Airfix Spitfire Mk Ia A01071B 1/72

[brinjal]

So, I finally finished my 2nd build - 1/72 Spitfire Mk Ia from Airfix.

 

Camouflage - Type B, handpainted

 

Off the bat, I quite like how my pilot looked. black boots and XF17 Sea blue. As for cockpit, I settled on XF71 IJN cockpit green with black head rest. painted the scribes on the fuselage halves with black. I used lemon yellow plus a drop of brown on the Mae West. Not exactly accurate but I suppose its ok for this scale. While doing this, I just can't seem to get the scenes of Fortis 1 and Fortis 2 from Dunkirk out of my head 😂

 

 

 

Next, comes the horrific tamiya recipe of 1:1 flat earth and red brown for dark earth from one of their spitfire instructions. I was on a hurry when I had the chance to drop by a hobby store in the next town, so i had to slowly rub off the wrong paints, and the fact that I had a long week at work means I left it too long. On the second pic, the result of a little experiment by mixing cockpit green and flat earth can be seen on the starboard wing, which is what I used in the end. 

 

 

 

Everything else afterwards went rather uneventful. Overall fit was satisfactory. I only added a little putty near the fuselage joint at the cockpit, and port wing to fuselage. Plenty of stencils in decals, I had the most difficulty with the long upper wing lines, and the red tapes at the gun ports. But its just me being clumsy. The decals were very easy to deal with, as long as the water that they were soaked in were warm, they came out soft, a drop of water on the target area greatly assist in placing them, and they'll start to really stick down after a couple of minutes. Usually after about half an hour, I applied Mr Mark Setter, the decals really conform well. I also learned it the hard way on the upper port wing roundel, that applying the setter too early, it melts away. I touched it up with sea blue. I know the cutting along panel lines technique, one of you guys commented on my last project, but I tried it on one of the smaller decals, it was a mess. 

 

I think the best way to describe how good the decals were, was that the underside port wing roundel, it has a pitot tube in the middle. I didn't realise it at first, but I simply lift the decal up, cut it with a scissors and place it back on. the fact that its round and identical makes it easy anyway. so the ring was joined, but there was still a little bit of the decal that didn't find ground to stick to, the setting solution did it for me. 

 

 

 

And oh, the canopy. I read one of the previous builds here that the canopy has a bad fit, i have the same problem. I basically cut off the rear frame, close to 2mm fit it in. 

 

 

The starboard fuselage roundel looked like it has a bit silvering, actually its because of the surface which had old paint on. My bad. But I like how the decals sink into the panel lines. 

 

 

So all in all, a rather easy build, most of the time spent was reading here and looking at photos. but i messed up the paintings, plus the horror of the reddish dark earth. Even then I'm still happy how it turned out in the end. I guess Spitfires just cannot look bad! 

 

cheers

[Bertie McBoatface]

That was building a Spitfire the long way round. Well done for persistence!

[Pete Robin]

Well done for sticking with it. It beats my 2nd effort by a very long way. Seem to remember glue all over the job and horrible blobby paintwork. Keep on doing what you're doing and just enjoy it.

Regards

Pete