Well. my kit arrived yesterday and after going over everything in detail, I decided the first one would be like Dmitry's - the early early with the Watts prop. I'm doing K9795, the very early 19 Squadron airplane with the yellow-surround insignia in all positions.

I started work on the kit today, doing it on breaks from working on the current manuscript (thank you thank you Mr. Schmuckerberg for the screw-up that locked me out of @#$%$#@! FleeceBlock and threw B'rer Rabbit into the briar patch, I now have plenty of time to keep up the work on the book and also work on a model) and as of this evening it is fully assembled and ready to start painting tomorrow. There were no difficulties encountered. The exhaust had the short-shot glitch, easily solved with a bit of C-A glue and a sanding stick. No other molding glitches on the kit.

The only "glitch" is that those gun barrels you put in the wing should be attached at their rear with C-A glue to prevent capillary action with liquid glue screwing up the look of the gun ports, but that's more a MIP (modeler-induced problem) than any problem with the kit.

Overall my experience parallels what Dmitry has reported. If you have familiarity with the earlier Eduard Spitfire kits, you will have no difficulty here. Just be certain to pick what your end result is going to be at the outset and pay close attention to the assembly callouts that are for your specific choice, because there are a lot of those.

Overall, you're not going to want to throw out your Tamiya or Airfix Spitfire Is, but after doing one of these you're not going to want to buy any more of the others if you're a Spit boffin and want accuracy and good research. None of the things that made me say "Dagnabbit!" while doing the Tamiya Spitfire are to be found with this kit.

The surface detail is so close to real that at a distance of about 5-6 inches in daylight light, you can only see the rivet detail if light is playing on the surface. Guess what, from about 20 feet away with a real one, the effect is the same! The surface detail is just stunning - petite and accurate.

Overall, the kit lives up to the hype, the result if you take your time and study the instructions will be a stunner. It's definitely The Best Spitfire I In Any Scale.

And I think I will be trying that "marbling" preshading on this.

Oh, and Dmitry - don't worry about your "Dark Earth" color. According to the research Fundekals did on Spitfire Is for their great decal sheets, there wasn't an "exact" shade of Dark Earth during Spitfire I production. One little thing I didn't know before doing the Tamiya Spitfire using the Fundekals is that the airplanes were painted in a "smooth" finish, not a flat finish as later marks were. It should be a semi-matt "satin" on the final finish.

One other thing that was "new news" to me in the Fundekal research is that on the black/white undersides, the entire landing gear - inside/outside the door, the gear leg, gear well, etc., was the surrounding color. And when those airplanes were repainted sky underneath, the black/white on the interior door, gear leg and well was left unpainted.

A gloss coat was applied. I will leave it at least for a day before proceeding with the decals. Should be the PN-M option.

Hello again Dmitry. @starfar
I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your Spitfire adventure. So much that I will most likely end up finishing the ones I had previously started during the 100 Years of the RAF group build and possibly adding three more to the mix. I'll add the new tool 1/48 scale Tamiya Spitfire Mk1 as now I have two of them, and a Seafire Mk III that my friend Jaime Carreon gave me during his last visit. That one is a Special Hobby kit and it has an interesting odd colored tail section that was replaced in the field.

I dug these photos out that were taken during WW2. These are actual color photographs that were for the "LIFE" magazine.

These pictures are very good, as they show the shine that was common on the Spitfire's finish after it had been wet sanded, to eliminate the over spray and smooth the surface, in an attempt to squeeze the last ounce of speed by reducing drag. They also show you how these colors "could" have looked. Granted this shiny look would most likely fade away after some exposure to the elements after some time. But this should give you a very good idea as to how the plane actually looked. Another thing to keep in mind is the life expectancy of the airframe. Many of these planes were lost with very little time on the clock.

I think that you are close enough with your colors. I would be happy as they are if it was my model.

The marbling technique does look interesting... and I hope that you enjoy these photos.

