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Escort to Le Bourget: Eduard 1/48 Spitfire Mk 1a


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Originally I intended to build this kit sitting on the ground, much as the real thing was photographed on the apron at Le Bourget airport, France, in May 1940. However, I felt that the main wheel struts’ attachments to the airframe were too dodgy. (Actually I did not understand how they were supposed to attach.) So I built it in flight mode with a home made transparent disc replacing the kit’s propeller blades and a pilot in the cockpit. The pilot came from elsewhere; the kit not being supplied with one.

 

To see more photos and description, click the link in my signature and then click Escort to Le Bourget (indented under World War 2 plastic models part 1). That should comply with forum rule limiting links to personal web sites while avoiding duplicating content on different servers.

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24 minutes ago, Lootenant Aloominum said:

 

 

Originally I intended to build this kit sitting on the ground, much as the real thing was photographed on the apron at Le Bourget airport, France, in May 1940. However, I felt that the main wheel struts’ attachments to the airframe were too dodgy. (Actually I did not understand how they were supposed to attach.) So I built it in flight mode with a home made transparent disc replacing the kit’s propeller blades and a pilot in the cockpit. The pilot came from elsewhere; the kit not being supplied with one.

 

To see more photos and description, click the link in my signature and then click Escort to Le Bourget (indented under World War 2 plastic models part 1). That should comply with forum rule limiting links to personal web sites while avoiding duplicating content on different servers.

Please post some more pictures of you model here on BM if you want to use it. Its not just a looky site to direct people to your own website

 

thx

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34 minutes ago, Julien said:

Please post some more pictures of you model here on BM if you want to use it. Its not just a looky site to direct people to your own website

I am happy to comply with the rules where they make sense, but duplicating content unnecessarily seems to me a waste of World Wide Web space. Why should folks not look it up on my web site? I could understand the objection if I were selling something or making money from it somehow, but I am not.

Here is another photo anyway:
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Hanging lines are edited out of the photo.

I brush-painted it with acrylic paints from the Hataka RAF D-Day and Battle of Britain set in their ‘Blue line’ range, which is optimized for brush rather than spray. These paints seem to me to match the real colors more closely than others I have used.

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6 minutes ago, Lootenant Aloominum said:

but duplicating content unnecessarily seems to me a waste of World Wide Web space

? You're (hot)linking the images from your own blog, so no space other than your own used. 

 

--

Nice work on the oil streaks though. Merlins are messy :)

 

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55 minutes ago, Lootenant Aloominum said:

I am happy to comply with the rules where they make sense, but duplicating content unnecessarily seems to me a waste of World Wide Web space. Why should folks not look it up on my web site? I could understand the objection if I were selling something or making money from it somehow, but I am not.
 

Because BM is not here just to point people to your website, either put the photos on here for people to see or dont post expecting people to goto your site.

 

Thx

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1 hour ago, alt-92 said:

? You're (hot)linking the images from your own blog, so no space other than your own used. 

I certainly attempted to do that, but the URL does not look the same as that for the photo on my web site, so I assumed it made a copy. Maybe I got that wrong, in which case, my apologies for not understanding the complexities of URLs well enough.

 

Here are the rest of the photos and text. (Duplicating text is so minor I don't object to that.)

 

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The finished model has a 9.5 inch (24 cm) span and is 7.5 inches (19 cm) nose-to-tail.

 

This was before the 1940 summer combat over southern England that became known as the battle of Britain. At this stage, the undersides of RAF day fighters were painted black, white, and silver. The unusually small size and extreme wing-tip positioning of the under-wing roundels imparts additional character to these particular aircraft.

 

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On May 16th, 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew to Paris, France, to meet with his French counterpart Paul Reynaud. Four Spitfires escorted Churchill’s De Havilland Flamingo on that occasion. The preceding photo shows two of the Spitfires and their pilots on the left.

 

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GR-U foreground and GR-S, the subject of my model, behind

 

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The edge of the transparent disc propeller casts unrealistic shadows, as do the hanging lines, naturally.

 

Build

 

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Less than two centimetres separate the instrument panel from the seat harness.

 

All this detail was hidden by the pilot when I decided late in construction to build it wheels-up with a pilot in the cockpit.
:(

 

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Having said that, as you might discern, I had some trouble getting things aligned, so that fault at least was hidden.

 

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Like the Airfix Mk V in the same scale, I could not get the cockpit tub to fit without sawing off an angle from the bottom. Along with the cut off bits were the rudder pedals. The sawing operation caused the assembly to disassemble. I was unable to re-attach the horizontal strut at the top in the rear part of the cockpit. In addition, the reflector sight (visible in an earlier photo) hit the floor and is in kit parts heaven, as is the light that should go on top of the fuselage behind the mast.

 

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Paint masks come with the kit.

 

The canopy paint masks are an exact fit and well worth the effort of positioning correctly. To be able to see the demarcations — to be able to peel them off the rectangular backing paper — I spread thin black paint over it, then wiped it off.

 

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Box e-painting by Piotr Forkasiewicz

 

The box art depicts another of the seven decal options included in the kit, which also comes with several different canopy styles, both open and closed.

 

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