1/48 Airfix Seafire F.17

Gallery Article by Mike Regan on June 17 2016

 

      

Last of the Line – Building the Airfix 1/48th Seafire F.17

First; a note about designations. In 1947 the system of using Roman numerals to designate mark numbers for British military aircraft was dropped in favour of using Arabic numbers, which continues to this day. Within the Seafire family, the first mark to be affected by this was the Seafire Mx.XVII which became the Seafire F.17; the latter designation will be used hereafter.

Entering service in late 1945, the Seafire F.17 represented the last of the line; the ultimate development of the original Seafire based on the Spitfire Mk.V airframe of 1941. It is a tribute to the basic soundness of this airframe that it was able to be modified to such an extent over time. After this come the last three marks of Seafire; all produced in small numbers in the late 1940s; the Seafire F.45, FR.46 and the Seafire FR.47 – the last operational Seafire to see combat.

The Seafire F.17 was essentially a Seafire Mx.XV with a beefed-up wing spar, cut down rear fuselage and bubble canopy. The strengthened wing spar enabled a longer-stroke main undercarriage to be fitted which all but cured the problem of the propellor “pecking” the deck after a hard landing which would often see the aircraft nose pitch downwards. The type could also now carry either drop tanks under the wings as well as rockets or bombs. Like the earlier Seafire Mk.XV, the Seafire F.17 retained the Griffon VI engine turning a four-blade propellor.

The Seafire F.17 entered service firstly with 809 and 879 Naval Air Squadrons in late 1945 and later went on to see service with 800, 801 and 807 NAS and 1830, 1831, 1832 and 1833 Squadrons in the Volunteer Reserve as well as a host of second-line/training units.

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The Airfix 1/48th scale Seafire F.17 kit was released only a few years ago and sadly doesn't appear in the 2016 Airfix line-up, but can still be found for sale online. It was one of the first kits to be released after Airfix shifted production from China to India and features the now familiar soft grey plastic and crisp (if slightly overdone) panel lines of current Airfix kits.

One has the option of building this model with the wings folded or extended and to this end, two complete sets of wings are provided, along with option of having the flaps down or raised. Under-wing stores are provided in the form of two slipper-type drop tanks and also rockets with four doubled-up launch rails – I used these on my model. A centreline drop tank is also provided.

A good selection of markings is provided, covering all three major schemes to be seen on the Seafire F.17 with excellent quality Cartograf decals. The first option (as seen on the boxtop artwork) is a Seafire from 800 NAS embarked on H.M.S. Triumph in the Mediterranean in June 1947. This aircraft is finished in Extra Dark Sea Grey over Sky in the Pattern No.1 scheme introduced in September 1945 with the demarcation between the colours at the base of the fuselage.

The second is for a Seafire of 741 NAS, Operational Flying Training Unit, Air Warfare School based at RNAS St. Merryn in early 1947. This aircraft is finished in the wartime Temperate Sea Scheme of Extra Dark Sea Grey, Dark Slate Grey and Sky with Yellow spinner, elevators, wing tips and ailerons. This high-visibility finish was for use in mock dogfights.

The third and last option is for a Seafire with 1832 NAS, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve based at RNAS Culham in early 1950. This is finished in Extra Dark Sea Grey over Sky to Pattern No2 introduced in August 1946; this is a quite attractive scheme with the high demarcation between the two colours.

Construction starts as nearly always with aircraft models (there are exceptions!) with the cockpit. This is quite well detailed straight out of the box and all I did was to add a harness from lead foil. The cockpit was painted aircraft grey-green below the line of the instrument panel, the instrument panel and the rest of the cockpit was painted black. I use Tamiya XF-85 Black Rubber for this as it is an excellent “off back” colour which helps to prevent things getting too dark in there. The pilot seat was finished in red-brown to reflect the bakelite material of the real thing. Once dried all this was assembled and the fuselage halves closed up. It has to be said that the fit of these new-generation Airfix kits is on the whole very good and this little critter was no exception to that. The plastic also responds well to my favourite Tamiya extra-thin cement as well.

With the fuselage closed up, attention was turned to the wing assembly. I went with extended wings for this model – I plan to do Seafire F.17 with folded wings some time. I opened up the holes in the lower wing piece for the underwing rockets and also for the centreline drop tank. Once again the fit of parts was very good, although I should have thinned down the out extremities of the lower wing as I ended up with a bit of a step at each wing tip – my bad. Prior to mating the completed wing to the fuselage, added the clear part for the three underside ID lights and cemented a piece of white plastic card on top of this and then painted the card black to prevent any “see-through” from the cockpit. The joint of the wings to the fuselage was OK – this always seems to be a bit of an issue with Spitfire/Seafire kits for me, but worked well on this occasion.

With the wings in place, the horizontal tail came next and this proved to be a bit of a problem; the fixed tailplanes were fine, but the one-piece elevators were not. The shaft that connects each elevator required substantial thinning down; as moulded it is too big to fit properly in place. Once this was done, I managed to achieve a decent fit; I displaced the elevators downwards for a bit of added interest. With the elevators dealt to, the rudder and stinger tail hook was added; Airfix provide two tail hooks, one in the “up” position and and one drooped downwards. I went for the the “up” tail hook as it looked like the drooped tail hook would hang lower than the tail wheel.

The main undercarriage was next and one does have the option of having the undercarriage up or down; if the retracted option is selected, a display stand will be required as one is not provided in the kit. I'm not a huge fan of aircraft models on stands, they always look a bit wobbly and look like an accident waiting to happen, so it was wheels-down as usual for me. I added the undercarriage struts and covers, centreline drop tank and tail wheel, as pretty much all of this is painted Sky. I found that when I added the tail-wheel guard, I found that this was too long and lifted the tail wheel of the table, so a little bit was lopped off the end to enable said wheel to contact said table. The main undercarriage wheels are nicely weighted and these were painted up and added to the model once the major painting was done.

Time for some paint!

I chose the boxtop scheme for my Seafire; the Pattern No.1 scheme is pretty straightforward and not such a hassle to mask off as either the Pattern No.2 or Temperate Sea schemes. Using Xtracolour enamels, the underside and propellor spinner got a couple of coats of Sky and once thoroughly dry, this was masked off and the Extra Dark Sea Grey was applied. This colour proved to be a little frustrating as it had really poor coverage for such a dark colour and three coats were required.

As mentioned above the kit decals are made by Cartograf in Italy and they performed beautifully, with no issues at all in their application. Once the decalling was complete, the underwing rocket rails were glued into place with CA glue – these had been painted with Sky for the stub launchers, Tamiya XF-19 Sky Grey for the rocket bodies and XF-58 Olive Green for the warheads. The whole model was given a coat of gloss varnish to seal the decals and that's it – finished!

The Airfix Seafire F.17 is typical of the current range, an excellent choice of subject presented in a well engineered kit that is pretty straightforward to build. I really hope that Airfix continue to release post-war British aircraft in 1/48th scale; there a so many subjects out there to choose from. Some have been done before in this scale; either as mainstream kits or limited-run kits. The latter are often very expensive and tend to disappear from the shelves quite quickly. The former, well many mainstream kits such as a certain Hawker Hunter and a couple of mis-fired attempts at Vampire kits really need to be re-done properly and methinks that Airfix/Hornby would make a lot of friends if they were to step up to the challenge!

(I do have the new 1/48th Meteor F.8 sitting on my shelf and it's all I can do to keep my hands off it at present and finish off other projects first!)

Mike Regan

Photos and text © by Mike Regan