1/700 Fujimi HMS Eagle R05 (with 1/700 air wing)

Gallery Article by Marcello Rosa "marcellorosa" on Sept 24 2020

 

      

Knowing how this is an AIRCRAFT resource centre, I will not bore everybody with the details of the ship. This is a very old (1976) kit of the postwar HMS Eagle, with many problems (which, if you really want to know about, are reviewed at: https://www.marcellorosa.com/1-700-hms-eagle-r05). But I decided to share the 1/700 scale carrier air group. The air group in this kit is not historically accurate: the Supermarine Seafire and Hawker Sea Fury did not overlap in time with the Fairey Gannet and Westland Wessex. The solution would be to buy aftermarket, but I baulked at paying more for 3-D printed 1/700 Sea Venoms than I paid for the kit. Besides, after waiting >40 years in a box, I simply did not have the heart to leave the Seafires and Furies out. Maybe on this day the Eagle was ferrying some old planes to a remote outpost of the British Empire. 

Click on images below to see larger images

The planes provided were pretty basic, and the decals for the air wing consisted only of British roundels, too big by a factor of 2. So I had to make my own using decal film and a laser printer. There were also no propellers, so I made them by glueing individual pieces of ship railing in proper positions. The Gannets had 8 blades (2 x 4 counter-rotating), the Seafires 6 (again, 2 x 3 counter rotating; I assumed a late Mk47 model), and the Sea Furies 5. The colours used for the planes were XF-50 field blue, for the upper wings and fuselage, and a mixture of XF-56 IJN grey green (4x) and XF-2 white (1x) for the lower surfaces. 

By far the biggest challenge were the helicopters. There were deep mold sinks on the sides, and the rotor blades provided in the kit were very inaccurate. New blades (longer, thinner) were made from Evergreen strips (#100), and the rotor "head" was clipped at its base to allow a more natural distance. Finally, because the stencils were white on dark blue, they had to be made in white decal film, with printed white letters on a near-matching blue background. A lot of Microsol later, and with some weathering, the "ROYAL NAVY" and number stencils seem to blend OK, from a distance at least. 

Marcello Rosa

Photos and text © by Marcello Rosa