Lordy, time's flying. While I was clearing my workspace of Spitfire and Il-2 remnants, I've been thinking about this build but doing nothing substantive. My fixation was, and still is, on the chin intake and the way it's been depicted in the two Hasegawa kits that I have. Going into this build, I had always known of the existence of various installation styles around the radiator but never really understood what was going on, until now.
After reading up on this, the short version of what happened is this, as I understand it: The as-designed combined coolant and oil radiators housed in the chin intake featured concentric ring vanes to split the air flow between the coolant radiator, the oil cooler, and the carb intake duct which was in the center of the oil cooler. After transferring over to the continent after D-Day, Typhoons immediately began experiencing engine issues resulting from the ingestion of dust through the unfiltered intake duct. A quick stop-gap measure was introduced, whereby a dome-shaped deflector was added to the front of the carb intake duct that deflected the dusty air while the aircraft was on the ground but these proved to adversely affect performance. These were quickly replaced with the so-called "cuckoo doors" which forced air through a filter while the aircraft was on the ground and switched to a direct air flow, bypassing the filter, when the doors were opened in flight. These again were found to adversely affect performance were often removed, especially as the 2nd TAF Typhoons moved beyond the dusty French advanced airfields and into Belgium and Holland where less dusty (bit more muddy) conditions prevailed . Once removed, the original concentric splitter vane rings were often not replaced, and so we have a common installation that looked like this:
Chris Shores, author and authority on Typhoons and Tempests, notes that " looking through a large number of 143 Wing Typhoon photos it does seem that the cuckoo door filters were removed in the winter of 1944/45. …..When the filters were removed the concentric circular vanes (which would have been removed to allow the fitting of the filters) were more often left off than replaced." (Ref
Some Hawker Typhoon colour questions) My subject aircraft. having operated out of Eindhoven through the autumn of 1944 up until Christmas day, very much fits this description. In fact, the above picture also features a 440 Squadron aircraft, a co-combatant with my subject, and so it's my intent to replicate the intake as bare, stripped of vanes and without the cuckoo doors.
With that established, here's the issue:. The kits that I have give me only two options. The first is to use the basic kit part that features the concentric ring vanes. The other kit includes a resin intake that features the cuckoo doors but there is no option that represents the installation that I want to portray, namely the one in the above picture. There are appropriate aftermarket parts for the 1/24 Airfix kit but I didn't see any in 1/48, so I'm left with having to modify the kit part. Here are the raw materials:
At the bottom left is the front of the kit radiator moulding featuring the concentric vanes. To its right is the back of the same unit with the protruding oil cooler. Above both is a potential insert for the front of the oil cooler - a moulded radiator from an old car model from my younger days.
Work started with drilling out the vanes using progressively larger drill bits:
And after some cleanup, I was left with this:
Though the plastic left behind by the removed vane is a bit thick, I should be able to work with this and hopefully come up with something that looks convincing.
Thanks for looking in and for tolerating the long post. My next update will hopefully show the successful next steps in recreating this feature.