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Building an Israeli Bristol Beaufighter Mk.TF.X in 1/72

By Stephen Tontoni

Overview

I got it in my head a year or so ago that I wanted to build a collection of Israeli aircraft since they had such an interesting hodge podge of types in the 1948 War of Independence. This is only the second aircraft (first was Mosquito) that I've completed since I started hoarding Israeli types and Israeli decals. The Israelis in 1948 faced multiple enemies and had very few friends. Even the US, which was quick to recognize the independent Israeli state, would not sell arms openly with which they could defend themselves against the other belligerents. Some of their aircraft were cobbled together from carcasses left by the RAF when it left. One example of that is their first Spitfire, which was a Frankenstein monster of bits from here and here.

There's one very interesting story that really epitomizes the early struggle of the IAF to acquire machinery with which to fight. In 1948, a group of Israeli businessmen formed a corporation in Scotland, supposedly to film a movie about a Kiwi squadron of Beaufighters used in WWII. In order to make a realistic movie, of course, it was necessary to purchase five war surplus machines. Once these five Beaus were purchased, they were flown to the continent, erasing their paper trail enroute, until four of them (one crashed) made it to Israel in time for the War of Independence. None of those four aircraft were to survive 1948 but they made a contribution to the war effort.

The Build

I decided to build my Beaufighter starting with the splendid Hasegawa kit. I accumulated various aftermarket odds and ends to dress it up. The first that I started to fiddle with was the set of resin wheel well inserts from Aires. These came with really nice wheel covers as well. Using this set requires you to remove the existing styrene wheel wells which are molded into the lower wing. It's really not terrible to remove as the plastic is soft enough and cuts easily with a scalpel. Getting the insert to fit is an entirely different story; those things just didn't want to go in and there are compound curves everywhere. It took a lot of carving, filing, fudging, cajoling, and filling (and some amount of cussing) to get them to look right. There are pictures of the finished product on this page; I'm glad I did it because Aires rocks!

Next, I scraped the interior detail off the fuselage halves so that I could mount the Aires resin interior. That set is sweet and is very straight-forward in construction. It consists of floor, bulkhead, fuselage sides, seat, instrument panel (photoetch), seat harnesses (photoetch), and various other details for the interior. It's simple to build and looks great, but I suggest that you do multiple dry fits with the fuselage sides before committing yourself with glue. It will probably take some scraping and filing to get it to fit right. I had some struggles around closing the fuselage completely with all that resin in there.

I got ahead of myself; as for painting the interior and the wheel wheels, I sprayed Floquil Interior Grey-Green (British) then made a wash of IGG mixed with a Floquil Grimey Black and thinner. I got that in all the nooks and crannies then dry brushed slightly lightened IGG on all the protruding bits and corners to simulate more depth. After that, I just had to spray some Dull-Cote on it and pick out bits here and there with a detail brush.

My only gripe with the interior set is that you can't see it! The details go pretty far back into the fuselage - all the way to the first panel line/bulkhead - and very little is visible through the canopy. I reasoned that the only way that you could make those wondrous details visible at all would be to open up the crew ladder under the aircraft. In that case, I believe that Aires should have included that ladder and hatch in the set. I apologize for neglecting to have taken build photo's of the interior; you'll just have to take my word for it. I held back my gloom as I said good bye to the interior before zipping up the fuselage, burying it alive. One other aftermarket doo-dad in the cockpit was the pre-colored seat harness from Eduard that I used on the pilot's seat. I like those pre-colored harnesses as I tend to scrape the paint off with my pointy tweezers and have to retouch later on. Perhaps I should invest in some sort of tweezers that have a soft tip.

I tried to make a new canopy using an ancient Mattel Vacu-form so that I could easily open the upper hatch (an omission on the Hasegawa kit) but wasn't able to get any of my clear styrene to melt enough to make a decent one. If there's a source of original plastic stock for those Mattel machines, or some sort of equivalent, I'd be happy to hear from any and all about it. In the end, I used the Hasegawa canopy which is thin and clear, but I wasn't brave enough to attempt surgery on it to open the upper hatch.

