Dirk's Hawker Hurricane Mk IIb "White 01"

b]The kit[/b]



There are 54 parts. At a glance they are nicely molded with recessed panel lines.





Famous for its heroics during the Battle of Britain, the Hurricane was considered for use by the Royal Navy after the threat to British shipping convoys greatly increased in late 1940. Initially, "tired" Hurricane Mk.Ia aircraft were modified to operate from catapults on freighters called Fighter Catapult Ships and Catapult Armed Merchantmen (CAM-ship).

While Soviet pilots typically preferred US-built fighters such as the P-39 Airacobra over the British Hawker Hurricane, the latter was the first Western Allied aircraft to arrive in the Soviet Union and thus played a vital role at a crucial stage in the war on the Eastern Front. Indeed, with the first examples arriving in September 1941, the Hurricanes had an almost immediate impact on the war in the Arctic, where they flew air defense missions around the key warm water port of Murmansk. Throughout the winter of 1941- 1942, the Soviet Hurricanes suffered heavy losses against the highly-trained Luftwaffe pilots, but a significant number of Soviet pilots would earn their proverbial stripes in the unpopular British fighter before transitioning to P-39s, P-40s, and more advanced Soviet-built fighters.

For this build I will be building the Lend Lease aircraft, "White 01" of Major-General A A Kuznetzov, Eastern Front. In September Kuznetzov, CO of the Navel Air Forces, of the Soviet Northern Fleet arrived to test-fly an Hurricane. He was an expert pilot with thousands of hours of flight time to his credit. Nobody doubted his ability to fly the Hurricane for the first time. Kuznetzov was presented with his own Hurricane so the roundels and fin flash of Z5252 were painted over with the Russian star and the number "01" was added to the side of the fuselage. The press photos taken at the time clearly show the Russian star painted over the RAF roundels.


In order to make this build a reality I will need some Russian decals and it just so happens I have a set.





Stay tuned

Will stay tuned Dirk

wouldn't you know. Within minutes of starting this i'm having one of my favorite moments.



NOT AGAIN!!! the canopy is missing!. $%*frickin%#$*&frackin%#$@!(**^ Hoe!!!! Does revell have any quality control practices in place? Holly good god!



I'm done.....

Aftermarket canopy?

Here is the starting foundation. It's actually pretty nice out of the box. Both the seat and the armor plate appear to be the correct shape no there will be no need to surgically alter anything at this point.



With the seat in place I used a pin vice to drill a hole to mount the first bits of the frame work. At first I tried to just glue the styrene into place but it was cumbersome and the parts kept falling off.







Here everything is trimmed up





Thanks for taking the time to look at my project

Thank you for taking the time to give the background and inspiration for your build and (besides the missing canopy), great start to the build.

Time to move forward. What inevitably happens during my builds is that something gets pointed out or discovered AFTER I move on to another step or where I'm past the point of an easy fix. This project is no different. What was discovered was that the head rest is all wrong for this bird. In the place of the head rest should be an armor plate. To be honest its still not a difficult fix at this stage but I just needed to point it out that it happened every dang time. In the immortal words of Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor it's time for MORE POWER which in the case is in the form of my handy dandy Drummel.



As you can see I was able to cleanly wipe away the head rest. I also added some throttle levers to the side panels



If you squint just right you can see the throttle controls. I also added the armor plate to the area where the head rest was. This was made with some Evergreen plastic card.



Painted









Now we say goodbye to all that work... Closing up the fuselage





That's all for now. Till next time... B - Strong

Time to tackle the wing



Wings assembled, but there is a lot more cleanup to be done on these



Ok I'll be the first to admit I can be slow on the uptake on things but how I got this far into it without realizing it is beyond me. If you look at the actual pictures of Whie 01 at the beginning of the thread you will notice and even see in the history that this plane was shipped with the "tropical" filter still in place. Well the MkIIb kit doesn't come with a "tropical" filter





Well lucky for me I happen to have a MkIIc in the stash which comes with the filter as a separate piece. *whew* Crises averted



Here we got the wings and tail planes in place. I will say that this is a really nice kit. Nice detail and the seams are great. The only filler I needed so far is between the rear of the cockpit and the antenna mast and then again a little just in front of the cockpit.



Tropical Filter

This is great stuff Dirk, thanks for the back story too.

I love your added cockpit details. Nice work. 

Than's Al.

After I looked photos of these last few steps Its hard to see a difference but surprisingly I do. Its unusual because usually the camera catches everything.

here we go, It's time to assemble the radiator intake. The way Academy has it set up the radiator intake sits in a recess.



What this does is cause the radiator intake to sit what I think is too flush on the fuselage. Its hard to see here but its very noticeable from head on. Sorry but I seemed to have lost that photo.



What I need to do is raise the front of the radiator a bit. Using my ever faithful Evergreen I set to work,



I started by making a template of the recess. I used a piece of paper and a pencil



Then thinking back to 3rd grade art class I took a rubbing of the opening.



Then cut out the paper, this acts as my new template. I then trace that onto the Evergreen and cut it out



The fit was pretty damn good





Now this is how the radiator sits. From this angle it doesn't look much different



But from head on, the result is much more noticeable.



The difference is the space between the 2 red lines. This gap/space was nonexistent prior to adding the card stack. This would be much more evident if I was better at managing my photos, but... It is what it is. At least this effort will not go un-noticed like the cockpit detail.



Now its time to start preping for paint.

Stay tuned my modeling friends.

Last night I applied Azure Blue to the underside of the Russian Hurricane





Now we wait

Detail is nice on that kit.

Last night I applied Dark Earth to the top

nightflier wrote:Detail is nice on that kit.

It is pretty good

Work on Major-General A A Kuznetzov's Lend Lease Hurricane continues

Last we left off the base coat of Dark Earth was applied. Next I masked off and a applied the Dark Green





Next its time to black out the RAF roundels so that the Red Stars can be applied. To do this I took out the decal sheet that came with this kit and using a circle template I found the correct size of the roundels.



Once the circles were traced and the centers found I use a compass scribe to cut out the centers











Till next time... Stay safe and B - Strong

Great work Dirk, very enjoyable.

nightflier wrote:Great work Dirk, very enjoyable.

Thank you, I'm glad you are enjoying it

Not a lot of progress last night. Looking at the original photos of this aircraft you can see the roundels bleeding through the paint. My goal was to represent that effect. I installed the RAF decals on the underside of the wings



Taking out the Azure blue this time I thinned it out more then I usually do for painting.





Lastly I gave the entire bird a cote of Future.
The first thing I wanted to do was add the extra Browning .303 machine guns to the wings. For this I used some Evergreen styrene. I cut the them a little long so that I could handle them better. Once secured in place I will cut them down to size and paint.



Thanks for taking the time to look at my work

AUGH!!!!! I had a little bit of a set back last night with the Hurricane when I went to remove the masks after painting the red over the gun ports.





Moving forward I decided it was time to install the prop and spinner









Started to paint the manifold exhausts before installing them. First I applied the rust. After that dries I will follow up with some silver and black to finish it off.



That's all for now, next up we will start tackling the decals

Till next time, B - Strong and stay safe

Looking very good Dirk.

nightflier wrote:Looking very good Dirk.

Thank you

Started the decaling. Here is the sheet and instructions. Lots of options for future builds

Vary effective and authentic seeing the roundels beneath

Last night I finally finished the canopy and put it in place with one big issue.

The plastic was so brittle that when I was cleaning it up it just crumpled away. After it was in place I added some clear glue to try and fill the gap