Hi, I thought I’d show something I’m working on currently in those odd late hours when the dear lady is watching crap TV or talking to her night owl friends on the 'net.
It will eventually be a little set piece depicting the Prototype Spitfire, K5054 on the day of its first flight Sitting on the grass/tarmac apron at Eastleigh, with the pilot, “Mutt” Summers, still with the cockpit door open. As I glued the arms on the figure in the excellent Airfix MkI kit in 1/48th scale, i thought he looked like he was giving a casual wave, so I cut his head off and turned it to look out of the open door side. What’s he looking at, I wondered. Ah, I know, the photographer who’s turned up from the Eastleigh Gazette to record the great event.
Being a bit of a tight wad (buying the kit was a wrench!), I decided that I’d make the photographer and his old plate camera on tripod. So I sketched out a 5’-7" scale humanoid in Milliput, cooked it on the TV’s digi-box overnight and set to with a knife and modelled him up, resorting to finer techniques only for his Trilby hat brim, which is 5 thou styrene, turned down at the front and up at the back. His right hand will rest on the camera handle and the left is pulling the tiny brass lens into focus. His jacket is blowing in the wind a bit.
The tripod is 1/2mm square wire picked up years ago at a show and the camera is three bits of styrene sheet and a lump of resin filed into bellows. the brass lens will go on once the woodwork of the camera and tripod are painted.
I have started the aircraft, but apart from a lot of mods to make it look more like the shape of the first Spitfire than the kit portrays, there’s little to see there. I am covering the airframe in foil, so that the much disputed part polish/part patchy Alodine finish will show. I don’t do silver paint! I believe the “polished” parts are just the result of those first panels being made on the English wheel in the body shop. Having used that wonderful machine I know that aluminium is burnished with just one pass through the wheels and that is what the first Spit’s forward panels would have displayed, not an actual polish.
Martin