The Little World

Five cold and wet days in Perth saw the roses in the front garden blown down, the cat reduced to tears, and the Hawker Tempest V completed. It started out as a vehicle for experiment and in the end has proven its worth.

The thing is garish, and deliberately so. After WW2 the Tempest was sent briefly to the middle east ( and one got shot down while under RAF pilotage ) and to Singapore to bolster the Empire. And then sent back and converted to target tug duties for the Gloster Meteor pilots. A good choice for the old warbird, as it was fast enough to give them some exercise and reliable enough to do it upon a regular basis.

The plane the model resembles is in preservation at hendon – one of a series of the Tempest V’s that did the training duty. They’ve painted and polished theirs so I took the opportunity to do the same. I like silver aircraft.

I like them shiny, and this is done very well these days by a Super Metallic from Mr Color. In this case Bright Silver. The yellow is MC 329 and the black their simple gloss. All coats given sufficient time to dry before re-masking. The final colour coats went to a good gloss and the decals laid down well.

The Buster experiment was to be an application of either Gauzy glosser or Cabot floor polish over the entire airframe by means of a soft brush. I determined to start on the underside of the tailplanes to hide it if it was awful, but in the end found it to be delightfully glossy and smooth.

An application to the elevators on the upper side showed that it was not going to affect the gloss of the paint very much at all…so I experimented with just coating the tail flashes and the fuselage roundels by themselves – they went so well that I did the wing insignia. And then decided that as this would seal them onto the aircraft, it was pointless just to gloss over the whole thing. It looks like the museum one as it is.

I am going to regard this all as a success and not press my luck further – there will be other planes to gloss on other occasions.