Supermarine Swift

by Mike Grant

 HyperScale is proudly supported by Squadron

Have I taken leave of my senses? I've taken a 1954-vintage, wildly inaccurate kit of an obscure RAF aircraft, built it, painted it AND put a pilot in it? And then mounted it on the kit's display stand, for goodness' sake...

The motivation for this model came from a conversation with a friend of mine in the U.S. about recapturing the raw enthusiasm for model building that we had as kids, when 'accuracy', 'detail' and 'photo-etch' weren't part of our vocabulary. I'd also just finished a particularly tedious and fiddly model/conversion and needed a change of pace. The 1/72 Hawk kit had been on my shelf for years though it had never seriously been a contender for being built, but with just 7 usable parts I figured it would be an ideal subject for my foray into nostalgia.

I had a set of plans for the Swift in an older issue of 'Scale Aircraft Modelling International', and these showed all that I needed to know- the kit was hopelessly wrong in length, shape and cross-section. There was no opening for the cockpit, the wing had 2 sets of spurious and grossly thick wing fences, panel lines were raised and, in typical 50s fashion, the markings were engraved neatly into the plastic. Perfect. Despite all this, when I did a dry-run it actually looked a bit like a Swift. I battled with my conscience over whether to do it as a literal, 'out-of-box' project or to make a token effort at looking like a serious modeller.

In the end I compromised and made improvements where I thought they'd be most obvious. I hollowed out the cockpit and added a pilot, seat and instrument panel. I sanded off all the panel lines and filled the engraved markings. I removed the wing-fences (scaled up they'd be better referred to as wing-walls) and replaced them with a thinner set. For the most part the pieces fitted OK except for the starboard wing-to-fuselage. I filled and sanded that joint so much that I could literally see daylight through the fuselage side, but eventually all was ready to paint.

The Hawk kit's profile is closer to the F. Mk. 1/2 with its shorter tail fin so I opted for the all-over aluminium finish, for which I used SNJ. I made the markings on my ALPS (before its demise) depicting an aircraft of 56 squadron. Everything was sealed with a coat of Future, then I added a few panel lines using a pencil. It wasn't entirely succesful, I had to use a soft 4B pencil to make any impression at all on the glossy surface and as a result some of the lines are a bit fuzzy. In retrospect I should have lightly misted a satin or matt varnish over the gloss which would have enabled me to use a harder grade of pencil. It looked OK though.

Was I able to recapture those carefree modelling days of my youth? Well, I did get a bit bogged down at the filling/sanding stage which wouldn't have happened back then, but I had to retain SOME of my self-respect. And I probably wouldn't have painstakingly created a set of replacement decals.

But I thoroughly enjoyed the project as some welcome light relief. And I have at last removed that Hawk kit from the unbuilt pile.

Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2002 by Mike Grant
Page Created 26 July, 2002
Last Updated 04 June, 2007

Back to HyperScale Main Page

Back to Features Index