Airfix De Havilland Vampire F.3 1:48

Full Review with Rich Goodenough

You will most likely already have read Geoff’s excellent review of Airfix’s new 1:48 De Havilland Vampire so let’s jump right in.

Just before we do though, here’s a sneak peek at how it all turned out…

I was keen to see how well the large parts went together so removed the horizontally split upper and lower fuselage/wing clamshells. Unfortunately, it was immediately obvious that there was a major problem with the upper half on my sample. The nose section forward of the leading-edge wing root was significantly twisted.

I noted from the instructions that there are various spars and bulkheads within the wing and centre section, as well as a substantial bulkhead behind the pilot seat. I hope these would help to pull everything correct. More of that later.

The cockpit is reasonably basic although given that everything inside the cockpit is called out in Matt black, it would be very easy to create a dark pit where nothing at all would be seen. I wanted to avoid that.

The first part I chose to join together were the cockpit bulkhead and floor, a simple enough tabbed joint, however to my dismay, and without any paint having been applied, the cockpit floor tabs proved to be too large to fit into the holes in the bulkhead. I applied some liquid glue to ease them in but was dismayed to find that I only achieved a join when the bottom of the bulkhead had given away.

I mention this because this became a feature of the kit in that several joints were just too tight or not deep enough to accept alignment pins etc. At this point I had applied no paint whatsoever so the extra microns that would add, weren’t the issue.

Read on…