I couldn't do the surgery on the canopy to have it open because I cracked one on both the bubble and the rear section so the interior work was just good practice.
I did some surgery to the exhausts, drilling out the end of the pipe and using #20 syringe tubes, flaring the rear one and squeezing the other two so they curved as much as I could figure from references. Then disaster and the left side mysteriously disappeared after I had glued it in so I resin cast another from a 2nd kit and repeated the process.
I made the machine gun port covers by painting clear decal film with matt red then cutting them to size and applying them with lots of micro sol to get them to dip into the openings.
A near disaster was the landing gear. My glue set up before I could get the peg in so I had to clean it out and try again but this time, of course, using too much pressure and the axle end began to bend. Luckily I was able to apply some thin CA to it while keeping it in its proper alignment and it seems to have done the trick. The other gear I found had only about 1mm of the square peg, not sure when or how it got broken off but I managed to get it in with the square hole filled with CA. I added a tiny strand of wire to each as well for the one line I could see in ref photos.
I used a strand of silver wire for the antenna, not sure what gauge it would be but its pretty much like a piece of hair. I drilled a hole with a tiny syringe in the top of the mast and the base at the fuselage to pass the wire through. On the tail I had also drilled through the small mast but ended up having my glue set up before the wire was through. I ended up drilling it out again but the top of the mast didn't survive so I used a piece of syringe for it.
I mucked up the chipping on the wing walk and did my best to salvage it by sanding then adding bits of the green and dark earth back over the areas needed then dirtying up again with oils.
This was my first diorama base as well, using pink polystyrene insulation. Acrylics for the runway pads with oil weathering and acrylics with textured pigments for the earth and static grass which I airbrushed for the different tones. All the references showed the edge nearest the concrete was lush while the patches were less lively the further away they were from the runway. I added yellow flock for dandelions to give a little other colour to rather drab scene.
After decades of 'start and stop' incomplete projects I finally finished a kit!
This is Tamiya's 60748 1/72 Spitfire Mk I. It started off in Dec 2022 as an out of the box, brush painted project I was doing while I was away from home, house and dog sitting for family. But the dark green was a different consistency than the dark earth and ended up with brush marks that I couldn't get rid of so when I got home I stripped it down best I could and airbrushed it.
I couldn't get any masks to conform to the aircraft to match the patterns on reference photos so I printed my own. I wasn't confident I could free hand it so I stuck with masking tape edges rather than tac. I think the weathering and washes toned down the harsh edges.
I used Vallejo Dark Earth and Dark Green for the uppers and Duck Egg Green for the belly and weathered with Abteilung oils.
The kit went together quite well and the only area I had any real trouble with was the tail. The stabilizers didn't seem to want to sit flush and I ended up doing surgery on them with some putty.
There are so many references that I probably spent more time looking at photos than I actually spent building it but that was half the fun. I think learning things about the plane helps a lot.
