On to the next build. What a wonderful thing eBay can be. One can find all sorts of little delights therein. One of them was the Airfix model of the Hawker Sea Hawk, a copy of which I picked up for a tuneful ditty of a song.
It really is a pretty basic kit. It has 33 parts in total. So basic that the entire instruction sheet is on one side of paper…
The moulding seems to be pretty much of an age with the aircraft – kind of mid- to late-50s. Little definition, loads of flash. Nothing is thin or sharp – the trailing edges of wings, tailplane and even the drop tanks are well rounded, with no hint of the exquisite design that Sir Sidney Camm and his team brought to the original. The Sea Hawk, although underpowered, was a little beauty in its own way. Most of them were actually made by Armstrong Whitworth as Hawkers was so busy with other projects.
Anyway, the moulds are tired as the kit needs loads of trimming and filling. The fit of the parts is rough and ready, to say the least. I did manage to cut some masks for the canopy, but the moulding on the transparency is so vague that I had to resort to reference books to find out where the window frames went.
But, after all that, mixing the decals which came with it and some others I had I managed to get a pretty decent end result with something that flew with 800NAS.
So, next up is yet another Harrier, this time the Sea Harrier FRS.1 in glorious Fleet colours from just before the Falklands war.
Looks like you’ve made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!
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Would be nice of them to re-tool the post-war FAA kits. The Sea Hawk needs it, they could also do an Attacker and a Scimitar. Would help the project considerably!
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A Scimitar would Certainly be good. I’ve noticed Airfix have retooled a lot of wartime RAF examples, maybe the FAA ones will come along at some point. Maybe it’s down to popularity.
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