Airfix 1/48 Spitfire Vb Malta Dec. 1942

[iSteve]

 

This is a great kit at a great price. I started on the Spitfire in late September and am close to wrapping it up. As luck would have it, I was doing some comparative research and stumbled upon this group build. I've been taking photos throughout my build so I thought this would be a great opportunity for my very first group build. I'm at the decaling stage, and then weather, paint and attach the canopy, semi-gloss finish, and string the antenna. In the next 9 days. Nothing like a nice deadline to light a flame under the bum. 

[iSteve]

The Airfix seat was nice but needed a flare rack. Rather than buy a whole new aftermarket seat, I sanded a piece of sprue to shape and drilled out the eight holes.

 

Then it was simply a matter of adding it to the seat.

 

The only aftermarket parts I did buy were HGW seatbelts. I had bought them once before for my Airfix Hurricane after seeing another modeler use them. It’s practically a kit in its own right, but the results are well worth it.

[iSteve]

The overall colour for the cockpit is Tamiya's Sky as it seemed closest to photos I've seen of the interior. Many cockpit parts were airbrushed with Alclad aluminum and then over painted with the sky. Then a light scuff here and there gives a nice realistic (in my opinion) wear to the elements. The seat was a mix of Tamiya colours to try to replicate the actual. It's a bit too shiny in my opinion, but once installed looks reasonable.

[iSteve]

This was the first time I used a decal for the instrument panel as usually I just highlight the dials with silver and paint the buttons their prescribed colours. It aligned perfectly, though it took several coats of MicroSol to get it to settle properly and a few pin pricks to clear out the bubbles.

[tonyot]

Nice job,....... have you painted your model in the desert colours from the kit as I doubt very much whether they were actually applied in this context with these markings? It was more likely to be wearing either an improvised (Dark Earth/ Grey Blue (EDSG)) OR official (faded) Temperate Sea Scheme.

plus another squadron aircraft,.....the codes were either yellow or light blue;

Cheers

            Tony

[iSteve]

Thanks for the suggestion Tony. I've seen both those photos in my research and in addition, there was a recent publication on Malta Spitfires by Brian Cauchi which included a colour camo reference:

 

So I used this as the basis for my colour scheme.

[iSteve]

The cockpit halves went together relatively easily. I needed to slim down the insert tabs on the bulkhead frames in order to make the fit easier to work with in joining the two halves and some masking tape helped keep the fit as the glue hardened. I drilled out the holes in the bulkhead frames  to look more authentic, though I doubt anyone will notice once it’s all done.

Once the cockpit was together, I glued it to one of the fuselage halves after test fitting them. I then glued the other half of the fuselage to the side of the cockpit and then to the other fuselage half. There was a bit of pushing and fitting, but it all went together well in the end.

The fuel tank cowl came next. I had read that the fit could be problematic due to the height of the instrument panel, or the thickness of the cowl, depending on how you look at it. I sanded down the inside of the cowl until I had a good fit. It didn’t require as much work as I thought it would. Before gluing it into position, I noticed it was a bit bare compared to the restoration photos I was using and so I added the required bits and bobs using pieces of sprue cut and shaped appropriately.

[iSteve]

With the cockpit all buttoned up, next was the wing assembly and on to everyone's least favourite task: filling and sanding. Fortunately, the Airfix kit, like most of its new toolings, is well engineered and falls together well. The wings have no locator pins which actually makes the fit much better. I assembled the lower wing halves to the fuselage and then aligned the upper halves snugly against the wing roots. I glued the halves together with Tamiya regular glue and then applied Tamiya Thin Cement to the wing roots and held the wings snugly against the roots until the glue set. With just a couple more passes of thin cement along the joint, the seam practically disappeared with no filling necessary.

The fuselage only required a little seam filling along the top close to the cockpit, along the bottom where the bottom where the wing meets the tail, and a bit at the front, mostly due to the fuel tank cowl and making a better alignment to the engine cowling.

I really don’t know what Airfix was thinking when it came to the wheel struts. The struts are essentially in two pieces where you attach the main part of the leg to a small section at the top which in turn attaches in the wheel well, though the instructions ask you to do it in reverse order. I’ve heard everyone who’s ever built this kit complain about this. What I did was to attached the two parts of the strut first and make sure the bond had thoroughly cured, and then attached it to the wheel well. It cab make painting a bit awkward, but I think it’s the best approach short of pinning the two pieces together. I’m happy to say the struts held their position throughout the build (touch wood).

