Correcting Hasegawa's 1/48 Spitfire VIII/IX Kits

by Francis Gallemi

Hasegawa's 1/48 scale Spitfire Mk. IX is available online from Squadron.com

Bruce Archer's article comparing the available kits of the Spitfire Mk. IX in the reference section of HyperScale is very informative and outlines the major problems that affect the overall accuracy.

The 1/48 scale Hasegawa Spitfire VIII and IX kits are especially plagued with outline problems as is clearly visible in the photos. Bruce mentions, however that, the Hasegawa kit is "very hard if not impossible to fix".

Having bought the kit prior to reading his article, I was very disappointed with these errors. I thought to myself that it must be possible to save this otherwise nicely detailed kit. After all, the Hasegawa kit does have the best detail and it would be a shame to discard simply because of an outline shape error. So I enlarged the scale plans mentioned in the article and set out to correct the kit.

The photo above shows the final result.

The correction itself is not difficult but rather time time consuming. I would say that if you have the kit already in your collection, then it probably is worth a try at correcting. If you don't have the kit, well, that's up to the individual.

Hope this helps out and if anyone has any questions, just let me know.

Happy modeling!


 

Text and Image Copyright © 2002 by Francis Gallemi
Page Created 25 June, 2002
Last updated 25 June, 2002

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