Czech Master Resin
1/72 Supermarine Type 300 Spitfire Prototype
First Flight at Eastleigh Airport, March 5, 1936
Kit No. 170
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History
March 5, 1936, Eastleigh Airport, Hampshire: Captain Joseph “Mutt”
Summers, Chief Test Pilot for Vickers Aviation, Ltd., swung the unpainted,
hand built Supermarine Type 300 fighter prototype, K5054, later to be
named “Spitfire”, into the wind and took off thus placing
an important marker in the history of aviation. The plane was Reginald
J. Mitchell’s fourth fighter design in the then current round of
competitions for the RAF’s next fighter. The Air Ministry liked
what they saw in the design and wrote specification F.37/34 around it
and ordered it built.
The prototype was completely hand crafted with each part made without
proper tools or jigs. Production tooling would come later when the design
had been proven in flight-testing. The skinning of the wings, tail and
fuselage was made up of many small panels hand-beaten on sand bags, or
on wooden bucks, to the correct compound curves required by Mitchell’s
complex design.
On this epochal first flight of the still unpainted airplane, the landing
gear, without covers, was locked down and a very low (fine) pitch propeller
was fitted.
Development of the design and the tooling and jigs to build it in quantity
took just over two years. The first production model Spitfire Mk. I, K9787,
flew on May 14, 1938. R. J. Mitchell died of cancer well before it flew.
When the last Spitfire F. Mk.24 and Seafire Mk.47 were completed a grand
total of 22,759 progeny of K5054 had been built. That’s not bad
coming from a hand made airplane.
The Kit
 Jan
Mace has, I think, wisely downplayed the kit’s instructions for
“yellow/green zinc-chromate primer” finish on his rendering
of K5054 for this kit’s box art. I would do the same in building
this kit of the plane as it looked on its first flight. Earlier, CMR released
their kit No. 123 depicting K5054 as it was after it was painted. This
kit was reviewed in Internet Modeler for .
Here’s what we get in one of CMR’s neat new boxes:
21 parts delicately cast in CMR’s standard cream-colored resin,
3 parts, the landing gear struts and tailskid, cast in strong white
resin,
2 vac canopies,
1 decal sheet depicting K5054 as it was on March 5, 1936 and
3 pages of well illustrated instructional material.
The wings are one-piece, tip-to-tip, with full depth wheel wells. The
multiple small panels of skin are very well depicted. The engineering
of the kit is quite conventional. One of my small nitpicks with this kit
is that the resin feed to the leading edge of the wing largely obscures
the eight gun ports, which were open but contained no guns on the first
flight. Before K5054 was painted the gun ports were covered making the
leading edge clean. It should also be noted that a second pitot probe
was installed in the number one, that’s the farthest left, gun port
on the first flight. CMR provides this probe but indication of its positioning
is a bit vague. Another small nitpick is that the ribbing and fabric covering
of the ailerons, elevators and rudder is rather poorly rendered.
I’ll mention one last nitpick. The trailing edges of the propeller
blades should extend to the rear edge of the spinner. They do not. So
far as I know, no kit manufacturer has ever accurately modeled in 1/72
the Watts two-blade wooden propeller so often used on British planes of
this period. Harry Robinson’s drawing, in the Spitfire Story, of
K5054 as it was on March 5, 1936 shows the shape of a Watts prop very
well.
Conclusion
This is a simple kit with few parts that can be built quickly out-of-the-box
into a very satisfactory model or it can become a magnum opus for a modeler
seriously afflicted with AMS. My thanks to CMR for choosing to kit this
historically significant subject.
And thanks also to CMR for providing the kit for this review.
References:
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Scale Models, March 1977: The First of the Many – Spitfire
prototype described and drawn by Harry Robinson.
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Scale Models International, April 1986: Spitfire Salute by M. A.
Goswell on the 50th anniversary.
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Scale Models International, September 1990: Modelling the First
of the Many by Robert Humphreys.
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The First Flight of the Spitfire, 5th March 1936: painting by Jim
Mitchell; a nephew of R. J.
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Spitfire – The History: E. B. Morgan & E. Shacklady,
Key Books, UK, 5th ed. 2000, ISBN 0-946219-48-6.
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The Spitfire Story: Alfred Price, Jane’s, UK, 1982, ISBN
0-86720-624-1.
Note: these are the references that I used because I had access to them;
there are many more.
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