1/72 Revell Hunter GA11 conversion

by Catherine Vickers

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This is the new Revell Hunter F6 converted into a Fleet Air Arm Hunter GA11.  For those not familiar with the mark, it’s an RAF-surplus Hunter F4 with the cannon removed & the addition of an airfield arrestor hook under the rear fuselage & usually a Harley Light in the nose, used for various training purposes by the Fleet Air Arm from the early 1960s until the mid 1990s.  The model represents an aircraft of the Blue Herons aerobatic team, operated by FRADU (Fleet Requirements & Air Direction Unit), a civilian-operated Navy training unit. 

I built the model OOB, with the obvious exception of the mods to convert from one mark to another.  John, my fiancé, had previously done some measuring & checking & worked out that the jetpipe section from the Scale Aircraft Modelling early Hunter conversion (intended for the Airfix kit) would just about fit in place of the kit parts, so once the fuselage was assembled I superglued it in place.  Due to the tail mods & the need to fill the gun ports, there was a fair amount of filling & sanding called for on the fuselage , but the rest of the kit went together with no real problems.  Once the filling, sanding & priming was completed, I  removed the tail bumper from under the rear fuselage, fabricated the arrestor hook from a length of Contrail rod & the nose off an old rocket, made up a new offset tail bumper from a piece of scrap & razor-sawed off the tip of the nose & opened up the aperture with a scalpel to simulate the housing for the Harley light. 

Painting was a generally painless exercise – I sprayed the underside with Halfords automotive acrylic lacquer white plastic primer followed by a coat  of their Appliance Gloss White, which gave a smooth, hard gloss finish with very little effort.  John then masked the undersides for me & I then airbrushed the upper surfaces in Extra Dark Sea Grey.  This was my first use of the new Hannants Xtracrylics & I must say I was impressed.  They perform much differently to enamels & initially it looked like a complete disaster as the paint went on unevenly & seemed to bead up in places.  Fortunately John had recently been told the secret of spraying acrylics by top US modeller Alex Bernardo & he explained the need to spray very light coats & let each one start to dry, then build up the finish gradually.  A few minutes of spraying & force-drying with an old hairdryer & suddenly it all came together, giving a smooth & almost-gloss finish.  The colour was a little lighter than the Humbrol shade I’m used to & had a slight blue tinge to it , but looked great & compared well with photos I’d seen, so I was very happy with it.  Once it had all dried, I gave the whole airframe a few coats of clear gloss to ready it for the decals & did a little detail painting.

Decaling didn’t go quite as smoothly as I’d have liked since I decided to use the roundels & stencils from the kit decal sheet.  Whilst the stencils were great & went on with no problem at all, the roundels were astonishingly translucent & the demarcation between the grey & white was glaringly obvious.  Fortunately I’m building my other Hunter as a Belgian Air Force example & had 2 full sets of roundels to work with, so I put 3 roundels one on top of another on each fuselage side before I was happy with the appearance.  When I came to apply the roundels to the wings, John lent me a sheet of Fantasy Printshop white roundel backing patches & one of those on each wing prior to the roundels cured the translucency much more easily.  Imagine my horror however, when it became glaringly apparent that the roundels were very slightly out of register, leaving a small but very obvious white edge to part of the roundel, standing out like a beacon against the dark grey of the wing.  I then had to cut slivers of blue from the good edge of the other pair of wing roundels & overlay them over the originals to hide the white bits .  I was NOT a happy camper !!!  I just couldn’t believe that a set of roundels that looked so good on the decal sheet could give me so many problems .  Once all this pain & suffering was over , I added serials , side numbers & Royal Navy titles from a variety of Modeldecal & Xtradecal generic sheets. 

Once the decals had dried, I washed off the airframe, gave it a sealing gloss coat , fitted the pre-painted landing gear, tanks & seat, sprayed a final coat of Humbrol Satincote, removed the masking from the windscreen & fitted the canopy. 

Although the decals gave some problems, on the whole the model went together pretty easily & I’m extremely happy with the result for several reasons – it’s my first conversion, it looks great, John’s told me it looks much better than his GA11 which he based on the old Airfix kit & finally it was displayed on the Aerobatic Display Teams SIG stand at the UK Nationals (or Scale Modelworld as they will insist on calling it these days!!) & received a number of favourable comments.  Hope you all like it as much as I do.

Catherine

Photos and text © by Catherine Vickers