Oh no! you say, "Eduard never made a Spitfire VII." Indeed, you are correctamundo. No Spitfire VII ever.
However, it's not hard to get one. Given I had been robbing various Eduard Spitfire kits of various parts for various things, and always believing in "waste not, want not," I had the wherewithal to come up with an Eduard Spitfire VII.
Other people have done Spitfire VIIs by using the Eduard Spitfire VIII, sticking the long wingtips on and painting it as one. Wrong! Wrong!
The Spitfire VIII OOB has an AeroVee carb intake air filter. The Spitfire VII didn't - it had the same small carb intake as the early Spitfire IXc.
And so this kit has a lower wing from a Spitfire IXc (Early) with the undernose part and the small intake, mated to the Spitfire VIII kit. (And then the early Spitfire IXc kit will swap an upper wing with a Spitfire Vc to get the late Spitfire IXc with the narrow cannon fairing, and the large AeroVee filter, while the early Spitfire IXc wing will go to the Vc - are you sufficiently confused?)
Then there's the different rear glass, which is "deeper" than standard. I did that with the "straight" canopy of a Spitfire I off the extra clear parts sprue, cut to size. Easy conversion. Finally, there's the pressurization intake on the right side of the cowling. I took that and the extended resin tips from an Ultracast conversion set for a Hasegawa Spitfire IX, which fit perfectly.
And then, when I found the attached photo of a Spitfire VII, I took the deep gas tank from a Spitfire Vc kit and used it here with this.
It'll be finished as Wing Commander Peter Brothers' airplane, using the personal markings decals from Spitfire: Aces of the Empire.
All in all, easy. It took an afternoon of assembly of all the different parts to get to being ready for paint.
5 attached images. Click to enlarge.
