One very nice beer glass, didn't get broken in the post. Problem? On the small side, have to keep filling it up. I will be christening it with a bottle of Spitfire Ale that I bought on offer at Sainsbury's a few weeks ago. Seems to taste even better when it's £1 a bottle. (That's a proper sized bottle, not one of those small ones they sell in Aldi for £1).
Cardboard souvenir beer mat.
Black cardboard box labelled Bassin. Inside:
Two resin slipper tanks. Also available separately. Nice that these are now available as they are often seen in photographs. As well as numerous rivets the surfaces have a quilted effect instead of being slab-sided.
Resin wheels. Four smooth tyres with Dunlop on the side. Four segment and five segment hub inserts, enough for four wheels of either type. Extra set of treaded tyres. They are numbered separately so it seems there is a left and a right tyre. Not sure why, perhaps something to do with the tread pattern? How often do you see a Spitfire with treaded tyres? Still, depending upon which hubs you have used, there will be enough parts left over to make a set of wheels with treaded tyres to use on another model if you find an example that had them.
Two resin beer barrels. Apparently the correct name is kilderkins (18 gal casks) My spell checker doesn't like kilderkins but I do. These are for use on two of the kit options which seem to have been a late addition.
Instead of including two of the PE set from the Profipack kit, the Royal boxing has its own dedicated PE which is split into two each with two sets of parts. One set is precoloured, basically the instrument panels and seatbelts. There are two versions of the instrument panel. The second set contains all the other PE which is basically what that from the Profipack but with some additional parts for the undercarriage.
Two sets of PE wing flaps. Looks too fiddly for me. Perhaps it might be a good idea to try to assemble them with Future/Klear as an adhesive rather than CA. Anybody want two sets of Spitfire flaps? Make me an offer.
Paint masks, again doubled up for two Spitfires. The kit (plastic) wheels have inserts for both sides but the resin wheels only one side so wheel masks are also included.
There are on less than fourteen options. It would be too tedious to list them all so you will have to go to Eduard's website to check them out. Twelve of them are on a decal sheet printed by Cartograf. There are national markings for two RAF Spitfires as well as USAAF, Israeli and Russian. Also an additional pair of fuselage roundels for MH779 which have a thin black outline. One of the options is for a 345 Squadron Spitfire with French roundels instead of the RAF. No argument with that, the French were allowed to use their own roundels but these are printed with lighter blue centres. I have no idea if they actually did use the French Blue or not and there may be arguments raging somewhere over this. All I can say is the blue has a little bit of a turquoise hue to it, which may well be authentic. The last two options are for the beer carrying Spits and are on a separate, non-Cartograf sheet that suggests that they are a late addition. Two sets of stencil decals are included.
The plastic. Two sets of sprues to build two Spitfires. In the Profipack only a single set of cannon barrels were present, alternatives seemed to have been removed from the sprues. Do not know why Eduard did this but in the Royal all three types of cannon barrels are present which enables you to go off-piste and build a model not included in the kit's options. The kit options, as Eduard call them, include early Mk IXc, late Mk IXc and Mk IXe. There is no problem building a high-back Mk XVI as Mk XVI designates them as having a had a Packard Merlin.
So what are the differences between an early and late Mk IXc? Well one of them is that they had different versions of Merlin engines, the early optimised for higher altitudes and the later optimised for lower altitudes. In service personnel started to call these later IXcs , IXBs which has led to the myth that some Mk IXs had a 'B' wing when in fact none ever did. To avoid confusion the Air Ministry designated them F.IX and LF.IX. The discernible differences are that generally the F.IXs had a short air intake and broad, dual blisters over the cannons, while the LF.IXs had the long Vokes Aero Vee filter intake and narrow, single, blisters over the cannons.
There are also some smaller distinctive differences that distinguish the F.IX from the LF.IX. F.IX commonly had a Coffman type blister on the front starboard side of the nose. In this case it was for a cabin blower which was in simple terms a Coffman starter that ran in reverse. They are present even when Spitfire did not have have a cabin blower for various reasons such as a common set of panels were used. Eduard have included this and there are two dimples on the inside of the fuselage that mark the place to drill the holes for it to be fixed in place.
F.IXs were fitted with a fuel cooler, the intake for which was on the port wing root. This was the position of the gun camera in earlier marks and consequently the fuel cooler intake can, and has been, mistaken for a gun camera. The intake has a noticeably larger diameter orifice.
So what happened to the gun camera? At first there was none but later a gun camera was fitted to the starboard wing root. They were also retro-fitted to existing F.IXs. So an F.IX will almost certainly have the fuel cooler intake but may or may not have the gun camera orifice. I find it a little surprising that considering how much detail Eduard have gone into on this Spitfire there is no mention of the fuel cooler intake in the instructions.
Something else that Eduard make no mention of is the beam approach antenna fitted to later versions. I cannot find anything on the sprues that look like one either. There is one included with Hasegawa's Mk IX.
So what is the problem that I have discovered? Instead of having a universal wing with inserts to for the different versions, as do many kit manufacturers, Eduard have three separate wing types, as they call them Early C, Late C and E. This is commendable as it allows the incorporation of other small differences in the wings. There is no problem with the E wing so no need to say any more about it.
However with the C wings Eduard have made the assumption that early IXcs have the short air intake and wings with wide cannon blisters while the late Mk IXcs have the the long Vokes intake and narrow cannon blisters on the wings. This is an over simplification as there are many examples of early IXcs with short intake and narrow cannon blisters.
Take for example EN526, option C in the kit which is one I would very much like to build. Eduard portray it with wide cannon blisters which is not correct. EN526 and its sister EN527 (which looks like it will be one of the options in the Duo Combo release) were among the first Mk IXc to be delivered to the Polish Wing. OK, all I need to do is build it with the late version wing. Not that simple, as Eduard have different wing under surfaces for the different intakes.
Because Eduard have supplied both the early and late wings I can fit the late wing tops to the early wing bottom (I have tried this and they seem to fit perfectly). I can then build the second Spitfire with the E wings. Although I am sure that there were some Mk IXcs with the long intake and wide cannon blisters I have so far not been able to find an example that was definitively configured that way. So that's not an option.
So I have solved the problem but only because there are three different wings to choose from. There are two, possibly three other similar configured Spitfires that I would like to build eventually but in future I the only way to do this would be to buy an early C version kit for the bottom wing and a late C version kit for the top wings. I would then be left with all the parts to build another Spitfire but no example to build. I don't think many people are going to be happy about that.
