I’ve been regularly updating the build of a 1:72 scale Spitfire Mk1a by Airfix these past couple of weeks, and some of you may wonder why the hashtag on “jahspitfire”. Well, Jah “Spitfire” binti Min Zohari was an actual person, and the elder sister of my dad’s school friend nicknamed Mat Belacan. Jah apparently get teased a lot by the lads in Taiping and she was known to get back at them with such ferocity, like the speed of the famous WW2 British fighter plane!
Anyhow, since the Me109 I built recently, suffice to say I was hooked and began work on the Spitfire right away.
My approach to the Spitfire this time was different in a few aspects:
1. whilst I painted most of the small parts, the main bits like the fuselage and the wings were painted later
2. used the modelling putty to fill in gaps
3. using Pledge floor wax (once known as Johnson’s Klear) to add a sheen to the plane after painting
The painting would have been better with an airbrush but I think it’ll mess up buangruang 4, with it being white and all. And I think the paint job turned out relatively OK. I also need to polish up on my sanding techniques, no pun intended.
For the guns, red square decals were provided but they were too faffy to apply that I ended up just painting red squares! And for a 1:72 scale model, the detailing was nuts. We have a complicated cockpit which ends up hidden in the plane, for one. And the decals for every single thing were there. And you can just imagine the size.
Here’s the finished Spitfire Mk1a in all her miniaturised glory.
My next project which will be after Hari Raya is the Aichi D3A1 “Val” bomber which was one of the planes of the Imperial Japanese Navy that bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
