1/72 Airfix Sea Hawk Mk. 100

Gallery Article by Orlando Sucre Rosales on Feb 4 2010

 

Hello, fellow modelers and readers!

This is the fourth of my projected series of articles related to old Airfix series 1 models. The subject of this article is an Armstrong Withworth Sea Hawk Mk. 100 from the German Marineflieger. Although the Sea Hawk was originally designed and developed by Hawker, the production was transferred to the Armstrong Withworth factory when Hawker shifted its efforts to the famous Hunter. The Sea Hawk served in different versions with the British, the German, the Dutch and the Indian navies.

This Airfix kit came in the cardboard-backed acetate blister package introduced in the mid seventies. It had alternative parts for two versions, the aforementioned Mk. 100 and of course a British version (in fact Airfix has been known for releasing a kit of almost every British aircraft, from the famous Spitfire to less known prototypes such as the Fairey Rotodyne and the Saunders-Roe S.R. 53, of which I built one some 35 years ago.) When I bought the kit many years ago, it was the only representation of this aircraft in 1/72 scale (it certainly was until the release of the MPM kit in this decade.)

Besides having the characteristic "pilot+seat" cockpit of old Airfix kits, the kit has other features:

  • The fuselage is too fat.

  • The cockpit canopy is smaller than the place where it's going to be glued.

  • The pylons for the drop tanks and the bombs are molded with the outer wings sections, and are too thick.

  • The undercarriage doors and the arresting hook are too thick.

  • The fit of the vertical fin to the rear of the fuselage is poor, as is the fit of the wings to the fuselage.

  • The air intakes are poorly represented. The same can be said of the engine exhausts and the triangular plate behind the exhausts, which is flat and should be curved.

  • The overall level of detail is poor: there are very few raised lines, and details such as the pitot tube, the four cannon openings and the ejector shells are not included.

Before starting the construction, I had already chosen the German Mk. 100 version because I like its tall vertical fin more than the short fin of the British version (it looks more "modern" to me,) and I had a large in-flight color photo and a color profile of "VA+229", an aircraft of the same squadron of "VA+222", the German airplane represented in the kit.

Click on images below to see larger images

  

  

I began construction by painting the seat and the interior of the aircraft with HU78 interior grey-green (as in the case of the Folland Gnat I previously built, I'm not sure if this color is correct), then I painted the pilot figure and glued it to the seat and later this assembly to the starboard fuselage half. After that I glued lead shot to the inside of the nose, inserted the arresting hook (which supposedly could be moved) and closed the fuselage. It was followed with the assembly of each main wing, consisting on upper and lower halves for the inner section and one piece for the outer section, and the three tail pieces. 

When the basic assembly was done, I undertook the long task of correcting and filling the seams. This time I filled the seams with super glue, as recommended by Paul Boyer in his book "Painting and finishing scale models" and in several FSM articles. However, using super glue without its accelerator (it's not available in my country) is a different story: it's was difficult to know when the glue was dry, and most of the times when it was dry it was also very hard, making sanding a pain. Moreover, sometimes the glue didn't fill the seam completely. Therefore I was (and still I am) not completely satisfied with the results of this method. I do think that filling and sanding the seams is the most unwanted task of model building!

Now it was time to start painting, and I looked at my large photograph again to be sure of the colors... but instead of start painting, I convinced myself that I had to add to the model some of the details not included in the kit. I purchased a caliper, a pin vise and some drill bits, then drilled the gun ports at the front-bottom fuselage, a hole to insert a scratchbuilt pitot tube at the tip of the port wing and a small hole at the rear of the spine to insert an antenna made of monofilament. I scratchbuilt the shell ejectors, and the black radome that goes at the rear of the spine. I also drilled a hole at the tip of the nose and the ignition exhaust hole near the port intake. I used the aforementioned profile as a reference for measurements.

