The Jubilee Spitfire

[PR19_Kit]

You've no doubt seen that amazing Jubilee Tucano that the RAF painted for QEII's Jubilee celebrations, and Airfix produced a super limited run edition as below.





The decal sheet is wondrous to behold and I looked at it with a certain gleam in my eye. It's not lost on me that a Tucano and a Spitfire are remarkably similar in size and performance, and I wondered what the BoB Memorial Flight would have done if they'd painted a Jubilee scheme on one of their PR19s. So with scanner and an Airfix PR19 kit to hand I started work, the Spitfire is pretty well stock of course, but I ran out of Halford's Grey Primer the day before I started this job, which is why it's primed in yellow. That's Halford's Plastic Primer Filler and it's pretty darn good, dries in no time and gives a superb finish. I just hope it won't show through the white top coat I'm going to apply later today!



Of course there's no way the Tucano decals will fit the Spitfire, what with curved versus straight wings and much rounder fuselage, so I scanned the Tucano decal to get the colours about right and scanned the fuselage, wings and tail of another PR19 kit.........

Yes, I really did put the bits in the scanner and took their piccie. That gave me a full size 'drawing' on which to lay out the complex curves of that wild colour scheme. Only the finished article will show if it worked but I'm quietly confident. Here's my decal sheets for the Spitfire, and it only took me three whole evenings to produce them!   There's two sheets because one is done on clear decal sheet and one on white.

[Go4fun]

Oh this will be tasty towatch. Good luck Kit.

[PR19_Kit]

The white's gone on OK, although it did look a tad jaundiced at the early stages. 

[Army of One]

Cool idea......

[NARSES2]

I've pulled a chair up and have my obligatory mug of tea 

[tc2324]

Like the idea Kit. 

Got a similar plan involving a special schemes RAF type on the table at the moment.

[kitnut617]

I missed this somehow --- looking forward to the end result Kit   

[PR19_Kit]

Mini-disaster on this today....... 

In the middle of masking up to paint the undersides red I managed to drop the darn thing, went to grab it and got the port wing jammed between my model bench and my knee. Broke the ruddy wing right off! 

It glued back together OK, in fact you can hardly see the join on the underside, but it needed a bit of PSR on the top and some localised priming and then a white respray. It should be almost ready to mask up again by now hopefully.

[Army of One]

Nooooooo......!!

[Rheged]

Mini-disaster on this today....... 

In the middle of masking up to paint the undersides red I managed to drop the darn thing, went to grab it and got the port wing jammed between my model bench and my knee. Broke the ruddy wing right off! 

Well held, sir!   It happens to us all from time to time.  Did you hear, faint in the background, the sound of the carpet monster gnashing its teeth on being thwarted of its prey?

[PR19_Kit]

I was STANDING on the Carpet Monster at the time, all I could hear was some muffled curses. 

The aircraft has recovered nicely and had it's first coat of red paint applied to the underside last night. Of course, being gloss red it hasn't dried yet so I gave it the once over with some Klear and the second coat of red will be going on in 20 mins or so.

[PR19_Kit]

There's something quite bizarre about a red and white Spitfire..... 





Having applied the Humbrol 19 as mentioned in the instructions for the Tucano I found it was NOTHING like the red they had on the decals! So I had to re-print both decal sheets with the red darkened to match. Luckily it turns out to be pretty darn close, and for the record the RGB values for the match are 111 0 0. Of course that'll be sure to work only on my H-P printer and the Crazy Computer Co. paper that I use.

[Tophe]

great job!

[PR19_Kit]

You've NEVER seen a Spitfire like this before!  



That's just the basic upper surface decals on, and I had a bit of a job with them curling so 'glued' them down with a coat of Klear. Might need a little touch up with some paint though.

The more observant of you may notice that this aircraft is powered by the rare V11 variant of the Merlin, there being only five exhaust stubs on the port side...........

Actually one snapped off en route down to this hotel and there's NO chance of finding it of course.  

[Captain Canada]

Wow ! Is that ever neat...and diferent