[iSteve]

Once the main assembly stages had been completed, it was on to priming and painting. My go-to primer, after years of what can best be described as the “big suck” in levels of success, is Alclad. Their primers airbrush beautifully without thinning, go on nice and smooth, retain the surface detail, sand and feather perfectly, and never lift off. The micro-filler versions can be layered on to remove light scuffs and scratches.

This kit will be the last time I use Alclad as a general primer. The one drawback is it’s a lacquer and the fumes are brutal. I always use a chemical filter mask when dealing with this stuff. One day, however, I knocked over my airbrush cleaning jar and basically evacuated the basement for a day until I felt it was safe again. I love Alclad metallics and won’t give them up just yet and a necessary evil to go along with them is Alclad’s gloss black primer for high-shine finishes like chrome, so I'm still stuck with lacquers for now. I’ve put my faith in my online modeling communities and have switched to Badger’s highly recommended new line of Stynylrez primers. We shall see on the next build.

There was one fix I needed to implement before priming and that was to remove the molded-on wing braces. My plane is from 1942 and the braces were not added to the Mark Vb’s until 1943. It was a relatively simple matter of just sanding them off. Then the primer went on in it’s typically wonderful fashion and I only had to do some minor re-sanding and filling. Rescribing was minimal.

Edited December 22, 2016 by iSteve

[iSteve]

I mixed my own Middle Stone base coat for the camouflage, calculating the proportions from the British Standard 381c paint chart with Tamiya paints.

I have seen many models done with preshading to highlight panel lines. I’ve tried it myself and found that while it has its place, generally it exaggerates panel lines to the point where it is unrealistic. More often than not, panel lines are molded sufficiently deep enough so that they don’t require assistance in making their presence known and still look realistic. Another approach is black-basing where the model is primed or coloured black and then the next colour is mottled on in layers to give depth and texture to the finish. My approach for non-metal finished models is to keep the typical grey primer coat and then add layers of colour. It achieves the same effect, in my opinion, as black-basing and works especially well in giving the impression of fading to the plane.

I also took a stab a mixing my own Azure Blue using a formula for Tamiya that seems to have become a standard for many modelers.It may have come out a bit more purple than I would have liked, but then again from what I have read, there was quite a variance from one plane to the next because of how it was applied.

[Blitz23]

Looking good to me!

[iSteve]

I’ve tried a few different methods of masking for camouflage and thought I would attempt something new. Tamiya (yes, Tamiya owns my soul) has this flexible masking tape for doing curves so I bought the three sizes available and tried it out on this kit. It didn’t go so well. Plan B: blue tack. It went much better.

I then overlaid wax paper and trimmed off the areas I needed. The tack made trimming easy as you can sink your blade into it without harming the surface of the model.

Then you just spray on your second colour. Using the same colour layering technique I was able to preserve the depth and texture I wanted to my paint job.

I kinda missed taking a few photos before decaling and clear coating, but you get the idea and it moves the project report along nicely.

I was really happy with how uniform the edge of the camo was in all areas and it worked beautifully around complex surfaces.

The Airfix decals were a bit thick, but with repeated applications of MicroSol got into the panel lines nicely. The clear coat blended them into the surface and eliminated any decal transfer medium.

 

Edited December 25, 2016 by iSteve
Typo

[iSteve]

All in all, it was good project. It’s the first Spitfire I’ve built in ages so there was a bit of a learning curve to source all the different aspects of the plane itself. Perhaps one of the more challenging parts was the radio antennae. EZ-line made it much easier.

This was my second Airfix kit of their new tooled kits and am looking forward to many more builds of them.

[Hosbabon]

Looks great ! Enjoyed your build thread too. Im just approaching the end of my own Mk.Vb, having gone with the airfix boxed scheme.

[iSteve]

On 26/12/2016 at 13:03, Hosbabon said:

Looks great ! Enjoyed your build thread too. Im just approaching the end of my own Mk.Vb, having gone with the airfix boxed scheme.

Thanks! I've been watching yours too and have to say you're doing a great job. Maybe next time we should build simultaneously and compare notes as we go

[vppelt68]

1 hour ago, iSteve said:

....build simultaneously and compare notes as we go

Actually, isn't that the very essence of group building 😁

Well done, you both! V-P

[iSteve]

7 hours ago, vppelt68 said:

Actually, isn't that the very essence of group building 😁

Well done, you both! V-P

Next time I'll start at the beginning of the build

Thanks V-P!