Fonderie Miniature Halifax B III - 1/48 scale

The FM Halifax has been described by some modellers as unbuildable but having seen several finished examples at various model shows I beg to differ. For sure it is not as straight forward as a Hasegawa or Tamiya kit, it should be remembered that it is a short run kit and is probably best approached as if it were an injection moulded vacform.

I have acquired three of these kits over the past couple of years and currently have two under construction. The second one to be bought had already passed thought the hands of two other people who had both given up on it. It was nearly complete (Pictured above, after partial dismantling) but had a number of problems.

First and most obvious was that the fuselage was far from symmetrical, appearing to resemble a banana, also the tailplanes were at odd angles and one was set higher than the other. Added to this some parts for the turrets were missing, the upper turret aperture was blanked off and a roughly made replacement solid rear turret had been fashioned out of filler with some metal tubes to represent the guns.

In order to correct these faults it was going to be necessary to partially dismantle the model and find a subject aircraft to finish it as that would not require turrets. The latter was fairly easy to achieve, I remembered seeing a couple of Charles E Brown photographs of a C Mk VIII serial no. PP285 in K. A. Merrick's excellent book on the Halifax. This aircraft was retained by Handley Page for test purposes after WWII, it had a streamlined fairing in place of the tail turret and the no mid upper. It was a particularly attractive aeroplane being mostly bare metal but carrying RAF insignia, so this is the example that I decided to model.

A couple of hours work with a scalpel, razor saw and few other tools had the model stripped back to just the fuselage and the wings with the engines still in place, they were subsequently removed when I notice that some were mis-aligned. I was now ready to start correcting the problems, little did I realise the route this was going to take down. But all that will be related in future posts.