1/72 Tamiya Spitfire Vb

by Phil Hastie

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Many things have been written about the superb Tamiya 1/72 scale World War II aircraft kits and because of that I won't go into the kit too much here. I will say that apart from a few minor changes this kit is built straight from the box, and all you need to build it is a tube or jar of your favourite glue because the use of filler is very minimal.

About this model, I came into possession of a set of decals of mainly Royal Australian Air Force pilots or Australian pilots in the RAF through an Australian company called PD Decals many years ago and when I got this kit when it was first released I thought that they would go well on it. One of the options was for FLTLT Brendan (Paddy) Finnucane whilst he was a member of 452(RAAF)SQN RAF in Sept 1941, it is this option which I used to decorate this kit in.  I started the kit about two years ago. The kit went together extremely easy and my first attempt at spraying camouflage patterns freehand in 1/72 scale left a little to be desired as can be seen by the large feather demarcation between colours on the upper surface.  Paints used were Gunze for the Dark Green on the upper surface and Medium Sea Grey on the lower surface, Humbrol Ocean Grey for the upper surface, Humbrol Cockpit green for the cockpit, Gunze Sky for the fuselage band and spinner, Tamiya Matt Black for the prop.

The first changes I made, were to open the door so that the great interior can be seen and to cut the canopy into three pieces. The second change to be made was to find a spare Spitfire prop that looked like an early Rotol prop and blunt spinner. As luck would have it lurking on my model desk is a partially completed SMER/Heller Mk Vc (to be completed as a RAAF Natural Metal Mk Vc) with the right shaped spinner and prop from it's original incarnation as a Mk Vb. This prop was sacrificed to the Tamiya kit for it's own benefit, or it would have ended up in the spares collection never to be seen again.

Click on images below to see larger images

So now we have the kit ready for the decals.  Here the fun begins, having been bitten before with aftermarket decals I used the kit National and general markings decals and only the unit and personal markings from the after market set, basically because that is all that was supplied with the set.  I actually got one set of SQN markings onto the plane before they came apart, the other side set started to break up in the water but stayed together long enough for me to get them on the aircraft and into position.  The Shamrock marking for underneath the windshield shattered as soon as they hit the water. After trying for months to get a new set and failing, I set the kit aside.  In March this year I managed to find a set at one of the stalls at the Australian Airshow Downunder.  So now I had a new set of decals complete with the Shamrock.  Having already suffered a major setback the first thing I did was to spray on a coat of SuperDecal Finish, and then second and third coats just to make sure that they would stay together.  So it's into the water and bingo it stayed together until I got it onto the model then it started to come apart, however I managed to get it together and in position.  Two days later its dry and I paint the inside of the outline Emerald Green as per instructions, let the paint dry and we're ready for the second Shamrock to go over the top of the painted first one.  Smart as I'm not, I decide that a coat of Future is called for to seal the second decal against cracking. So after another three days I carefully place the decal in the water and then when it's loose on the paper, we move it to the aircraft and "Shatter", not only that, the water gets into the first decal and breaks it up from underneath the green paint and now I'm back to square one and a hand painted Shamrock.

Hope you enjoy the kit, which made it's public debut in May 05 at the ACT Scale Modellers Society Annual Championships, hand painted Shamrock and all.

Phil

Photos and text © by Phil Hastie