Tamiya's 1/48 scale
Bristol Beaufighter Mk.VI

by Paul Marshall-Potter

Tamiya's 1/48 scale Beaufighter Mk.VI is available online from Squadron.com

This is my 1/48 scale Tamiya Mk.VI Beaufighter in 1/48 scale.

I mainly model in 4mm scale in railway modelling, however I cut my teeth as a kid, as did my brother, buying Airfix Series 1 kits for the small amount of pocket money I got.

Over the years I have occasionally built both aircraft and car kits, and followed the use of different mediums and materials from these sides of the kit building hobby. These I have then used in my railway modelling and also used railway techniques in the plastic kit mediums.

There is very little done to this kit apart from the addition of a Cutting Edge cockpit detailing kit and a Vac-formed rear canopy.

The kit goes together very well. There is nothing I find more frustrating than trying to put together a poorly designed kit, be it an aircraft, car or model railway locomotive.

The Cutting Edge cockpit is very good quality, but is a little difficult to get to ‘sit’ correctly, but it does make a significant improvement over the Tamiya items.

The instructions and illustrations are good too, if a little sparse on painting information, so I followed the Tamiya information on that. I can’t recall the Vac-form canopy manufacturers name but the navigator/radar operator position replacement really worked well yet the cockpit one was not so good. I retained the Tamiya cockpit canopy and used the Vac-form mid upper position.

The only other work I did was to add new landing lights from a 1/43 Model car kit I had spare and to file flats on the main tyres. Filing the flats gives a better look to the model as the model looks like it has real mass when viewed from the side.



 

The paint work is primarily from Tamiya aerosols. The camouflage masking was done with rolled up Blue-Tak and Tamiya masking tape.

Once the main colours were sprayed I used the Tamiya transfers and unfortunately trashed the serial numbers, so used the other numbers left on the sheets. I then dry brushed silver around panels that would have got scuffed, and used an ink wash in the panel lines to highlight them.

The model was finished with a coat of Vallejo Matt varnish airbrush applied, and used ground up artist pastels for the gunsmoke and exhaust staining.

Feeling very pleased with myself I subsequently realised that I had transposed the wing tip navigation light’s. So I had to change them round, unfortunately that came to light after taking these images.

For those that are interested the camera was an EOS10D with a 28-70mm 2.8f lens, taken in available light on an overcast day.
 

Click on the thumbnails below to view larger images:

 Images and Text Copyright © 2005 by Paul Marshall-Potter
Page Created 16 November, 2005
Last Updated 15 November, 2005

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