Many thanks for those kind words again Martyn, greatly appreciated!
Another Battle of Britain Fact:When the Hawker Hurricane went into full production Hawker's were turning them out faster than the RAF could accept them into service. For that reason the Government gave Hawker's permission to sell the surplus on to friendly foreign air forces likely to resist the rise of the Nazis. After the Battle, as more and more squadrons re-equipped with Spitfires, hundreds of Hurricanes were supplied to the Soviet Union. Following the usual Soviet doctrine of belittling anything that was not built in Russia, Stalin's government described the Hurricane as mediocre at best and far below the quality of communist designs. One of the Soviet's top fighter Aces however described the 'plane as the best fighter he had ever flown!
And so the other ‘Saviour of the Nation’ finally makes her first appearance, the
Hawker Hurricane MkI. The Hurricane was essentially the final configuration of the long pedigree of Hawker’s pre-war biplane designs which ended up with the Hawker Fury and Demon. The first design of the Hurricane, was equipped with a fixed undercarriage like the Stuka, (as was also the Spitfire in fact) and just four .303 machine guns, two in each wing, and the aircraft was to be powered by the Rolls Royce Goshawk engine. The Air Ministry was unimpressed however and rejected the design. The designer
Sydney Camm went back to his drawing board (literally)
and re-designed the airframe to include a retractable undercarriage and a change to the new
Rolls Royce PV-12 engine – never heard of it? Neither had I, but it went on to be immortalised under a new name – the
Merlin! The new design was received with more enthusiasm and a prototype was ordered. During its construction a new specification was ordered by the RAF for all future fighters to be armed with not four but eight guns. The prototype was too far advanced to include the extra armament but still passed its first tests with a few design changes to be introduced including the eight guns. RAF trials began in 1936 and test pilots reported that: “The aircraft is simple and easy to fly with no apparent vices”. Further testing later did reveal a hidden flaw however when it came to spin recovery characteristics – the damned thing wouldn’t recover easily at all!
Having failed the spin tests Hawker helpfully suggested that those particular tests could be ignored! The RAF however had something to say about that
(dizzy fighter pilots not being the most useful in a dog fight!) The Royal Aircraft Establishment discovered that the loss of spin control was caused by the airflow over the lower fuselage below the tailplanes and could be solved by the addition on a small ventral fairing and extending the rudder down to that fairing. That’s why very early Hurricanes have a flat rear end and subsequent builds have the ‘dipped’ fairing (except on my model as I’m cutting her a….. err, back end off!)
The first Hurricanes were, just like the earlier Hawker biplanes, entirely fabric covered, however, the doubling of the gun armament meant that the ground crew needed to kneel or lay over the wing to service the guns. In my model the wing had now acquired an aluminium section across the wing from the gun muzzles to the trailing edge. By 1939 though, a new wing of fully stressed aluminium was brought in and continued throughout the war. The Hurricanes actually shot down more enemy aircraft than the Spitfires, a fact that led to a form of snobbery amongst the very German aircrew they were downing, many of the captured enemy swore blind that they had been brought down by the more respected Spitfires!
Although the Hurricane was developed into various forms including Fighter-Bombers and the Fleet Air Arm Sea Hurricane, the basic design of wood and fabric was already at its pinnacle and unlike the Spitfire, which was a totally new fully metal design and went on to improve throughout the war, the Hurricane just couldn’t keep up with the new technologies. But who cares! She was ready and waiting just when we needed her the most!
