My Surprise Prize Airfix’s new Spit Mk Vb
I was So surprised to hear from Martin informing me that i had been awarded Junes Random award its very rare i come up trumps with anything like this so Thanks iModeler
I will try to get it on the bench as soon as i can just got to get a few other bits finished first
once again Thanks
Mark
Congratulations Mark! Ooooh, that's going to be a nice one, eh what? 🙂
Congratulations, a well deserved win and an awesome prize!
congratulations!
Nice one Mark. Enjoy the build mate.
OK...photo shoot's over - back to work in that back yard garden. 🙂
Seriously - well done, Mark...always good work.
Enjoy yours winnings Mark.
I see shadows, things blooming & no rain in the picture. I thought you lived in England?
congratulations and good build !
Gotta love getting presents in the mail. Enjoy it Mark it looks to be a great kit.
Speaking of great kit, you appear to have a well turned out back yard. What part of the Empire are you in? 😉
HI RICK, THANKS IM IN THE UK AND THE BACK YARD WAS A LITTLE UNTIDY AS YOU CAN SEE I HAVE A COUPLE OF BIG BUCKETS OUT AND THE HOSE PIPE I DONT KNOW IF YOU MADE OUT THE SMALL FISH POND BEHIND ME I WAS IN THE PROCESS OF CHANGING SOME WATER BECAUSE WHILE WE WERE AWAY ON VACATION IN THE GOOD OLD US OF A
THERE WAS A POWER CUT WHICH TRIPED ALL MY FILTRATION SYSTEMS WHICH RESULTED IN THE SAD DEMISE OF A FEW OF MY KOI CARP 🙁
AND YOUR RIGHT I LOVE GETTING PRESENTS IN THE POST ESPECIALLY UNEXPECTED ONES
TAKE CARE RICK
REGARDS
MARK
Congratulations Mark
Eric
Well that's pretty nice for randomness... I'd go buy a lottery ticket too just in case
Congratulations! That's my kind of surprise!
Congratulations, Mark, well deserved.
The kit arrived Friday. I spent most of that afternoon and most of Saturday assembling it, which is now completed. Here's a few observations:
Yes, it is the best Spitfire V in any scale. The designers definitely bought themselves an Eduard Spitfire IX and went through it, looking at how to do all that detail "the Airfix way," i.e., not so damn fiddly. With six parts for the wheel well and gear leg base, you cannot tell the difference between that and the uber-fiddly Eduard gear wells, once it's assembled. There's a lot of that kind of simplification throughout. Airfix definitely understands KISS.
Fit is excellent, I didn't use any putty anywhere. But the fit is VERY precise, so you have to be sure each part is cleaned up of extraneous remains of sprue gates, etc. I suspect most of these early kits are going to be slightly warped (some perhaps more than others) like mine was, but things can get straightened out easily, just take the time to hold it in position.
There is something different about the plastic. It has that smell, sort of like one of the Crappy Hawk kits, and Tenax didn't immediately glue things together. I ended up using cyanoacrylate and Tamiya extra-thin cement, and had to rubber band or tape everything as i assembled the fuselage and wing, and then the wing to the fuselage, to get it to set up nice and solid. I really hope model companies aren't leaving polystyrene behind, since that's going to make for a lot of problems if they don't have some label somewhere letting modelers know what's what.
The weakest point is the clear parts. They are not really all that clear - there's a good bit of distortion. If you pose the canopy open, that will solve it. The early windscreen doesn't look quite right, but it's acceptable when placed in position. I am using the kit glass for this first review kit, but will likely use Falcon/Squadron canopies in the future (yes, there will be others, I said it was a good kit, right?). I've checked and they do fit.
I can't figure out why there is no panel detail on the lower side of the ailerons, but that can be scribed in if you want it.
I have no idea why they included the wing bomb racks and bombs, since the Spitfire Vb never used them, but that's additional stuff for the parts box. There are catapult points included, so you can do a Seafire Ib if you want to scribe in the A-frame arrester hook.
Bottom line, this is not the easy-assembling Spitfire XII or Seafire XVII kits, but with careful fitting (I think Airfix's Indian plastic company got in a rush, because there is minor warping throughout, particularly with the wing, but the plastic is soft enough to get that fixed) the result is going to be the next-best Spitfire to the Eduard kit, without all that fershlugginah fakakte rivet detail you'd never see on the real thing (yes, I have been up close and personal around several Spitfires out at Planes of Fame, and didn't see any rivets from further away than 2 feet - 1/2 inch in 1/48).
Definitely a bargain at the price. Hopefully they will follow up with a Spitfire Vc.
Thanks Tom, i didn't really take an in-depth look at the kit but i will sure take on board your comments especially regarding the warped parts.
I have just got the new 1/24 Typhoon and mine seems to have a few similar problems but i put it down to there being quite a lot of plastic being crammed into the box and a few bits are going to get a little bent out of shape.
The one thing i have had to do straight away was to order a new set of clear parts the ones in the first batches are terrible the canopy parts are very distorted i dont know how true it is but i was told by my supplier that this was the reason for delaying its earlier release, so airfix new about the problem didn't fix the problem and released it anyway, so now all the people who bought one of the early releases has to p**s about ordering new parts i think thats pretty c**p for a kit costing around £100
Cheers Tom
Mark
Very nice Mark. Well done 🙂