to make it spin, you'll need to do some surgery to the kit parts, such as installing a brass rod in the prop, sleeving into a length of tube in the nose.

The chin cowling is the same for all options, but a choice of angled tube or shell-style intake under the chin is given, but with no notation to guide you in your choice. Under the wings are the radiator and oil-coolers, which are both drop-in parts that fit within the recessed engraved into the wings. On test fitting the radiator, the inner edge wouldn't touch down without a little adjustment to the part, so be aware of this before applying glue, and it needs a bit of extra head-room in order to fit.

The landing gear legs have brass cores, as mentioned earlier, and fit into slots in the gear bays, with nicely rendered wheels that have a slight bulge at the bottom, the Dunlop logo in relief on the sidewalls, and slightly convex hubs. The first prototype flight was done without landing gear doors, so you can leave them in the box if you fancy tackling the bare metal/green shades, but the following two scheme had inner and outer doors, while by the time the fourth scheme was adopted, the additional weight of the inner doors had been removed and the familiar half-covered wheels were on view.

The canopy is presented in clear resin, and there is a tiny gap between the parts and the casting block, which allows you to get the razor saw in there without losing and framework detail. They are nice and thin with a very slight bloom to the clear parts that disappears after a dip in Klear or Alclad Aqua Gloss. The original single piece curved windscreen is supplied along with the opening canopy and fixed rear portion, and for the final scheme, the bullet-proof glass has been added. These parts are quite different to production Spitfires, as the windscreen was given a sharper rake and larger bullet-proof screen area, splitting the windscreen into three distinct sections. The initial batches of Mk.I Spits reached service with the prototype straight canopy, but was soon superseded by the blown "Malcolm Hood" that afforded the pilot better visibility and allowed a little more head-movement to scan for enemy 'planes.

The final act is to add the pitot probes to the port wing leading edge, the longer two-stage part is resin with a brass core, while the smaller one is 10mm long and the supplied brass rod is used to create it, gluing them both into holes in the leading edge of the wings.

Markings
The colour schemes for the prototype Spit are controversial and rely heavily on evidence of those that were there at the time, plus the error-prone interpretation of black and white photos. There are four schemes included, as mentioned earlier, from unpainted to glossy blue green and grey. From the box you can build one of the following:

• Eastleigh Airport, 5th March 1936 – all over natural metal with yellow/green zinc chromate primer on metal surfaces and aluminium dope on flying surfaces.
• Supermarine works, Eastleigh, May 1936 – High Gloss Blue Green with silver spinner tip.
• Hendon, RAF Pageant, June 1936 – High Gloss Blue Green with silver spinner tip. Black 2 in front of each fuselage roundel.
• Supermarine Works, Eastleight, December 1936 – High Gloss light blue-grey called French Grey.
  

The decals are pretty simple for the prototype, consisting of roundels under and over each wing, with fuselage roundels, and serial under the wings, on the rear fuselage and rudder. The fuselage roundel and codes have a white outline that is supplied on the sheet as an additional white backing decal. The red roundel centres are also separate, so you'll have a stack of three decals on the fuselage sides. Decal quality is good, and due to the separation of the white outlines, registration isn't an issue between the black and white, unless you mess it up!

Conclusion
The very first Spitfire is now easily available in kit form, and won't take a whole heap of work to turn into a finished model. The resin is well cast, the part count has been kept to a sensible minimum to ease the job, so as long as you have a few tools, some super-glue (CA) and two-part epoxy for the larger joints, you shouldn't go far wrong. I suspect that the kit was patterned from a Tamiya Mark I kit, and can see a few tell-tale signs that's the case, as I've built two. To build the initial mark without the gear bay covers, you'll need to fill the two grooves in the gear legs, which are used to position the bay covers, but that's about it. A few air bubbles are lurking just beneath the surface in places, and can be filled with styrene rod and nipped flush for ease, but again – that's an expectation of short-run resin kits.

Highly recommended – a good candidate for your first all-resin kit too. It really is quite simple.

Thanks to Ali for the chat on colour schemes as well as the review sample, and to the folks at Alclad for confirming I'll be able to mix their clear green with their aluminium shades.

Review sample courtesy of

[rmcclure]

Fine review, Mike, thanks very much. The detailed parts like pedals and seat looked very nicely moulded indeed and I expect we'll see a few of these on the forum over the next few months - looking forward to them. I've bookmarked your review for Boxing Day as this kit is firmly on the Christmas list!

Cheers,

Roger

[Shalako]

Quite lovely kit and very nice presentation.

Thanks Mike.

Though, I do have one question. Are the resin clear parts better in any way, when compared with the standard clear parts we find in scale model kits?

For instance, do they pass the 'test of time'? I mean, do they get a 'yellow' tint as the years go by or not?

[Space Ranger]

At only £40, that has to be one of the best modeling bargains ever. It's almost enough to tempt me to abandon 1/72 for 1/48!

[rmcclure]

Quite lovely kit and very nice presentation.

Thanks Mike.

Though, I do have one question. Are the resin clear parts better in any way, when compared with the standard clear parts we find in scale model kits?

For instance, do they pass the 'test of time'? I mean, do they get a 'yellow' tint as the years go by or not?

That's a good question. Would the threat of yellowing be mitigated somewhat by a good coat of Klear, or similar?

[Enzo the Magnificent]

I built a model of the prototype a few years ago using the resin conversion kit which Mike mentioned. I was never really happy with it. So now the opportunity arrives to build another!

The casting of the cockpit interior is really quite astonishing.

[Caerbannog]

Great news - on my next stop at A2Zee this will go in the basket. The Paragon conversion set sell for half the price on the AlleyCat kit on evilbay and does neither include decals nor the base kit - so this resin kit is excellent value in my eyes. Now come on and do the Speedfire as well

Rene

[Ali62]

Thanks Mike

Thanks for a great review.

To the guys that are concerned about the canopy, the clear is a UV stabilised resin that I have used for a few years now and there should be no yellowing over time. A dip in future really does bring the sparkle to these canopies.

Cheers Ali

[spitfire]

Nice review Mike, the kit looks great, nice to see a complete kit of the prototype rather than a conversion.

Cheers

Den

[Mike]

Thanks gents - I'll be posting up my review build shortly, as I've already cleaned up the parts, and am looking forward to beginning construction

[Antoine]

We're looking forward to it, too!

[Tim T]

Wow, that looks amazing. Hats off to Ali for coming up with such an interesting and historically important subject. This will definitely break my resin duck!

[Beaconroot]

Oh wow! I must order one of these! Awesome!

Jim Root