Airfix's Spitfire FR Mk XIV Mojo Builder

Thanks guys. Catching up with my Tamiya Spit and then will proceed on this one again.

A major step was taken yesterday in getting the fuselage halves together. Despite the warps (below), things lined up reasonably well.



Here are the fuselage halves glued together along with the cockpit tub. I took a bit of a risk here in that one of the cautions is that the wing root seams can be a bit of an issue. Fixing the cockpit in place basically eliminates the option of using any flexibility in the fuselage to adjust the width but I will tackle the issue within the wing itself.


The most common complaint about the Airfix recent Spitfire offerings is the poor fit of the fuel tank armour insert. Typically, the insert is moulded too narrow to enable the correct slightly raised detail to be achieved. To fix this, I borrowed an idea from Paul Budzik's videos on this kit. The first step was to glue in some robust flanges along the bottom edges for the fuselage openings to serve as supports for spacers.



Below is the insert. The 4 lugs that you see there are moulded spacers that are supposed to locate the part to the correct width. They normally extend beyond the glue surface but I snipped them off flush with the glue seam.



The lugs are then filed down gradually until the insert fits correctly with the proper slight step above the fuselage surface. However, when flexing the sides wider, the top of the insert moves lower and this results in the top being lower than the front of the fuselage. The fix is to add strips along the bottom of the insert to increase the height.



Constant dry fitting of the insert and adjustment of the lugs and depth of the filler pieces is needed until the desired fit is achieved. However, even after that is done, there remains a large gap due to the insert being too short in the long axis. So after I had everything fitting properly, I added a strip of styrene to the front edge of the insert to fill the gap. Below you can see the white extensions.



Finally, the insert was glued in place with copious amounts of CA on the inside.



After seeing these close-ups, I continued to file down the sides of the insert as the lip there was still too much. So as it now stands, these edges are now fixed and I'll post some more pics later as I continue with a few adjustments.

Nicely done Andy.

Thanks guys. Not liking the seam on the rocker cover bulges, or has Tamiya spoiled me?



Note that the fuel tank insert sides have been pared down.

Good work so far Andy!

Watching with great interest. Three more Airfix kits to build. They really dropped the ball on the fuel tank inserts and landing gear

Thanks Geo. I have yet to get to the gear. Still trying to smooth the fit of the rocker cover bulges and I had to pry one out yesterday as it sat too deep. Nothing worth showing though work continues slowly.

I've now blended in the rocker cover bulges enough to allow me to proceed with attaching the wings, which would have been in the way up to now. Tweaking and scribing will be done after the wings are attached. The one below is the one that I had to pry off partly after gluing, and you can see the damage to the very soft plastic toward the front and below the exhaust slot. I'm not going to try to fix this as there are some fastener details here that I'll lose, plus the exhaust stubs should mostly hide these small defects.



I began with a dry fit of course and then proceeded to glue the wing lower half starting at the rear seam. This turned out to be a decent fit at this location, no worse than my Tamiya Mk I.



After the lower wing half had set to the fuselage, I proceeded with attaching the upper wing halves. The port wing had been filed earlier so that the contour matched that of the wing root on the fuselage and so the seam at the wing root fit pretty nice. However, the adjustments resulted in a slight misalignment of the wing halves as you can tell from the lip seen at the inner edge of the aileron opening.



Yuck, the starboard side was a different story. I had also done a dry-fit adjustment but it turns out that the seam would be good if the upper half was staggered on an angle with the lower half, which I didn't want to have to deal with. Aligning the edges of the wing halves now resulted in a 1mm gap at the back of the root when the front was flush so I had to do some more filing and dry-fitting.



The fit is complicated by the fact that there's an indentation moulded in the inner face of the upper wing half that coincides with the radiator duct which bulges up from the lower wing half. This indentation is almost exactly the size needed to fit over the bulge so every time I tried to slip the upper wing seam toward the root, it slid back because the bulge. I therefore had to scrape away the plastic on the indentation and this allowed me to bring the seam into contact.



The good news is that I now have a good root seam that I won't need to putty. The bad news is that all this work resulted in a misalignment of the cannon fairings. However, I think should be a straightforward fix.



So this had me wondering if I should have listened to Paul Budzik and left the cockpit tub free so that I could ad detail to widen the fuselage a bit. Probably would have been better than what I now have but there's no turning back now.

Thanks for looking.

Nice progress Andy!

Thanks gents. So I looked at that stagger again and it's not as straightforward a fix as I first thought. The misalignment is about half a millimeter which is actually a lot when the cannon fairings are about 2.5mm wide. Here's a look:



I toyed with the idea of just filing them to suit but I had a better idea while I was pedalling on my bike trainer. Basically, just cut out the piece on the underside along lines to preserve the surface detail, file the cut-out piece to suit and glue it back in with a spacer. The following sequence shows what I did.



Rivet counters will notice one less rivet on this side compare to the other but, hey, they know where to go.

Over a bit, I glued in the carb intake which, compared to my Tamiya build, has a pretty mediocre fit. This is the best I could achieve after 10 minutes of dry-fitting and adjusting. The indentation in the lower cowl is much too wide leaving a flat step. And, obviously, the cutout in the wing is far too large, leaving a hefty gap. Same goes for the radiator baths.



Not the worst I've seen but you'd think a 2019 new-tooled kit would try to give the competition something to worry about. Sigh........

Great fix. The deeper you get here really looks like this was one of those "Made in India" kits

Thanks Geo. And to think that I ended up paying the same for it as my Tamiya one, what with the pre-order, exchange rate, and shipping. Oh, and you being a sprue gate lover, check this out:



FOUR attachment points on what are supposed to be block and diamond tread tires! With 2 attachments, I can usually hide one as the flat spot that I usually file in but FOUR!? So much for any tread detail.......

Nice fix there Andy.
Yes, I'd expect better from Airfix these days, especially at the prices they now charge. Not sure if their kits are still made in India, but I had heard that production is to return to the UK.

Lovely work so far Andy!

Feel your pain Andy.
my Sword EE Lightning 's pitot tube had 5 attachment points on the very thin tube !

looks good so far though