Tamiya 1/32 Spitfire XIVe Conversion

[jkim]

Wow, looking good on the mods. Been keeping up on FB, blad to see you back at the bench!

Thank you Lyle! The trip to Central Asia is always a high point of the year for me. The months of organizing and preparation, the actual trip itself and then the mental decompression and jetlag afterwards and going through all of my photos... it occupies most of my thoughts for a long period of time. I took about 4,000 photos, which I have to go through and process via Lightroom. From those 4,000, I post about a couple hundred on FB. And then I have to distill those to about 50-75 for a slideshow.

https://youtu.be/M6hVIJZMso8?si=VegIU27ftOH0gtjP (Religious in content so be forewarned!)

Oh I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next in the cockpit!



Good to see your back on here and at the bench again John!

Thanks Carlos! Yeah, I'm excited to see how the cockpit is going to turn out. Really happy that Laminar Flow Design produced the cockpit details as they represent a major upgrade to many of the cockpit components, most notably that big electric box and throttle quadrant.

That's gonna be a really nice looking cockpit!

Welcome back John!!

Thank you Mike! It's good to be back and modeling again!

Details details. Lots of great stuff happening in the cockpit

Thanks Johnny! Lots of great details, I agree. Gonna take a pause here as I'm awaiting some replacement parts from Laminar Flow Design including, hopefully, a 3D-printed instrument panel. In the meantime, I'm gonna spin up a new project, which you may like given your screen name!

[tempestjohnny]

Very nice. The Tempest II reminds me of a Sea Fury

[BlackSheep214]

Great to see you back at this. Definitely miss watching your work come together. Incredible work on the cockpit walls.

[jkim]

Back to the Spitfire XIVe!

One of the reasons I put a pause on this build is that Mathieu at LFD informed me that he had updated the cowling for the XIVe conversion and was sending it to me. It was worth the short wait.


I love how Mathieu incorporates a rectangular cage around the printed arts, protecting them during the shipping process.It looks like he sent me the entire conversion set and an additional goody... thank you, Mathieu!


Also included is this new 3D-printed instrument panel. I was most curious about this so I decided to take a closer look.



As you may recall, I have two previous version of the panel already. One is the kit panel, slightly modified with the addition of Airscale instrument bezels to give more 3D relief to the panel. The other is the Quinta panel, which is incredibly detailed but I don't like the "pillowed" look around the edges of the parts.


The LFD panel, which is comprised of three big parts and a couple of small levers, looks very promising and may be superior to the previous two if I can paint it adequately.



Here is the panel mounted onto the front cockpit bulkhead. Mathieu thoughtfully included the wiring loom on the left side.


But I chose to work up a scratch-built alternative using bits of styrene and copper wire.


I'm slowly familarizing myself with this build and working very slowly. I'm trying to identify sub-assemblies that can be glued together prior to painting. The Barracuda starboard sidewall and modified kit port sidewall have been glued into place.


The bubble top XIVe has a canopy crank on the starboard sidewall that needs to be utilized, which forgot to include in the last mock-up of the starboard interior. LFD has a crank replacement in its cockpit set so the kit crank is trimmed off and replaced with the new one.

[KSaarni]

Astonishing details or then that Xacto blade is in scale 5:1 !

Great that the build continues John !

- Kari