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A pair of Airfix 1:48 Chipmunks


Iain

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In a complete change of scene for me, I've been dabbling in the dark arts of 1:48 scale - something I haven't done for years - and boy does everything feel small!

 

Building a pair for someone that owns a pair of these fine aeroplanes - and something a little personal for me as I now own a share in a Chipmunk - albeit with a Lycoming engine and more power!

 

Now at a stage where everything is coming together - so a few notes that may be useful to others building this kit.

 

As moulded - the kit wings *may* exhibit a downward curve towards the tips - to fix this remove the inner locating pins on each side and remove the last mm of the plastic spar - then hold/clamp straight whilst everything dries. This then means some work to remove material from the fuselage wing roots to ensure correct dihedral.

 

The flap trailing edges look too thick as moulded - so inner faces were thinned quite a bit by scraping a straight scalpel blade along the surface. Note that this results in very thin plastic which can dissolve a little with the plastic solvent used to bond everything and that's been neatened up with some filler-primer (dark yellow in photos).

 

Seat pan straps added from Eduard photo-etched items - main, vertical, straps to follow. Instruments are those provided in the kit.

 

Engines un-detailed/painted as the cowls will be closed on the completed models.

 

48b427_86db4df76c5b4575973b4d8d0dca6184~

 

48b427_c9a872066baf437ca22288b34fc027c1~

 

48b427_824d6072aebf4820bc94d57501fb3b09~

 

48b427_d8133cb94da341698c59cd84f27193ab~

 

Needs a few tweaks, but what kit doesn't?

 

Such a pity we don't yet have a Chipmunk in 1:32...

 

Iain

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And another couple of comments on these kits for anyone else building one...

 

If you follow the instructions and bond the whole of the cockpit area in place - you then have to trim the rear instrument panel a little to fit. If you just bond along lower edge of cockpit 'tub' - you should still have enough 'play' to be able to spread the cockpit sides apart - fit the rear panel and coaming section, and then run some solvent into the joints from the outside.

 

Instrument faces are from the decal sheet - and very nicely done! They are applied over the kit panels, which were previously painted gloss black, and a lot of setting solution used to get them to settle into the detail. After being left for a week they were then sprayed with matt varnish. The dials looked a little 'stark' white - so, instead of using clear varnish to 'glaze' each instrument, I mixed up some clear, with a little Tamiya clear yellow, to give a cream effect to the gauges.

 

Iain

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12 hours ago, Iain said:

Such a pity we don't yet have a Chipmunk in 1:32...

 

Amen to that.  I'm doing one of these as well, as WP979 of 5AEF, and cussing myself as I omitted to thin the trailing edge.  :doh:.  Looking forward to seeing how these turn out.

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On 1/16/2022 at 5:28 PM, Iain said:

Such a pity we don't yet have a Chipmunk in 1:32...

Following with interest Iain, I can feel the force pulling me to buy one of these and I don't build anything other than 1/32 (the 1/48 Anson is also calling me for some unknown reason).

It's strange, out of all the aircraft in the world, I think this is my biggest hope for a 1/32 kit and I have no idea why ??   It's the right subject and size for one of those nice eastern European model companies to release one.

 

neil

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On 1/17/2022 at 5:58 PM, npb748r said:

Following with interest Iain, I can feel the force pulling me to buy one of these and I don't build anything other than 1/32 (the 1/48 Anson is also calling me for some unknown reason).

It's strange, out of all the aircraft in the world, I think this is my biggest hope for a 1/32 kit and I have no idea why ??   It's the right subject and size for one of those nice eastern European model companies to release one.

 

neil

 

To do this aircraft justice Neil, I think that 1/24 scale would be even better! (OK Iain, time to double up on that 1/48 scale and get the 3D CAD printing on the go!) :)

 

Derek

Edited by Derek B
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 2/10/2022 at 1:49 PM, Chek said:

One thing I've noticed on a few Chipmunk builds in the more modern scheme: the prop blade stripes should not be symmetrical,

If the stripe at the root of one blade is white, its opposite companion should be black.

The same applies to Tucanos in their pre-privatisation scheme.

Yep.  When I was at University, I was assisting Thomas Douay-Whiteside who invented these markings to make propellers more conspicuous to people on the ground.  Their main "problem" was that it gave the impression that the propeller was spinning off-centre, when the intended effect was to make a "flickering" effect with alternating black and white bands.  The improvement from what I can recall was to make the bands more symmetrical and have bands at the tip and root do the flickering instead.  Don't know if there was further research into that or if it was implemented wider.

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