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04 October 2015

Build Review - Tamiya Supermarine Spitfire Mk.Vb/Mk.Vb Trop (60756) - Part 1

Time to get back on track with my aircraft building, where better to start than with another Tamiya kit. The kit, Tamiya's 1:72 Spitfire Mk.Vb/Mk.Vb Trop (kit number 60756) in a North African colour scheme.

Assembly, as so often it the case begins with the cockpit and the two halves of the fuselage. For a change I'd decided not to use a photo-etch set, this model was going to be in flight and so a pilot would be filling the cockpit space. Having said that I think the interior of the kit was reasonably well detailed as is, you can see from the picture below.

Tamiya 1/72 Spitfire Cockpit
The out of the box interior
Tamiya 1/72 Spitfire Cockpit
Cockpit & (Airfix) pilot
The pilot figure was taken from my spares box, in this case an Airfix pilot. Tamiya, for some reason, don't include pilot figures in their 1:72 kits (although this may have changed since their latest F-16 releases at this scale). I find this a little odd, as the 1:48 scale kits, of which some of the 1:72 scale kits are scaled down versions of, do contain pilot figures.

With the insides painted, using a home-brew interior green mix, it was time to assemble the two halves and the cockpit.

Tamiya 1/72 Spitfire Cockpit


This was done by gluing the two halves together and pushing the cockpit assembly up through the bottom. This works well and prevents an uneven cockpit. By comparison I was building an older Airfix Spitfire at the same time. This model used the typical method of trying to glue a floor piece in-between the two halves and it sank leaving it uneven and consigning the model to being used for testing paint colours.

I decided that as this was a model in flight it would need to look used and so wanted to use the hairspray method of weathering and so selected areas were sprayed silver.

Tamiya 1/72 Supermarine Spitfire Mk.Vb/Mk.Vb Trop

To be honest this didn't really work and I'm at a bit of a loss as to why. Not enough hairspray? Too much paint over the top? Either way, in the end only a small part of the wing roots weathered but it look OK. The rest was touched in using a Citadel silver paint.

On to the painting, starting with the underside. I used Vallejo's UK Azure (71.108) but felt that this was too blue. I over sprayed that with a 50/50 coat of UK Azure and Pale Blue Grey (71.046) and this seemed to be a better match.

I've written before about problems with the accuracy of Vallejo's colours and once again this proved to be an issue. I had bought the Vallejo RAF Desert colours box set and that was why I'd chosen a desert colour scheme. However the colour were, once again, not even close. I tried mix after mix with no success before giving up and deciding to use Tamiya paints. This for me wasn't a decision taken lightly as I'd had mixed success with Tamiya paints, finding them too watery, especially combined with my masking.

Tamiya 1/72 Supermarine Spitfire Mk.Vb/Mk.Vb Trop
Tamiya 1/72 Supermarine Spitfire Mk.Vb/Mk.Vb Trop


However my fears were unfounded, I managed to use them and use them well (for me). No paint leaked under my masks which was result! So Vallejo's loss is Tamiya's gain, in the future I won't be quite so afraid of using them.

Colours were straight from instruction sheet. Middle stone sprayed over the whole upper surface, this was a 1:1 mix of XF-59, Desert Yellow and XF-60, Dark Yellow. I then masked of the areas that were to retain this colour and over sprayed the Dark Earth colour. This too was a mix, 1:1 of XF-52, Flat Earth and XF-64 Red Brown.

With the painting done, the next step was the decals, which I'll write about next time.

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