After adding the scratchbuilt bits the model was ready for painting. I masked the canopy and then painted its frames with HU78, then I painted the whole model with Humbrol Authentic HB5 Sky, but after the first pass over the white plastic I realised the paint had to be whitened, so I finally mixed it with 1/3 white to get the shade of my reference photo. I couldn't work in my model for some time and this light color caught some dirt, so I had to retouch it. I had read in the October 2001 FSM article "Building big like a pro" by John Adelmann that he sprays a coat of Future between color coats to protect each color, with the additional benefit that minor mistakes can be easily corrected by erasing them with thinner, so I adapted this tip and airbrushed a coat of acrylic gloss varnish over the Sky.

Later I masked the color demarcation line using Scotch Magic tape and the technique I described in a past article about an Airfix Zero. It was in this model that my symmetrical masks were really important! I wished that the demarcation line on the nose looked completely horizontal when viewed from the front, so I had to make several adjustments to achieve this feature. Another important thing about the masking is that the upper color should wrap the leading edge of the wings and the stabilators, and also should wrap the engine intakes. Therefore, correct masking was crucial for the finish of this model. 

Before painting the upper color, I airbrushed gloss varnish over the masks to avoid paint bleed, as recommended in another FSM article. According to some references, the upper color should be Extra Dark Sea Gray. One of the confusing things about this color is that there is a matt version used on Fleet Air Arm WWII aircraft (roughly HU27 Sea Grey or FS36118 Gunship Gray, although some modelers use a grey lighter than HU27,) and a postwar satin and darker version (HU123) used on Royal Navy aircraft such as the Sea Hawk, the Sea Fury, the Sea Venom and early Sea Harriers, among others. 

I painted the upper surfaces with HU123, but even taking into account that the in-flight photo I had was taken in a sunny day and this fact makes the colors appear lighter than they actually are, I found that HU123 was too dark. I arrived to the conclusion that the German Marineflieger used a not so dark grey, so I ended using HU165 Satin Dark Sea Grey (which is not a satin version of HU27.) Later I painted the black radome, when it was dry I airbrushed a coat of gloss varnish and the model was ready for decaling.

I tried Paul Boyer's tip for old decals on this kit's decals, as always. However, the decals became very fragile and their application was disastrous. The national insignias cracked badly, I managed to join the pieces in the case of the underwing decals, but I had to borrow decals from other kit to replace the insignias that go over the wings. The edges of the other decals lifted from the surface and dried this way despite the many coats of decal solvent I applied over them, so I had to cut the lifted edges carefully with a sharp knife and retouch the decals with black paint. 

I replaced the German flag of both sides of the fin and the warning triangles below the cockpit with spare decals (the original ones were out of register).  I also added the two vertical black thin stripes at the port side of the cockpit (ending at foot pegs in the real aircraft) and small black rectangles with tiny white lettering to the outer side of each drop tank, all made from spare decals. I finally added a small stripe of black decal just before the port side of the cockpit canopy, and then painted HU165 lines over it, to represent the grille from the cockpit air input.

After all the decals were placed and repaired as needed, I airbrushed the model with Humbrol Satin Cote to get an even satin finish. Then I masked and later painted the exhausts and the plates behind them with Humbrol metal cote Polished Steel, and polished them. The model was now ready for final assembly. I glued the already painted undercarriage, and later the thick undercarriage doors, an uneasy task. Later I glued the already finished drop tanks and bombs, and the scratchbuild pitot tube, after that I removed the masking from the canopy and polished the windows. Finally I painted the wing-tip lights, and the model was finished in August 2007. 

After more than two years, the Humbrol Satin Cote is still sticky. I've thought many times about applying a coat of a different satin varnish to this model, but when it comes to the action, the priority goes to building or finishing new models (by the way I write articles when the weather isn't good for modeling)... so this Airfix Sea Hawk will likely stay as it is today. I'm satisfied with my first attempt at minor scratchbuilding and detailing.

Thanks for reading and watching, and happy modeling!. Greetings from Caracas, Venezuela.

Orlando Sucre Rosales

Photos and text © by Orlando Sucre Rosales