1/48 Hasegawa Typhoon IB - Teardrop Canopy

Juggernut · October 1, 2022

I've finished another project that I'd been working on a for a few weeks. This time it's Hasegawa's 1/48 Typhoon Ib with the Teardrop Canopy. There's no 1/32 injected kit of this version of the Typhoon so I had to scale down. Since I've always wanted to do the "Sharky" aircraft, I needed to get some aftermarket items to enable me to do it accurately. I purchased (but only used parts of it) the Barracudacast Typhoon cockpit set for the bubble canopy, the Barracudacast radiator intakes and exhausts (I used the "cuckoo door" version), Barracudacast resin main and anti-shimmy tailwheel (the kit does not come with the anti-shimmy tailwheel so prevalent on later Typhoons), Ultracast 4-blade prop, Ultracast tail wheel well, and lastly, the Ultracast Tempest tailplanes. With these in hand, I set out to find the decals for "Sharky". I found none at anything but highwayman prices. I discovered that Montex makes a maxi-mask set for this aircraft so I ordered and used it. This was my first attempt at masking markings; I don't think I did too bad but it was a learning experience. I have a Silouette Cameo 4 and ended up making new roundel masks since I buggered up the Montex ones.

I used the Barracudacast seat, some of the black boxes, the gunsight, and the rudder pedals from the cockpit set. I could not, for the life of me, get the entire cockpit to fit in any kind of decent manner so I created a Hasegawa-Barracudacast hybrid. I think it came out ok for what you can see of it. The Ultracast Tempest tailplanes are "slip over" parts meaning they slip over the plastic tailplane roots. There was some deformity on the separate elevators but I fixed that with some sheet styrene and CA glue.

As for modifications to the basic kit, I did the following:

Thinned the back edges of the radiator housing/fuselage as well as the flapper edges.
I drilled a hole in the intake trunking and ran a 0.020-inch styrene rod from there to a chunk of half-round styrene rod I glued to the inside of the door.
I drilled out the navigation light lenses (boy that was a task-and-a-half) to better represent what these lights actually look like.
I drilled a hole for the obligatory whip antenna on the upper fuselage, behind the canopy
Rescribed all lost detail (including the oversized removable panel fasteners.
Eliminated both wing leading edge landing lights. I read that rocket firing Typhoons usually had this done to them so the rocket exhaust jet wouldn't break the perspex and create a big issue.
Drilled out the teeney-weeney 20mm cannon muzzles.
Removed the clumsy canopy rail that Hasegawa provides and replaced it with a strip of styrene
Redesigned the clear light behind the pilot's armor plated headrest to better resemble the actual item. (I then proceeded to launch the Hasegawa clear bulb part into oblivion when holding it for installation with a pair of tweezers...I made a replacement but it's not as good.)
Drilled out two light fixtures just forward of the inboard landing gear doors. I've read that later Typhoons had lights here (red-left, green-right) so I created them with Molotow chrome, Gunze Sanyo aqueous clear green and clear red with 5-minute epoxy lens.

I painted the kit using old Floquil enamel paints for the Medium Sea Grey, Ocean Grey, and Dark Green. I scanned the instructions, resized them and cut out paper masks for the camouflage pattern. The roundels are a mix of MRP, Xtra enamel blue and Tamiya White (as are the shark teeth). The mask for the black edging around the mouth did not do well so I ended up painting it by hand. The prop is Mr. Finishing Surfacer 1500 black. It needed no further paint to make it look the part. The squadron codes are again Floquil enamel RAF Sky but the serial number decal was too small to paint (at least for me) so I created a decal for the serial numbers. It looks good and the font is correct I believe.

That about sums it up... Now on to the photographs. It's not a perfect build but I'm happy with it even though the pictures seem to always locate the minutest of errors and blow them up so they are unmissable...Oh well, I'm glad the contest judges don't have this ability.