1/48 Gloster Meteor - Airfix

[TeaWeasel]

My main blog with all my current projects really isn't gaining much traction so thought I'd split them into separate, more manageable threads.

 

I never had the Meteor particularly high on my list of future projects. My main area of interest are jets from that era, 50's - 80's, but more along the lines of the Lightning, Buccanner and TSR-2. Getting back into the hobby was made easier with the Airfix Mystery Box, which included this and a MiG-17 and Curtis Warhawk, both in 1-72. Both of those were fun builds but I miss the added complexity you get with 1/48.

 

This is the first 2010's-era kit I've bought from Airfix and the I'm really taken aback with the optional extras they've added. The kit allows you a multitude of options such as having the gun bays open or shut, as well as having the engines on show, or even on a maintenance rack, removed from the aircraft. I didn't want to go overboard with the aftermarket parts, in this case I've just gone for a set of Xtradecal transfers to replicate a particular look, WL135

 

 

Something about this design I just love. The schemes included were just silver and I was getting a bit sick of that, wanted the standard camo look. The lightning bolt and blue/yellow chequer just finishes that look so I'll be going for that.

 

The cockpit looked rather complex at first but fits together like a glove. Around 5 parts to make the tub, another 4 for the seat and it's pretty much there.

 

 

Paint-wise I've kept it rather simple; a few photos show a generic black cockpit so that's what I've gone for. Simple basecoat of black with a light drybrush with Citadel grey, and then I'll mark out a few little details based on any available photos. Seat isn't yet glued in, so that'll be done separately. 

 

 

While that was drying I started the wing subassembly, mainly the undercarriage bays. This was nice and easy, just a few small panels creating a box structure on each side, with a couple of trusses that'll also support the exhausts. Since the photo was taken I've also drilled the holes for the rockets, same as the image of WL135 above. Wherever it's a real image or not I don't really care, it's a good enough reference for me. 

 

I also had a look at the lovely engine subassemblies in the kit. With this kit you get both engines with the option to have them uncovered within the wing, or separate on a...gurney thing... I decided to keep my options open and just have it all unglued, so I can move it about as I wish. 

 

I based the engine on this perfect example on display at Hendon.

 

 

And after a little while came up with this.

 

 

The gurney is still to be painted, might go with an industrial yellow for that as a nice bit of contrast, but overall I'm really happy. The cylinders were Alclad Hi-Shine with Vallejo Gloss Black, and a Citadel black wash to accentuate the grill detail. Still have to attach the end-piece and might pick out some other details but it's a nice little eyecatcher in itself.

 

Next step is to paint up the seat and get the cockpit finished before I move onto the fuselage. 

Thanks for reading, all comments appreciated.  

 

 

[stever219]

The Meteor's a pretty good kit but has a few minor niggles.

 

The semi-conical fairing below the rear fuselage needs to come off; this was only installed on F(TT)8s and the nose can be a pain to fit neatly.  Please note that RAF Meteors didn't carry the underwing rocket projectiles; only the RAAF used them operationally as far as I can remember.  For WL135 you'll need the later style canopy (no solid rear section(, the larger diameter 'deep breather" engine intakes and the later ailerons with two tabs.

[TeaWeasel]

1 hour ago, stever219 said:

The Meteor's a pretty good kit but has a few minor niggles.

 

The semi-conical fairing below the rear fuselage needs to come off; this was only installed on F(TT)8s and the nose can be a pain to fit neatly.  Please note that RAF Meteors didn't carry the underwing rocket projectiles; only the RAAF used them operationally as far as I can remember.  For WL135 you'll need the later style canopy (no solid rear section(, the larger diameter 'deep breather" engine intakes and the later ailerons with two tabs.

Thanks for the tips. I initially irked a bit at having to fork out for more aftermarket parts, but they seem to all be included luckily enough. 

[stever219]

28 minutes ago, TeaWeasel said:

Thanks for the tips. I initially irked a bit at having to fork out for more aftermarket parts, but they seem to all be included luckily enough. 

Airfix seem to have covered most of the easily spotted airframe changes that occurred throughout the life of the Mk. 8; with what’s in the box you can model just about any of them from a very early VZ-serialled Jet right up to the last WL-serialled example.  I’m hoping that we’ll get a RAuxAF reboxing next year (plenty of pretty colour schemes in High Speed Silver and camouflage) or maybe a European, Middle East or Latin American repop.

