Hawker Typhoon 1b

Badged up for 70th Anniversary of D-Day and I'm doing it for the 80th... 

Impressive amount of stuff in this set. 

Cue the sprues... the Tiffy... and a smidgen of aftermarket photo etch. 

... the vehicles... these look cool, unlike Airfix vehicles from back in the day, these actually have windows! Look a lot easier to build than the classic RAF Emergency and Refuelling sets too. 

... and the diorama base and effectively the old WWII RAF Personnel set that I had as a teenager, although these appear to made out of oiled Blu-Tak combined with molten Haribo and jelly baby, WTF?

Even my beloved UMP acrylic primer won't stick to them, and that works miracles. Right, people are now at the back of my crew spares, unlikely to ever see the light of day. I'll make the accumulator trolleys, but I'm having to dig out some enamel paint, so the colours are going to be miles off as you'll get what I've got! 

Bit of Airwaves PE in the tub - mixing and matching as, TBF, the Airfix mould is better in some places. I think the PE is for an older mould rather than this one. 

Swerving off the instructions as usual, full paint, camo mask, varnish and (next) decal job before the final parts go on - much cleaner. 

D-Day assault set vehicles and a diorama base which I've had a stab at (need decals yet). BSA M20 motorbike looking good - 5 eurocent coin for scale! 

The only bit of the crap-plastic RAF personnel in the set that I'm doing: a pair of accumulator trolleys. There is precedent for this colour scheme. Added cables too. 

With my new-found interest in ordnance and munitions, the underwing rockets are not only multicoloured (2 greens, the red/silver noses, currently buried in Blu-Tak) with aluminium rails and black brackets, but I've handmade tails for them. 

Rocket tails... €.05 coin for scale again. 

Rockets mounted (and undercarriage) post decals. 

All done bar one more coat of varnish and maybe some light weathering 

Head-on view, showing off cannons and rockets. You can see why it was so formidable a ground attack aircraft. 

Side view, showing the 247 Squadron badge. 

All finished - just went for faint panel lines and left it factory-fresh as I was thinking it looked particularly good and couldn't bring myself to weather it. 

All finished - just went for faint panel lines and left it factory-fresh as I was thinking it looked particularly good and couldn't bring myself to weather it. 

OK, Airfix might have done the base better (at least I didn't just paint it, I did add vegetation, mud/weathering powder and even a tree!) - and they did the figures. Not happening, hard enough getting the paint to stick to the two accumulator trolleys :-D 

I'm chuffed with it anyway. 

Look at all that lovely mud 

How I actually intend to display it (in an acrylic case that is en route): on the BBMF display candelabra (painted in knock-off vantablack) with the BBMF Lanc B.III, Spitfires IIA and PRXIX, and a Boulton-Paul Defiant turret-fighter for company.

(There's now a Fairey Battle and a few other vehicles on this assault set's diorama base keeping the Standard Tilly, Bedford MWD and BSA motorbike company.)