Academy 1/72 Spitfire Mk. XIV
This is the model that turned me off of Hyperscale's discussion board. You see I happened to comment to someone that I didn't think the Academy Spitfire Mk. XlV was all that bad. Sure the radiators are perpendicular to the ground instead of the bottom of the wing, the leading edge of the fin needs a bit of minor re-shaping, the edges of the carb intake and radiators need thinning down, the cockpit door is too small and the wing is a bit thick. All of which are fairly easy to fix, and the Academy kit was less than a third of the price of the Fujimi one at the time.
I ended up in a lengthy debate with this fellow about the myriad errors with this kit and decided that life was far too short to be wasting my time discussing such trivial things with people who are obviously far more worried about microscopic discrepancies than I am.
Apart from the aforementioned problems, apparently the wing fillet is wrong, the nose is wrong and the cockpit is too wide, making it, in his opinion, "a terrible kit". I was told the best 1/72 Spit XlV could be had by combining the Ventura & Fujimi kits. At the time those kits were going for around $25.00cdn a piece - the Academy kit was $7.99.
I've compared this kit to three different scale plans and dozens of photos and I can see nothing wrong with either the nose or the wing fillet. If they are off, then it can't be more than a few thousands of an inch which is far too pedantic for me! The cockpit is a bit too wide, I'll give him that, but it hardly puts it in the "terrible kit" category.
I fixed the radiators, re-shaped the fin, rescribed the cockpit door, refined the leading edges of the carb intake and radiators, and added the fuel filler cap in front of the windscreen. I also converted it to an 'e' wing as I wanted to model a 402 squadron RCAF machine.
I'm not sure if it should have the red fabric patches where the outboard .303 guns would be (not installed in the 'e' wing) but I do have one photo of an 'e' wing with those patches so I stuck 'em on.
In spite of what the nay-sayer on Hyperscale said, I think it looks every inch a Spit XlV and at a fraction of the price of his Ventura/Fujimi hybrid. So there!
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