So, on to the kit. In
Photo 1 you can see the entire kit contents laid out, four sprues of a nice light grey plastic with a fifth sprue in clear for the canopy parts and lights etc. The canopy itself is composed of three parts but only two are used, the main ‘greenhouse’ sliding part and a choice of two front windscreens, the earliest ‘flat’ version or the upgraded thicker one with the additional bullet proof panel. I’ve gone for the bullet proof version, partially because most of the Hurricanes in the Battle were retro fitted with them and also because the early version was unfortunately broken in my kit (snapped away at the sprue attachment). What I haven’t shown is the well drawn out instruction booklet composed of seven pages of A4 (not the single double sided sheet in the Spitfire!) Whereas the Spitfire kit was a ‘Beginner’s’ model, the Hurricane most definitely isn’t and there are some issues with the fit of parts as I’ll explain when we come to them. The first thing to notice is the construction of the cockpit, which is completely different to the Spits. Where I could build the Spitfire cockpit as a separate unit, super detailing it before, then adding the whole thing into the fuselage halves, with the Hurricane you can’t do that. The Bulkhead which holds the seat and the instrument panel locate into the left fuselage but the foot pedals and control column fit onto the cockpit floor which is part of the upper wing component. We’ll come to that later on, but the starting point (following the instructions at this point) is the lower wing half and the undercarriage wheel well. In
Photo 2 we have the main components of this section laid out, there are some further details which go in after the fuselage is added and the u/c legs go in.
Photo 3 illustrates those same parts in position ready for painting. I believe later marks of Hurricane had the same ‘cockpit green’ protective paint like the Spitfires but the Mk I’s were bare polished aluminium in most of the exposed metal areas. In order to paint these areas I found my old tin of
Humbrol Polished Aluminium Metal Cote. I thought it was still in the old garage but after a long and fruitless search I discovered that I’d already brought the thing up on a previous salvage trip! As you can see in
Photo 4, the tin is really rusty on top but the Metal Cote is as good as the day I bought it which, when you consider that that day was over thirty five years ago, is pretty good going!
(If only the acrylics would do that!) The composite
Photo 5 shows the wheel well after painting with the Metal Cote from top and bottom. The only problem I’d overlooked with the Metal Cote was that, being spirit based itself, trying to use the Blue-Grey Enamel Wash to shadow the details tended to dissolve the aluminium! I should have coated it with the acrylic varnish first of course.
There was going to have to be a whole lot of scratch building on the Hurricane. My initial plan was to cut the fuselage through the middle to expose the innards of the airframe but the moulding of the model was so good I decided it would be a pity to spoil it and so the Hurri would go in intact. Unfortunately, when I started to fit in the various elements of the diorama; the two Spits, the hut, Bofors gun and the two vehicles it became apparent that no matter how I arranged them, it just looked too crowded for an operational airfield. The only way to get the space the model needed was to lose the back half of the poor old Hurricane – so back to Plan A it went. For the internals I again used one of my excellent volumes of
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Aircraft, a weekly part work from some time ago, each aircraft featured came with a highly detailed cut away diagram as you can see from the photo I took of the Hurricane pages in
Photo 6. The only problem with that collection is that the full colour plans often show one model and the cut away drawing shows another. In the case of the Hurricane the full colour was a Battle of Britain MkI and the drawing was a MkII Sea Hurricane armed with flamin’ cannons which meant more research on the web to get the gun bay layout!