 

One thing I forgot earlier: the ventral tank in the kit also has fittings for the target tug role.  On my fighters I’ve just installed one or other part to blank off the locating hole then sanded flush.

[TeaWeasel]

So I've rather blitzed ahead with the Meteor and missed out on some photo opportunities but here's a quick update.

 

I didn't want to go all-out with aftermarket parts for this one but when it came to apply the decal for the cockpit dials it all went a bit south. I've always hated putting this particular decal on as in my experience it never goes right, always just gets crinkled and ruined even after quite a liberal amount of decal softener. I scrapped that and just bought the Eduard upgrade, mainly just for the dials but thought I'd have a look at the other details.

 

 

Very happy with how the dials turned out, as I was a little worried about getting it aligned correctly. I keep saying this but I still can't believe the detail in these parts. 

 

 

Another angle and you can see the throttle handles and such that were also included, which I've deviated slightly and painted red just to highlight. The handles themselves were a bit of a nightmare requiring multiple folds to get the thickness right. The red bit inbetween the two handles is just a bit of sprue, heated then cut to shape. I may apply a tiny bit of putty just to even the finish out. 

 

The seat is still in progress. I thought I'd have a try at the seatbelts included in the Eduard set, but had already glued the seatbelt part included with the Airfix kit in place, so I've been filing and shaving them away ready for the Eduard ones. Never attempted photo-etch seatbelts so any advice would be welcome.

 

 

Once the cockpit was done the rest went together very quickly. Bit of difficulty with the fuselage halves not lining up correctly so a fair degree of sanding was required on the top seam. Once that was done I was on a bit of a roll and attached it to the lower wing halves which now have the exhausts attached ready for engines.

 

The tailplane is also in progress; next steps will be to finish that off and decide on the engine configuration. as I'm still deciding wherever to have one completely closed and the other on display, but if I do that then it can't be placed in the engine bay afterwards as it's just slightly too big to fit. Any suggestions?

[TeaWeasel]

Last few details on the fuselage went together with no issues. The nose on the other hand was a bit of a bugger, around 1.5mm too small. Wasn't too bad once the filler was applied, but getting it nice and square on the fuselage in the first place took a while. 

 

With that done, the undercoat went on. Decided to go for grey instead of my usual black, for two reasons:

• I'm looking at trying the preshading again which worked well on my 1/72 P-40 Warhawk
• I had a can of grey going and was too lazy to go get black.

Once that had dried I started the preshade layer. 

 

 

 

Overall I'm rather satisfied with the result. Once this clears up I'll go back over any lines I've missed, but I did find it quite difficult once you start getting the shakes. With that in mind I may go back over and clear up the lines with more grey.

 

Paints have been ordered from Airfix. I used the Hobby Colour Converter app to find any acrylic substitutes, but the Vallejo grey it suggested was too dark for my tastes. I managed to get the green in acrylic but the yellow and grey are the classic Humbrol tinlets. Feels a bit weird to be using those again but with that in mind, what would be the best way to use them? Is there a particular order or extra steps you have to take when using both acrylic and enamels together?

 

Thanks all, comments appreciated. 

[TeaWeasel]

Well it's definitely been a while. I took a step back from this particular project for a bit but have made some progress with the basecoats. 

 

Since I did the preshading of the Meteor I've honed my skills a bit and realised that it's a bit too stark for my liking, so I went back over with a coat of grey to try to make it more subtle. 

 

 

Ignore those blobs on the wings, that's just blutack holding the engine covers on. I then masked it off and went over the underside with Tamiya X-11, which is becoming my silver of choice. Went on really nicely, little bit of overspray was tidied up once it had dried.

 

 

I've made a slight variation with the scheme in that the grey/silver border is a more gentle curve from the nose to the leading edge wing root, not really visible in the photos. I found this to be easier to mask off than the 90-degree curve in the real scheme, and I'd rather have it slightly off but neat than correct but messy. 

 

Next steps will be to mask off the tail and paint that up in yellow. I have a tin of Humbrol yellow in the correct shade but they sent me the enamel rather than the acrylic I asked for. Given my hesitance to use enamels I'll probably find the equivalent shade in Vallejo.

 

Thanks all,

Joe

 

 

[Biggles87]

Looking good so far, I like the underside representation of HSS. I have used Tamiya AS 12  Bare Metal Silver in the past but I’m on my last can and probably won’t get any more here so I might try X 11 next time.

