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
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