Seafire Mk.III by Eduard (with a little bit of help!)
I often get the inspiration to make a model from reading a book about the type: in this instance, "They gave me a Seafire" by Cdr. R 'Mike' Crosley, which gave me a Seafire too! And so a start was made. I'd left it too late to get the Special Hobby kit of the Mk.III, so a bit of scratch building on an Eduard Spitfire Vc had to be done. There were a few alterations needed: a four bladed prop, a twelve stack exhaust, the larger filtered aero vee carburettor intake, the arrestor hook & the wing folds needed to be scribed in. My spares box provided most of the parts needed & I scratch built the rest. Markings came from Aeromaster & represent a Mk.III of 899 Sqn. HMS Khedive, in September 1944, during the invasion of southern France. Paints as usual these days were Vallejo & I tried out SMS washes fairly sparingly & found them excellent. Accordingl to my researches, The F.A.A often removed the catapult spools & associated hardware from later Seafires, as they had no trouble taking off without assistance, which saved me some trouble & saved the aircraft some unneeded weight as well. Anyway, here she is: I hope you like it!
Nicely done - looks great!
Thanks Greg.
Excellent result and great modifications to the original Vc mold, Tony!
Congratulations!
Thanks Spiros. I had a lot of help from the web, but it seemed like most of the photos were of deck landing mishaps!
Very nice build, Tony @tony-prince
Well done
Thank you John.
Nice work, Tony. I’ve been thinking of kitbashing the Eduard Vc with SH Seafire parts.
Thanks John. A suggestion if I may: The Eduard Vc has everything you might need for a Mk.III as long as you can scribe the wingfold (I used the outer wing panel from an Airfix Seafire Mk17 as a guide) & make a template for the arrestor hook panel. The exhausts came from an Eduard Spit Mk.IX, as did the spinner & prop. The carburettor scoop was from an old ICM Mk.IX, but the shorter scoops were also used. I didn't bother with the catapult spools as apparently the Seafire was quite capable of taking off under it's own power & the spools were removed to save weight & add a few more mph. This might give you two Seafires instead of one?
Really cool, Tony (@tony-prince). I have always liked the FAA camo.
Thanks George; glad you like it.
That is a really nice Spit.. err Seafire and a relatively painless modification. Thanks for sharing.
Very nice result. Looks great!