Heller Spitfire Mk XVIE

[The Rat]

Now that I have Wooksta's attention, how is this kit? Just pulled it out of the stash and it looks very nice, but I'm confused on the choice of 2 exhausts. Maybe it's my hangover (was that out loud?) or my inability to read French, but I can't understand why there are two different styles in the kit.

And my plans for it have changed. It was going to be a wing swap with a Frog Attacker, but I realised that there is no way that an Attacker would be improved with a narrow track landing gear, no matter how much better the Spitfire wings would be, and the construction of the Spitfire wings would make an inward folding gear impossible. So the plan has gone from that to... Nothing at the moment.

[The Wooksta!]

Until recently, this was the gold standard for late Merlin Spitfires, not bad for a kit that's over 40 years old.  It got a great deal of things right that Revell still haven't.  It was suggested as a donor kit by Aeroclub for their range of vacform fuselage conversions covering other Spitfire marks - and if John Adams recommends it, it must be right.  The Esoteric mk VIII/IX/XVI highback of 1990 used it as a master for an expensive multimedia kit that was the CMR of the day.

The shape is largely bang on, the gull wing is there, detail is good, especially in the cockpit (Airfix 30 years later didn't improve on it with their retooled mk IXc).  Fit is excellent.  Not really necessary now, what with all the nicer new tool kits about, but the Heller XVIe wing will fit a few other kits to kitbash other variants (see my Plan Blog for more such jolly japes).

But naturally, there are downsides but unlike most kits these are quite easily fixed.  The canopy is off - the windscreen has frames in the wrong place, the cowling under the nose is too deep - a halfway between the mk IX and a PRXI deep chin, the tail is too tall and the radiators too deep for a Merlin aircraft but spot on for a Griffon. The intake underneath is a bit too boxy. The wheels are an odd hybrid - wartime diameter with post war 3 spoke hub.  I'm not going to bore you further with that discussion, it's been mentioned enough in my Plan Blog. Finally, it's a post war aircraft, because it has the heart shaped blisters inboard of the guns, which were a post war mod when the wheel tracking was changed on all Spitfires from roughly July '45 onwards. 

It's one of my go to kits, one that I really enjoy building, once I've sorted out the few niggly errors which I can easily fix (TBH, I ignore quite a few - radiators, tail, canopy - and fix the others; resin wheels, sand down the cowling and intake.).  My Plan is littered with Heller 16s and I have a very good stash of them (I'd estimate about twenty but likely more).

The exhausts.  Fishtail (wartime) and round (post war), but the post war ones are a bit anaeamic and best replaced.

You'd be better off putting the Frog Attacker wings on a mk VIII (it was proposed but never built) or ideally a XIV, so you can do the shortcut Spiteful first prototype.  If you're doing that one, I'd suggest an Airfix PR19 for the fuselage with further mods to change that to a 14.  However, said prototype had Spiteful, not Spitfire, wing root fairings and they are quite different.  You'd still need the different radiators - shallower and much wider.

[The Rat]

Whew, that was... comprehensive!  Thanks, seems I have some correcting to do. Might go the Spiteful route, But there are also whiffing possibilities with the Attacker, for which I'll need the wings.

Thanks again! 

[The Wooksta!]

TBH, I could have been a bit more comprehensive but I though it was going on far too seriously long enough by half as it was.

If and when you need to know the mods to the Airfix 19 to convert it to a 14, just give me a shout.

[The Rat]

If and when you need to know the mods to the Airfix 19 to convert it to a 14, just give me a shout.

Will do!

[kitnut617]

I used Attacker wings and put them on a Mk.XIV, only I've screwed it up a bit, I didn't line up the wing spar location properly and got the wing too far back. The nose of the wing root should line up with the lip on the air intake, or the main spar of the Attacker wing is in the same location as the main spar on a Spitfire wing where it a attaches to the fuselage,



The black line on both wings here is the main spar.



But don't use a low back fuselage, the Spiteful used a modified standard Spitfire fuselage. Here you can see what mods you need to do to make a Spiteful fuselage out of a Spitfire fuselage.

[The Wooksta!]

Except the Spiteful isn't a revised Spitfire fuselage, it's an entirely new design - it's wider for a start to take the fuel tanks that were in the Spitfire wing.

[kitnut617]

Except the Spiteful isn't a revised Spitfire fuselage, it's an entirely new design - it's wider for a start to take the fuel tanks that were in the Spitfire wing.

Actually, no it wasn't --- just the top above the datum longeron had a different cross-section, everything under the datum was Spitfire Mk/VIII/XIV fuselage. So I've read ---- It's only as different as a low back Spitfire fuselage is to a standard Spitfire fuselage, different cross-section above the datum longeron.  The datum longeron is easily identified on any Spitfire kit, it's the long panel line that runs down the middle of the sides at the same level as the exhaust stubs.

[perttime]

Interesting.
The first Spiteful NN660 must have been pretty much a Spitfire XIV with a different wing (mounted a little forward?). Then, changes to the fuselage, and tail,  were introduced. At least the most obvious changes were in the upper half of the fuselage. Googling found me what is supposed to be a comparison between "frame 13 for a Spitfire on the left and Spiteful on the right ... two frames behind the seat back and aligns with the back of the canopy on the Spiteful."


https://www.key.aero/forum/historic-aviation/3863679-supermarine-spiteful-fuselage

[kitnut617]

The first prototype NN660 was just as you say perttime, NN664 (second prototype) was the first one that had it's fuselage modified, it also kept the Mk.XIV tail assembly. The third prototype NN667, was the first one to get the new frames built as one unit. But you can see the bottom of both those drawings are the same. I've got similar drawings which I got from the RAF Museum, I didn't buy many, just the relevant ones that showed what they did. The ones I bought were a bit expensive which restricted me on how many I could buy at the time. BTW, the Morgan/Shacklady book doesn't say anywhere that the fuselage was a 'totally new design', it says the third prototype had the definitive fuselage ----

[PR19_Kit]

https://www.key.aero/forum/historic-aviation/3863679-supermarine-spiteful-fuselage

There's an amazing amount of information on a relatively rare type on that thread!