I’ve heard that the nose fit was problematic but not because it was too small so I’ll store that away in the memory bank for when I start mine.

Star safe.

 

John

 

🇺🇦

[TeaWeasel]

16 hours ago, Biggles87 said:

Looking good so far, I like the underside representation of HSS. I have used Tamiya AS 12  Bare Metal Silver in the past but I’m on my last can and probably won’t get any more here so I might try X 11 next time.

I’ve heard that the nose fit was problematic but not because it was too small so I’ll store that away in the memory bank for when I start mine.

Star safe.

 

John

 

🇺🇦

 

Thanks, and the nose fit is a fraction too small, made worse by the fact that it's a pretty flat join with no real pins or flanges to connect it. Not an issue to be honest, just something to be careful for.

 

Joe

[TeaWeasel]

Little bit of progress this week. Gave the silver underside a couple of days to dry, then I moved onto the tail, probably the bit I was dreading the most as it's yellow. I'm sure anyone else can sympathise with the difficulty of painting yellow.

 

I started with Vallejo Dead White. I only discovered this shade recently, but it's a fantastic titanium-white that goes on very well. Once that had dried I tried Vallejo Medium Yellow but wasn't happy with this, it looked too neon whereas I wanted a fuller tone. I then tried Armypainter Phoenix Flames thinned down and after a couple of coats this was the result:

 

 

Granted, it's a little sloppy at the moment but the bulk of it has really come off well. The slight overspill at the bottom I don't care about as this area will be green anyway. The middle join will have to go back over in grey; I thought this bit would be yellow as well but I think the photos I used were inaccurate. I thought I'd fixed that seam as well so we'll have to sort that out before remasking for a grey coat. 

 

Thanks all, comments welcome,

Joe

 

[TeaWeasel]

After a lot of procrastination and delay I finally took the plunge and started applying the green. Similar to my Lightning F6 I used Tamiya XF-81, airbrushed with a little bit of Vallejo thinner. The tail was masked off with tape but the rest of the masking was achieved with this dedicated mask set from TopNotch.

 

Thoughts? I bought the masks for the Lightning from the same firm and they went on almost perfectly, just a little bit of touching-up required. These however were more difficult. The masks themselves are brilliant; they're easy to adjust, can be trimmed and have little to no overspill at all. Where this particular set went wrong however is that they don't seem to match the scheme on the packet exactly. The masks around the engines for example were rather difficult to apply as there isn't actually much guidance on the instructions on the correct positioning. A black and white outline of the plane showing the specific mask positions would be helpful in my eyes. 

 

 

Overall though, she's looking much nicer now. There are a few odd patches; the area near the rear of the starboard engine in the second pic needs redoing, this is a result of the masks not marching the pattern as I described earlier. In my haste I also forgot to redo that part of the tail in the previous post. 

 

Now the camo is out of the way I have much more of a motivation to actually get this one done.

 

 

 

 

 

[TeaWeasel]

For some reason I thought I had updated this one, might have too many projects on the go...

 

The first decals went on, and I couldn't help but apply the roundels and squadron markings first, just to add a bit of colour to the model.

 

 

 

The Xtradecals went on very nicely, no problems except that I have a quite a few sets leftover, so if anyone wants any Meteor squadron markings just let me know.

 

I also went over some areas with the MiG Shaders, was very impressed with the result on my MiG-21, but less so with the green one on here, really didn't do much. I'm also less happy with that gun hatch just to the lower-left of the ejection warning label but I suppose it's too late to change that now.

 

The engine is just there for the photo, there are a couple of parts to add if you want it mounted, which will be the next step.

 

Cheers,

Joe

 

[Lord Riot]

This is looking good! I hope mine turns out like this. Superb colours, and that engine looks amazing. 

[exdraken]

Looking great!!

I like the open engine bay! I alo left one open with mine

 

[TeaWeasel]

10 hours ago, exdraken said:

Looking great!!

I like the open engine bay! I alo left one open with mine

 

 

Cheers, being rather indecisive I thought best to have one engine on show, the other on the trolley with the bay for that one just sealed. 

 

22 hours ago, Lord Riot said:

This is looking good! I hope mine turns out like this. Superb colours, and that engine looks amazing. 

 

Thanks man, it was lucky there's a perfect example at Hendon, so was sure to get a few snaps last time I was there.