Airfix Hawker Sea Hurricane Mk.Ib 1:48 - Page 6 of 6

Final assembly

Final assembly saw the installation of the undercarriage, antenna, pitot, arrester hook, footstep and catapult castors, and a thin piece of stretched sprue for the antenna wire. This was first glued into a hole drilled in the fuselage spine, threaded through a hole drilled in the antenna pennant, stretched rearwards and glued under tension to the rudder post. The excess was then trimmed off and the paint touched up on the post to disguise the glue. Sounds easy, but it took three attempts.

A topping off ceremony I always like to perform is to add the propeller last of all. It sort of sets the seal on the completion for me, and is a time to sit back and admire the fruits of my labours. And so it ended, a total of 31 hours spent during a little over a week from start to finish. If the wing roots hadn’t have played me up and I hadn’t dissolved several of the smaller parts, I’d have finished a lot sooner, I think.

So I now have a Sea Hurricane in the collection, which is a sort of half-hearted replica of the one flown by the SC. I say half-hearted, as the propeller and spinner are slightly wrong, there are no stickers on the prop blades to denote a modern warbird, some of the stencils are missing and there’s a whip antenna missing from the starboard wing, but it’s close enough to fool the casual observer. I bet you didn’t notice until I just pointed them out, eh?

Airfix seem to have improved since the last kit of theirs I built, and I’m quite looking forward to some of the other offerings of theirs that I have in the stash. It’s not Tamiya quality, but then what is? There are some things I would do differently on the build if I were to do another one, sure, but that’s not likely to happen as life’s too short, and so am I.

Right. What’s next..?
Dean L.