Silver Wings Hawker Demon 1:32

Wing Preparation

I would imagine that if I hadn’t visited Shuttleworth and seen the Demon in the flesh I probably wouldn’t have realised just how “over the top” the Silver Wings rendition is of the ribbing, but since I was aware of it I felt compelled to try to do something about it.

I honestly don’t know whether I took the best approach and if my attempts were worth it, but here goes!

It was clear that a lot of sanding was going to be necessary to take those ridges down, but I also thought that this could be lessened by flattening out the troughs in between the ridges. So I sprayed several coats of Halfords Filler primer, a slightly thicker version of their ordinary primer:

which I then proceeded to sand. The difference in colour gave me a good idea of how much I was taking off and if I was getting a fairly even finish. How much to sand off was difficult to gauge and was probably influenced by the tediousness of the job too!

The items numbered 14 above are inspection plates which are provided as PE in the kit, but I prefer to use my own cut from self-adhesive vinyl because I think it gives a better scale thickness.

I had already decided that I wanted to represent the rib tapes, initially I used plain narrow strips of kabuki-type tape:

Then I hit on the idea of trying to design and cut some made of Oramask 810 vinyl on my Cameo Silhouette cutter because I wanted to show the actual stitches if possible. Lots of trial and error resulted in:

…which when applied and primed looked good enough to my eyes. On the centre section I also sanded off the rather heavy framing for the fuel tank and replaced it again with vinyl. This detail shot gives a good idea of the top wings:

A comparison of a “before” and “after” shot of the lower wings:

Next came the dilemma of how best to install the upper wings…..more of that anon!

The empennage…