Academy 1/72 Hawker Tempest V

By Sav. 27/Apr/2010

Time to get something small finished while the big projects get shelved. So I picked up Academy's 72nd scale Tempest for a quick build to be thrown together over a few days.

The Grumman Tracker project has been sitting on my table for far too long waiting to be completed, this project was something I could do in a few days to get re-motivated and get something finished.

Academy make some really nice WWII kits in 1/72nd scale and this one is no exception to that rule. Here we have 3 sprues of light grey plastic which has some nice finely engraved panel details and good other detail.

Work started in the cockpit which had some good basic detail on the side panels and cockpit floor (didn't get a photo of this sorry) I applied the standard interior cockpit colours, then applied a dark wash which really improved the look of the detail. The instrument panel was painted mat black and then dry brushed with silver to bring out the raised detail. I was pleased with the result of the cockpit considering the hour or so that spent on it.

Being a WWII aircraft there are only a few parts left to put togeather from here, the two fuselage parts went togeather with the three part wing section. Only a very small amount of putty was required on the underside of the wing where it meets the body.

At this stage I painted the gear struts and wheel inners silver and applied the same dark wash as was applied to the silver. Once this was dry I brush painted the wheels matt black along with the prop. However once dried the prop showed some nasty brush strokes so I sanded it down and left it to be sprayed black with the pre-shading spray run. Here's a small article on how I do my pre-shading on models.

Here the base sea gray has been sprayed over the dark preshading. I didn't bother with masking for this step as it's much easier to just place the painting instructions somewhere nearby so it can be used as a reference while spraying by hand. You do need to be careful that you cover all the grey areas, it's better to go a little too far into the next colour and lose some preshading than to remove the masks at the end of the paint and find some un-painted areas.

So next up was the rather long process of applying camouflage paper masks which I used because it's a lot easier to cut into the wavy lines required. Cutting masking tape never gives me a good enough result in this scale.

Here we have both ocean grey and the dark green applied along with the yellow along the wing leading edges. I've also applied a good coat of future floor polish in preparation for washes and post shading.

Next up the washes and decals were applied. Unlike most Academy decals, these ones seem to go on with no problems at all. Then I used chalk pastels to highlight the center of the panel lines, this effect was almost totally lost once a clear flat coat was applied over the top to seal everything in.

All in all a nice quick little build to get something complete.