1/48 HASEGAWA SUPERMARINE SPITFIRE MK IX

Pilot Officer Max Collett, No. 485 Squadron RNZAF December 1944

Another spitfire, this time Hasegawa's MK IX. I know's to short and considered un-buildbale for that reason by some. Even even though it's to short it still (to my untrained eyes looks in proportion) so I chose to ignore that and just build it.

I chose an aircraft flown by Kiwi, Pilot Officer Max Collett as it had the C wing but with the 20mm cannons outboard and .50 Cals inboard (e wing armament?) I assume this was done in the field. Max Collett is still alive I believe and is involved with the 485 Sqn Association. I guess I could of asked him but typically I found this out to late in the piece. Info on 485 Sqn including a picture of this aircraft can be found HERE

The Kit

This was a pretty straight forward build, all the problems were of my own making. The  pictures to right show the cockpit, the decals for the instruments were punched out and applied individually, whilst this is time consuming I think it's worth the effort. One issue was what to do with the .303 gun chutes and hole sin the wings. I couldn't find any real evidence on what was done so I assumed the airframe fitters would have blanked off the cartridge ejection shuts and just used the patches for the wings.
 

I also used a Ultracast seat, exhausts and door. In my opinion Ultracast do the some of the best resin for World War II aircraft.  I alos added a piece of fine wire to each undercarriage leg for the brake lines.  For painting I masked the kit out with blu-tack then decide to use Gunze Masking agent. bad move as I found out that it reacts with acrylics (ammonia?). Shan't be doing that again.
 

Regarding the wing armament, I'm no Spitfire guru and am going of what was on the decal sheet. From it and what I found out via the net, the gun mod was done in the field, so the aircraft was initially delivered with the C wing armament of 2 cannon, 4 MG's.

Now this bit is my theory, as just a convenient way to move on and get the kit finished :-). Once the e-wing armament was fitted by the Sqn/base workshops, the 4 .303's were removed, the shell chutes on the underside of the w wings blanked but the patches were just left over the .303 holes. Of course I have no proof of this, but equally I couldn't find any evidence of what was actually done, when these mod's were done locally

The kit was sealed with Gunze Flat and lightly weathered with pastel chalks and a silver pencil. I don't go overboard as I really couldn't be bothered, plus the photo of the aircraft I had didn't look to beaten up.

Photography

I've been spending a bit of time getting to know my camera, I took about 200 shots of this kit trying to get some good photos. As usual I didn't read the instructions until well into the piece. Once I'd used some the advanced settings an  manually set the white balance I managed to get these shots which I'm happy with. These where taken with a Panasonic FZ-30 camera, with aperture at F11, the shutter speed was manually set. Lighting was 4 white energy savers with a white card as background. Images were resized with paintshop pro X but no other post processing was done.

The Pictures

Click on the thumbnail for a better look

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