I have a lot of information posted like this on the build journals of the Spitfires. I have copies of the original documents that specify how the finish should be done, as far as filling in over the rivets in the leading edge of the wing and so on. Most of the information I posted was obtained from the late Edgar Brooks, who was a Spitfire wizard.
He was very instrumental in uncovering the actual facts about the type, and had the documentation to prove what he stated.

I am looking forward to seeing your next installment. I really like how you are building your plane. It looks magnificent.

I also hope these pictures and the other information I have provided you are of help. Take care my friend and stay safe... and thank you again for the inspiration to finish what I have started with my remaining Spitfires.

Here's a heads-up from my build:

The Eduard decals continue to be "problematic." If you have done the P-51s, you will be familiar with the problem. Eduard now makes their own decals and they are too thin and are not fully opaque. Particularly with the color yellow, which starts from a weird shade to begin with and gets worse when you put it over a dark surface (like Dark Earth/Dark Green). They make the decals thin to go over all their surface detail, but if you have tried other decals on their new kits, you know it's not a problem to get them to settle in.

I am doing K9795, the early/early Spitfire I with the yellow-surround national insignia on fuselage and upper wing. When I applied the decals yesterday, the result was a sick chartreusy color for the yellow. I was about to strip down and start over with a different alternative, when I remembered that Airfix did this option on a sheet in their Spitfire I releases. Dug through the decal dungeon and found the sheet. Not only is the yellow right, but so is the pre-war red and blue (not the wartime dark blue and brick red that's on the Eduard sheet). And they went down without problem over the faulty Eduard decals. So, if you want to do this option, find that sheet in you Airfix kits.

It appears that the individual markings - serials, letter IDs, the upper wing insignia, lower wing on light backgrounds, etc., will be OK, but the yellow markings are not good. Fortunately, everybody has lots of RAF national insignia in their decal stash, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. There's another good alternative which is to get one of the great Fundekals Spitfire I sheets, which are perfect. Lots of great research, printed by Cartograf.

For those who might worry this is a message from the "Town Crier," the topic of the poor quality of Eduard decals is currently The Hot Topic on every FB modeling page devoted to Spitfires and P-51s (with the Iwo Jima P-51 release), and nobody has a good word to say about the kit sheets.

I sent a long message to my Eduard contact about this. Hopefully they will get the message and fix this. Just adding another layer to the decals and getting a real yellow would probably solve all.

Hi Tom. I just received my Spitfire kit and was curious about the decals after I examined them. I accidentally scratched one with a finger nail. They seem very fragile and I agree, the yellow is not right.

Ok, about the new Eduard decals in two words - Buy Replacement.

Unfortunately, the quality is below the acceptable level. The film is very thin, so you have such effects:

Also, because the film is too thin, it's deadly hard to position elements bigger than 5x5mm. Black lines on the wings (by the way - what is the proper name for them?) is mainly impossible to make straight. I've spent the whole evening just to make that 4 lines and two roundels:

And there is also another issue, which is not seen until you apply the decals - the print offset:

You can't see that white on the sheet. You can clearly see it on the kit.

Use replacement, or/and use masks. It's not the case when you can ask for replacement, because looks like Eduard can't produce it normally - P-51, F-104, now Spitfire all have the same issues. Fighting the poor quality decals is not what the scale modeling is about.

Here's a photo of my model completed a couple hours ago. Full review at Modeling Madness on Thursday (reprinted here later with more photos).

As to the question regarding the cockpit interior, if you've built any other Eduard Spitfire, you've seen the interior. Other than the "wobble stick" for retraction and the brake handle.

Now on to the second one!

And thanks to Dmitry for taking "point" and finding all the punji pits.

1 attached image. Click to enlarge.

That offset on the decals is intentional Dmitry - they are trying to recreate the look of overpainted larger insignia, replaced with the smaller roundels. In 1939-early 40, they went through a ton of changes in insignia size as they seemed to issue a new requirement every other week. The old "Profile Publication" on Spitfire Camouflage covered this in detail, even quoting the change orders. It led to some interesting combinations of small wing roundels and oversize fuselage roundels and color-reversed fin flashes, etc. But anyway, that is not a "bug" on that decal you used - it's a feature.