Building Pat Pattle's Hurricane.

Conversion of the 1/48 Hobbycraft Hurricane MkII into a Hurricane MkI Tropical – to resemble the last aircraft flown into aerial battle by the legendary Pat Pattle. 

When I was given this kit, I decided that I wanted to modify it to be Pattle’s plane. This, I knew, implied the modification of the nose and wings. For the nose, I had the option of cutting it through the panel line immediately before the cockpit and sanding it to make it shorter, or doing the same around the spinner area. None of these options would give me a satisfactory nose profile. For the wings, covering the C type wing panel lines and re-scribing them was one of the options, probably the most difficult and time consuming one? Finally I decided to make a copy in resin of the nose and the gun muzzles using the 48 Hasegawa kit as template. 

First I put the 3 nose pieces in a plasticine base with walls made of cardboard covered with plastic (that came from the bag of diapers of my newborn son!). Once properly secured, I dropped the fluid rubber into it and left it cure for a couple of days. The base was taken off and the rubber & pieces were turned upside down. The rubber was covered with Vaseline and more rubber was dumped into the box (I had little rubber left so I used whatever piece of rubber – even dried – I could use). When dried, the pieces were taken out from the mold and were ready to be used. The nose of the HC kit was cut along the panel line before the cockpit so all the engine area was removed. On the wings, using Richard Caruana’s plans in SAMI, the cutter was used to open up a rectangle were the muzzles go.