The rest of the build was very straight-forward and simple. I used a bit of CA glue here and there to fill seams, but nothing really noteworthy. I really liked the positive connection between the horizontal stabilizers and the fuselage. Although I learned a really neat trick for aligning dihedral on them, it wasn't necessary to use it; they are difficult to misalign.

I was supposed to be building a MkTF.X but started with a MkVI. For the most part, they look very similar as MkVI's were often updated with the new turret and all that. The one question that I wasn't able to answer regarding the Israeli Beaufighters was if they came from Fleet Air Arm stocks; if they had, they'd have had 'wet wings' rather than 'gun wings'. The 'wet wing' variant had large wing fuel tanks instead of wing guns to increase their patrol range. Not knowing which Israel used, I reasoned that they wouldn't have needed the excess range but would have valued the guns; I went ahead with the MkVI with the updates and I'm now calling it a TF.X. Purists out there can gather up a lynch mob if they deem it necessary. I made sure to have the correct turret, the correct air intakes, no dorsal fin, dihedral on the horizontal stabilizers (NB: I've seen drawings with and without, but my more recent references show the dihedral. Also a cause for more rumination: with such accentuated dihedral, are they really horizontal stabilizers? Food for thought on a Sunday morning), no Sperry autopilot, and no radar antennae so that it would look correct.

Painting was really a lot of fun. I decided to approach the wing stripes differently this time around; normally, I'd prime, paint white, mask, paint blue, mask, then do the camouflage. This is a system that is well-founded and reliable. Of course I decided to experiment. I figured that if I did all the camouflage first, I could mask and paint the blue - which would have no problem covering anything - then mask and paint the white. The reason that I reversed the process is that I was still tracking a source for masking tape as I didn't want to cut ultra thin strips of Bare Metal Foil to do this job. I went ahead and shot Floquil Midstone (British), then free handed Floquil Dark Earth (British), masked, and shot Floquil Azure Blue (British). That color scheme makes me happy.

Painting of the fuselage and wing bands was another area in which I fudged slightly for ease of application. I measured the bands on a 1/72 drawing and it came out to about 9/32" per band. There are five stripes per band, so I decided to push my reading up to 10/32" or 5/16"; how convenient... Then I found that Pactra has produced 1/16" masking tape and bought a couple rolls of the stuff; you never know when you might need it! I first masked off the 5/16" bands using Tamiya tape and sprayed Model Master Royal Blue. I applied 1/16" tape abutting the Tamiya tape to work as a spacer for the first masking strip, then another spacer, then the second masking strip, and so on. Anyone who's built furniture knows the 'spacer technique'. I removed the spacer strips, leaving the masking strips in place, then sprayed Model Master Insignia White. When I removed the tape (nearly immediately as I couldn't wait) I found that I had some minor bleed through in some panel lines. Weathering them took care of the problem. The look is exactly what I want and the white is toned down by the blue underneath. Apparently, you have to burnish down the Pactra stuff more than you do the Tamiya stuff.

Decals were extremely simple; I just used Isradecals Mogen Davids (Israeli insignias) and applied some numbers from my spares box. Isradecals lay down really well and respond very well to Solvaset. These are among the least cranky decals I've used as they are quite opaque, they respond to solvent, yet they don't disappear in a glob by it.

For the antenna, I used .94 test (.001) tippet line that I got at a fly fishing store. For the insulators, I cut two bits of casing off a thin insulated wire and threaded them onto the line. I attached them with just a touch of ultra thin CA glue. They're over scale, but the effect is nice.

Conclusion

So there's the second aircraft in my Israeli collection. I really enjoyed doing it and I'm pretty happy with the model although I'm aware that it has many faults. I highly recommend all the aftermarket doo-dads that I used although if I were to do it again, I'd spend less time on the invisible parts.