Speaking of the gun bay, that was the next stage! In
Photo 7 we have the finely moulded panel lines of the gun bay on the port wing. There seemed to be some re-designing going on in this area among the early Hurricanes, this one has the more rectangular panel but others, (possibly when the all metal wings were coming in) have a sort of rectangular with hexagonal bits instead. The first job was to carefully scribe along the panel lines with a sharp pointed knife as in
Photo 8, repeatedly going slightly deeper each time until the entire panel was removed, shown in
Photo 9. The wing halves are held together with masking tape as seen here, I had to keep putting it on and peeling it off as the various components of the gun bay were made up and test fitted (sometimes needing a little tweaking when I’d forgotten that the wing was getting thinner towards the tips as well as from front to back!) With the panel removed, it was necessary to file back the thickness of the upper wing at the edges of the now open bay to bring those edges back to something closer to the metal skin thickness. I could now start to plan out and construct the intricate aluminium spars and box girders, which make up the interior of the Hurricane’s wing. I began by first cutting and sanding offcuts of Plasticard to the shape and size of the spars and then drawing the zig-zag pattern of the internal struts. A copy of the template was then glued together out of
0.5 x 0.8mm Plastruct styrene strip (the same as I used on the Hut windows) as shown in
Photos 10 and
11. Again, these were glued together on the sheet of glass so they could be carefully removed by safety razor blade once dry. The procedure carried on with frequent referrals to the cut away drawings until the main part of the bay was done as in
Photo 12. The extra long bit is the Leading Wing Spar with the series of holes through which the Brownings barrels pass and the rear most section is the Main Wing Spar which carries right on to the wing tip and back to the fuselage where it is one of the main attachment points joining the wings to the fuselage. The last major piece was the next spar along which is almost hidden from view but does form the outer wall of the ammunition box stowage. This can be seen coming together in
Photo 13. The finished bay can be seen in
Photos 14 and
15, and after it’s Metal Cote in
Photo 16. Once the bay was suitably weathered down (or grimed up whichever is closest!) I had to construct the Brownings. This is where the natural sneakiness of the modeller comes in. I have a couple of hard plastic ground crew figures carrying a Browning, they came with the RAF Refuelling set and I’ll be using one of them in this model. Not only did I use the gun he was carrying to get the dimensions from, but by having him
carrying one of the things, I only needed to make up three more instead of four!
Photos 17 and
18 illustrate the sequence in building the Browning .303. Starting with a strip of plasticard cut off one of my thicker sheets, first a ‘shelf’ is filed out of the top surface which will take the ‘wings’ which stick out slightly (part of the breech mechanism which is raised up when loading the gun). Once the shelf was correct,
then the strip was cut to length, this saves having to get the shelf in the right place and also allows better handling with a longer strip to hold onto! A thin strip of plasticard was then cut and glued on to form the wings and the front was drilled out to accept a short length of 0.5mm black coated copper wire which forms the barrel. None of the barrels are actually seen once in position, I simply added them on as a guide to stick into the barrel blast tubes as you’ll see shortly. To finish off, a short piece of stretched sprue was added to the rear of the gun and an even thinner piece was drilled and glued into the left side to form the cocking bolt.
The last item to add to the bay before the guns could be fitted was the set of four blast tubes. These pass through the leading edge spar right up to the muzzles on the front of the wing. They were also fitted with a heating element, with another back in the gun bay itself to prevent the guns freezing up. The tubes were formed from 2mm diameter aluminium tube (no painting required here!) and were super glued into place lined up with the muzzles as shown in
Photo 19.
Photo 20 illustrates the final test fitting of the three machine guns and their four associated ammunition boxes, also made from thick plasticard. (There are also a complicated set of curved ramps which feed the ammo belts into each gun together with smaller ones to guide the spent cartridges out of the slots in the slower wing. I got away with making them though as they would be removed before servicing the guns!
) The strange looking thing in
Photo 21 is a single strand of electric wire with four other strands knotted on and stuck in place just by the black acrylic paint. I did try super gluing the first attempt but in this minute scale the super glue made big ‘blobs’ at the knots, which didn’t look right. What this object turns into is the pneumatic tube assembly attached to the bolt mechanism, which actually fires the guns. This tube runs all the way back to the fuselage to a compressed air cylinder, another reason not to take a bullet in the air bottle - as well as the powered undercarriage, you’ve also lost your guns! In
Photo 22 the guns, now painted satin black are in position with the pneumatic tubes attached apart from the dangling one for gun number two and finally, in
Photo 23 the top wing is temporarily back in place to show the finished gun bay. Note those two little flat plates sticking up in front of the empty blast tube, those are two tiny pieces of lead strip and represent the two metal plates onto which the body of the Browning is bolted.
In the next instalment, onto the Hurricane's cockpit – and beyond!
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!
Robin
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
First wooden ship:
The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second:
Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third:
HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1
US
