Next, there was a bit of a hiccup. Dry-fitting the wing assembly to the fuselage revealed that not only was the internal spar on my kit warped, but also the central part of the lower wing half. The section forward of the wheel well was twisted inwards towards the well itself, and there was a huge gap where the wing leading edge refused to meet the underside of the cowling…
No amount of clamping was going to solve this, so drastic measures were taken. I had to cut a wedge out of the wing leading edge to give relief on each side where it meets the cowling…
…and then glue it in four stages, clamping all the while to maintain pressure on the joints until fully set. The underside of the cowling sits perfectly in position with hardly anything to betray it as a separate part, and I was wishing that the wing section had taken a leaf out of its exemplary book.
I managed to get the leading edge of the wing section somewhere near flush, and then went about doing a bit of filling. After the putty was smoothed off, I did a bit of re-scribing to restore the panel lines lost in this area, and also around the wing leading edges where sanding seams always thins or loses them.
This kit has a number of sink marks, which I attended to while I had the putty on the go for the wing joint. They’re all over the exhausts, a couple on the nose over the locating pins, and a couple on the tailplane fillets, which were the most awkward to sand without losing detail.
It was while I was attending to the fuselage seams that I noticed that the fin is slightly offset to port at its leading edge. Powerful prop driven aircraft often have this to counteract the propeller torque on takeoff, and it was surprising to see this level of accuracy in the new Airfix products. I just hope it was intentional!
One area where I do think this kit scores over the Hasegawa Hurricane is with the inclusion of the entire rear lower fuselage as a separate part which joins seamlessly with the rest of the fuselage, and with the trailing edge of the wing at a natural panel line. The Hasegawa version had the join right across some scalloped detail and was a pain to sand flush as a result. Nice one Mr Airfix.
Exhausts
While I had the exhausts on the go, I gave them a coat of metallic dark iron, and then used various colours of pastel chalks to add rust, weathering and stains. I was well pleased with the result, until I gave them a coat of matt varnish to seal it all in and the effect completely disappeared, leaving me with what looked like black exhausts! Back to square one, and this time I achieved the effects with dry-brushing, which doesn’t need sealing…
I then installed the wingtip and landing lights, which had to be sanded flush and then polished back to clarity with a polishing sponge. The navigation lights were detailed with a tiny hole drilled from the inside which was then filled with paint to represent the red or green bulb inside the real thing.