Kotare 1/32 Spitfire Mk.I is now shipping

[Lusitanian]

Really looking forward to this one!

[Lusitanian]

Surprised to see no comments now that the kit is on the streets.  It’s very nice, and easily the best Mk.I ever in 1/32.  Not perfect, but nothing ever is.

[ChesshireCat]

16 hours ago, Lusitanian said:

Surprised to see no comments now that the kit is on the streets.  It’s very nice, and easily the best Mk.I ever in 1/32.  Not perfect, but nothing ever is.

I thought about it and simply passed on it! Wrong kit at the right time. They should have done a MK.Vb or C, or a new MK.XII. My money is going to Revell this year with their new Hurricane (thinking I need three or four kits) as this was one of the most desperately needed kits for eons. Add to this that somehow I have to get the money together to buy two P40b kits from GWH.

gary

[Buckmeister]

Got this kit earlier this week.  It looks very nice in the box.  It may be the Wingnut team that did it, but I don’t think it’s up to Wingnut standards.  Don’t get me wrong - it’s a beautiful kit, but it lacks the finesse of Wingnut. The tooling of the raised rivets on the aft fuselage is too prominent IMHO, and a lot of them are going to be sanded off when you try to get rid of the seams along the piece that makes up the spine of the fuselage.  Not the greatest of engineering decisions. I will be sanding all of them off and applying HGW rivets to replace them. To their credit, Kotare is the first kit to accurately portray the aft fuselage with dome headed rivets, I just think they’re going to look odd on a scale model if you leave them as-is.  The cockpit is quite nicely done. Providing seats with and without belts attached is a good idea, but the belts that thread though the back of the seat to be anchored aft are far too thick to look accurate.  Again, I will be using HGW belts in mine. 

 

Kotare calls this kit a “mid” Spitfire Mk.I (a meaningless term), and it only comes with the hand pumped landing gear retraction system. I know that that was the standard on the earliest Spits, but I think the majority of aircraft built from the spring of 1940 onward had the engine-driven system installed.  As far as I’m aware, no one has ever uncovered precisely when that system was first installed on the production line at the Wollston Works in Southampton. Maybe someday someone will.  I will be replacing those parts with resin parts from Barracuda in mine.  

No engine detail at all is provided.  That’s fine by me, since I think leaving the cowling off of a Spitfire and destroying those beautiful lines should be a crime in every jurisdiction on earth. My kit came with 3D printed exhausts, which look very nice.  Honestly, the plastic parts don’t look that bad either.  Control surfaces are all separate.  The elevators are designed to be “drooped”, and even (correctly) have the trim tabs deflected opposite the droop of the elevators.  The rudder is designed to have a bit of offset, but easy enough to mount straight with a little bending of the tabs that mount them to the vertical fin.  Fabric effect on the controls is very nicely done.  Flaps are (correctly) molded closed.  The only time you would ever see the flaps down on a Spitfire is when it was actually in the process of landing, or possibly if the airplane was on jacks and torn apart inside the hangar.  Otherwise they were always up when the aircraft was parked.  

 

The cockpit is nicely detailed overall.  Decals are provided for the instruments, but they simply stick on the front of the plastic panel, with no attempt to portray the glass that covers them.  Not sure what I will do with that yet.  Hopefully one of the 3D printed cockpit decal makers will step up and provide us something for it. The two large oxygen bottles aft of the seat are molded into the sidewall part. Not the best solution (they are not true cylinders), but I don’t think they will be especially visible through the aft canopy in any event. You can build the cockpit door open or closed, and it correctly lacks the crowbar that only appeared from mid-1941 onward. 

 

Landing gear is okay, but not outstanding.  It lacks some detail, and there is no indication of the brake line at all.  The way it’s designed it appears it will assume the correct stance, and the tires (sorry, tyres) have the correct camber and the hubs are nicely detailed.  You can put the tail wheel in place after painting (thank you!!).

 

The instruction sheet is definitely evidence of a Wingnut connection - it looks identical to the “look and feel” of the Wingnut instructions.  Beautifully illustrated, with clear instructions, including installing the control cables under the cockpit - a nice touch.  

 

To me the single biggest down side of the kit is the decals.  To be frank, they’re horrible.  That was also one of the problems a lot of Winghut kits had, and I suspect the same person is responsible for these.  Wingnut had trouble with getting correct colors, especially on their German stuff. The same problem is evident here.  The actual artwork is fine for the most part, but the colors are awful.  The squadron codes, which should be Medium Sea Grey are an almost shocking color of blue gray. I pulled out my BS381c fan deck, and the color is actually a stronger blue than BS381c/636 PRU Blue.  I’ve seen two models built using the kit decals, and they stopped me in my tracks.  Additionally the yellow color on the roundels is a bright, almost lemon yellow, not the very deep orange yellow that the real things were painted.  I know not all airplanes in 1940 exactly matched the standard, but I really feel like this decal gives you the wrong visual impression of how a Battle of Britain Spitfire really looked.  Kotare seems to make a big deal of their stencils being the only accurate ones ever done, but I’m going to disagree on that.  The early blocks of Mk.Is (at least) used a serifed font, which Kotare’s does not have. It’s easy to find photos of this.  I think Kotare’s are more appropriate for later build Mk.Is and subsequent marks. Fortunately there are aftermarket alternatives available for everything except the cockpit decals, some of which I will be using on mine. The other thing that Kotare says is that all Mk.Is had hard-edged camouflage demarcation lines on the dark green/dark earth upper surface colors.  For sure, some of the very earliest ones appear to have, but later ones absolutely had a very fine feathered edge.  It’s a very tight feather, probably like an inch or so, but definitely not hard edged.  I emailed the restorers of N3200 in the UK, and they confirmed that their aircraft had feathered edges when they sanded down the camouflage for the restoration, and that’s how they painted her during the restoration.

 

Overall this is easily the best 1/32 Spitfire Mk.I ever done.  As soon as I saw it announced, I got rid of my Revell Mk.II and the earlier Revell/Hasegawa Mk.I/II mashup of the 1990s, and I’m glad I did.  This one blows both of them away with ease.  You really don’t need much, if any, aftermarket stuff to make this a stunning model, save for the decals.  Looking forward to building several.