Hawker Typhoon Ib

Hasegawa's New 1/48 Scale Kit

by Bruce Bell

When Hasegawa announced they were producing a new tool 1/48 Typhoon I was in the middle of building the older obsolete Monogram kit. I immediately shelved this project without a second thought. Why bother, I figured, when they will do everything I need to do on this one?

When the Typhoon was released in the US the same day as the Tamiya Mosquito I was in a quandary about what to build first. I call both of them "bench clearers" i.e., whatever is on the bench at that time gets pushed to the side for one of these. I decided on the Typhoon since the references were fresher in my mind.

Cockpit assembly was simple, consisting of 12 parts with nice tubular frame sides, seat, and armor plate. I opted to replace the seat with Kendall’s Typhoon seat and had to do a little finagling to fit the instrument panel fronts but it does come together when the fuselage halves are joined in step 2.

The wings in step 3 are a no-brainer - bottom and left/right tops. That’s where the fun begins though, because moving to step 4 there is about a 1/16^th inch gap between the fuselage and the wing roots. Gads! On a new Hasegawa kit? I had to find my putty, which had almost dried up in the tube. Not only do the wings need help but also the cowling top and bottom as well as fuselage seams need a good sanding and polishing. This was similar to their earlier Hurricane, which needs the same treatment. A lesson here for Hasegawa is to observe Tamiya’s way of doing things. Tamiya probably would have designed the cowl as a single separate piece that glued to the fuselage.

After filling, sanding and polishing it was time for paint. Modelmaster Ocean Grey, RAF Green and Medium Sea Grey were used for the camouflage colours. The sky band was painted (decals never align right). Paint was applied using an Iwata HP-BC. Decals are Aeromaster sheet #48-372 a/c is from No. 609 Squadron.

All in all, a nice kit that needs minimal modeling skills but more work than what we’ve become accustomed to with the best releases of late.

Bruce Bell

Article, Images and Model
Copyright © 1999 by Bruce Bell
Page Created 20 February, 1999.
Last updated 26 May, 2007.

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