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Hawker Tempest

Hawker Tempest

by Jack Hollander

This was a bear of a kit to put together. It has a lot of “fit” problems.

The instructions say to complete the cockpit first and then enclose it with the fuselage. If you do that, it won’t go together. Instead, I glued the left hand side of the cockpit and attached it to the left hand side of the fuselage.. Then I did the same thing to the right hand side before gluing the fuselage together.

Hawker Tempest

Even then, I had to shave the side of the floor. It does, however, come with some very nice photo-etch for the cockpit.

No rivets were included with the kit, so I used a pounce wheel to create the effect. I followed this with a wash to make the rivets visually “pop”.

Hawker Tempest

The decals were really good. I cut around the carrier paper so as not to get silvering. I used Alclad for the radiator.

Photos by Jeff Junker