de Havilland Vampire F.3

This is Airfix’s 1/48th scale Vampire F.3 straight from the box expect for the usual PE seatbelts, decals and I added the foot peg extended ready for entry to the cockpit. This peg was scratch built. Decals are a mix of my own and the kit’s roundels. I never seem able to build airframes represented by the kit decals.

The Build

The kit is good, but a bit tricky getting the top and bottom halves to join without issue. Some filler and sanding was needed around the horizontal join either side of the cockpit. It needs lots of weight in the nose too! Lots!! I ended up not having enough and had to add more into the front of the wing fuel tanks – after having had to cut a hole in the pylon through which to add the weight as I’d assembled and painted them already! Lead was used, cut into small bits and held in place with super glue.

The airframe is ‘silver’ all over. This is the RAF’s post war scheme of High Speed Silver – a silver painted dope, not polished bare aluminium. This is the case with most RAF machines, unlike the USAF during WWII and later – something that a lot of modellers don’t seem to realise. This HSS colour, to me, always seems to be dulled to a ‘metallic light grey’ colour rather than being a reflective sparkling or mirror-shiny silver. I’ve used my own blend of paint mixing Tamiya’s LP-11 as base with a fair few splashes of matt white. This seems to me to take the edge off the sparkling silver, and LP-11 is a great colour to use as a base.

Anyway, a couple of other areas to watch out for are the undercarriage assemblies. They work, but just be careful to ensure parts are clean and paint free when installing – and don’t trim the ends of the legs as this will change their angle. In fact, there’s a square box into which the tops of the legs fit; I had to shave the legs down so that they fitting into the box.

The nose gear also a bit fiddly too. Just take care with the undercart altogether.

The under wing aerial was added later rather than when the instructions suggest. Adding it too soon would have resulted in early breakage during the build.

Note, if you are building the FB.5 variant of this kit, watch out for the navigation lights – the kit instructions doesn’t tell you to remove a small amount of the wing leading edge to accommodate the smaller set in lens of the squared off wing tip.