1/72 Italeri Hawk T1A

by Catherine Vickers

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Having seen a number of Hawks at model shows, I rather wanted to build one, so my fiancé John dug into his seemingly bottomless stash & presented me with an Italeri Hawk T1, a pair of Airwaves resin Martin Baker Mk10 ejection seats and Modeldecal sheets 115 and 116.  I perused the decal sheets & eventually settled on a Hawk T1A of 92 (Reserve) Squadron  in air defence grey with a dark blue fin, fitted with a gunpod & underwing Sidewinders.  

I built the kit more or less straight from the box, with the exception of a set of Airfix landing gear doors since John had a spare set from a kit he made a mess of & the Italeri ones are a joke.  Sadly, the Airwaves seats turned out to be too big to fit the cockpits without massive amounts of surgery & I had to substitute the kit seats.  Naturally, this didn’t become apparent till the model was built & the seats were lovingly painted – I was NOT pleased!!!  In general, the kit went together well, needing just a little filler here and there, but the windscreen was a distinctly poor fit , so this was masked out with Bare Metal Foil before it was fixed in place & filled round the edges .  Once all was satisfactory  I gave it all a final coat of primer & brush painted with Humbrol enamels, followed by several coats of acrylic gloss to ready the model for the decals.  Since John had warned me that Modeldecals were distinctly less user-friendly that those I was used to, we decided that I’d use the national markings & stencils from the kit sheet & just use the squadron markings & serial numbers from the Modeldecal sheet.  Having seen the amount of cursing John was doing whilst applying a full set of Modeldecals to his Airfix Canberra conversion, I’m certain I made the right decision .  After a wash to remove the decal glue & setting solution residues, I applied a final sealing coat of gloss, fitted the landing gear, pylons, missiles & seats, then John  sprayed the final matt coat for me .  I removed the windscreen masking & attempted to fit the canopy, this last proving highly unsatisfactory due to the reluctance of the canopy to fit over the internal windscreen for the rear seat.  Consequently, I decided to fix the internal screen inside the canopy & fit it in the open position.  This had a happy ending since I think the finished model looks far more attractive with the canopy open than it does with it closed.

Catherine

Photos and text © by Catherine Vickers