1/24 Scale Coastal Patrol Spitfire floatplane

[Spellbinder99]

I could never work out why Trumpeter would do such a severely "What If?" plane like the Spitfire Vb floatplane as a 1/24th scale kit, but having struggled with the Airfix 1/24thscale Spitfire in my youth I was interested to see what a State of the Art version would be like.

However, as Spitfires are as common as fleas on a camel, I was interested to see HLJ put the kit on special, so I ordered one with one of my recent shipments.
Of course, the one review I saw of it decried it as a curates egg because of the variance between what was on the box and what was IN the box, but I didn't really care.
All I saw was a packed box with some well detailed parts and a lot of play options when it came to assembling the kit.

What I see in the box is a Vb floatplane that was sent to Australia as part of a batch after the Allies were driven out of the Med by the combined forces of the Germans and Italians. Australias desperation for any combat aircraft after the fall of Port Moresby and the initial Japanese landings in Darwin and Cape York meant that even though the Japanese did not push south to the Brisbane line, the RAAF was ready to take anything, anywhere.
A severely wet Christmas in 1943 meant that large tracts of the Northern Territory and Queensland were both impassable to land vehicles and covered with mile wide lakes. Even the normally dry Lake Eyre was filled to a depth of 10 feet.

This is where the "Floatfire"came into her own. Hopping from lake to lake, supported by crews in Dornier flying boats, they became a highly mobile force that was able to demoralise the Japanese invaders and disrupt their allready tenuous supply lines untill a counterattacking force was able to cut off the Japanese Army in Darwin and put a choke hold on them untill surrender came in mid 1944. At that point a stalemate was set between the Japanese held northern islands and Australia that saw constant small raiding parties of Japanese probing the coastline from Broome to Townsville for the next two years.

To counter these raids, coastal patrols of Floatfires were set up to keep watch for them and to initially attack with cannon and wing mounted bombs. Though tired and war weary by 1946, the airframes were kept aloft by constant scavenging and substitution from retired Vc airframes as nothing was found to be as effective as a "first response" aircraft.

Given the striking white tail sections and wing leading edges seen on the land based Spitfires to avoid being fired upon over the Northern Combat Area before the eventual repulsion of the Japanese forces, the Floatfires otherwise wore the later war overall Foliage Green with blue and white roundels. The paintwork was VERY weathered as the groundcrews constantly touched up the paint to try to keep corrosion at bay.

Standard fit was two 20mm cannon and two .303 machine guns with one 250lb bomb under each wing  and a centrally mounted slipper tank for range enhancement.

Basically I am going to build this model with all the wing panels and engine panels closed up as I want to depict her ready and armed to go out on the next coastal patrol.

Cheers

Tony

[Mike Wren]

sounds good Tony, now get on and build it... we want pictures!    

[nev]

Tony, I'm with you on the "why the hell did Trumpeter release this kit?" and - especially at the steep, steep asking price I can't imagine they will have sold many.

I have one of their vanilla spits in the stash and so does Ollie.  Unlike me, I think he's started his so he may be able to offer you tips on construction.

I have a floatplane conversion for the 1/48 Hasegawa Spit and that will probly be an anti-kamikaze, battleship based floatplane for the invasion of Japan.

Yours sounds like a very interesting idea and like Mike, I wanna see some piccies!

[Ollie]

Ha!

Nev, starting is a big word!  One year later, the cockpit is not finished yet!

But as soon as the B-25 is done, it moves unto the bench...

   

[Spellbinder99]

I have started construction with the wings to get a feel of how it goes together.

The first thing that strikes you is that the wings feel much more solid than the old Airfix kit as the internal gunbay walls brace the top and bottom surfaces.
As I decided I wasn't  going to have the bays open, I glued the access panels in place on the upper surface and I have to say that I was very impressed with how precisely the machine gun panels fit. Carefully glued in with the glue applied from the inside the joint is almost seamless.

The cannon panels are a little looser, but the finished effect fits in well with my wish to show the airframe as well used with worn out panels. I may even paint a few as primed replacements or in a different colour to represent having been salvaged off another airframe.

The only parts that need to be added before closing the wing halves are the 20mm cannon as they protrude through the wing and the shell ejection shutes next to the wheel wells. Speaking of the wheel wells, although they are marked as not for use due to the blanking off, I added them as they strengthen the inner wing area a lot by being glued in place. The area they locate is clearly shown though blanked off so it is easy to get them right.

I didn't bother with the .303 guns as the ports will be either blanked off or have doped on dust covers represented as it being pre-patrol. I did forget to add the flap indicator linkage but it was easily added after closing the wing halves.

I also tried the metal linkages for the aileron but they seemed too much of a fiddle especially as the control surfaces will be glued in place for security. The contours of the cavity for the ailerons and their leading edges at least mean that they look effective with correct looking gaps when glued in. It also allows you to properly glued all the wing edges before installing the aileron if you don't make them poseable and removes the toy-like effect of having everything drooping under gravity.

The JMN/Rivet Counter faction may have issues with Trumpeters accuracy sometimes but their engineering is faultless so far in this kit. Everything fits! The wing leading edge needed only a little scraping with a knife and a quick swipe of wet and dry to clean up the joint. I have only done the right side so far, but the reultant wing assembly sits at a good dihedral with no tweaking and feels nice and solid. I glued the aileron in undeflected, but I will probably position the rudder displaced with the water rudders done to match.

Even though Spitfires apparently hardly ever have their flaps down on the ground, the detail on these is very nice (apart from some ejector pin marks) so I will have them down as well. They, however, will be assembled and glued after the fusleage is on the wings.

I also tried gluing one of the flaots together and they are a class act all the way. Depite being two fairly thin moldings the size of a large WW2 bomber in 1/72 scale with only a few alignment pins, the float halves go together faultlessly and take mere seconds to clean up after the glue is dry. The leg halves don't line up as well with one half being slightly longer than the other, but again a few seconds cleaning up removes the step and leaves a good surface.

The shaped mating surfaces and large alignment pins between the leg top and bottom and the float top and wing bottom mean that even dry fitted everything aligns really well and wil glue together with little or no filler. Full marks to Trumpeter on the parts engineering so far, with the proviso that fitting the wibbly bits (engineering thechnical term there!) with the facility to wibble would make cleanup harder but should not affect the fit.

Even though the instructions show the cockpit as being assembled in the fusleage before closing the halves, I want to dry fit it to see if it can be added and painted after gluing the fusleage as that would be preferable to me. I also purchased the Airfix Mk V kit before I came back here and pirated the MkV specific parts out of it to see if I could add its Vokes filter to the Trumpeter kit as to me, the big pugnacious Vokes filter says Aussie Spitfire and if I remember correctly the flotplane spitfire was trialled with the Vokes at one time. I will report on how that works out....

Cheers and pictures when the sun comes up...

Tony

[nev]

pictures when the sun comes up

Thats what we like to hear!  B)