1/48 Tamiya Gloster Meteor F.3

by Gareth Phua

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After a long break of almost 2 years of not building any aircraft, I decided I yearned for the challenge of building aircraft kits again.

Hunting around for a relatively good quality yet reasonably cheap (in this part of the world anyways) kit led me to the Tamiya range of aircraft kits. I chose the Gloster Meteor F.3.
I initially bought this kit with the intention of entering a local Tamiya contest here in Singapore, but other personal distractions saw to it that this kit was completed slightly more than a month late. I've always had a soft spot for British jets of the 50s, 60s and even 70s. There's a certain ugliness about them that's appealing.
Anyways, the build wasn't easy due to my hamfistedness, and certainly wasn't due to poor engineering on the part of Tamiya. Many mistakes I made were of my own doing. If anything, the superb engineering of the kit helped in alot of my repair work. After painting, gloss coating and decalling, I discovered a cracked wing root joint, which was repaired with white glue then sprayed over with the original colours before darkening it some using Tamiya clear smoke.

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Eduard PE parts for the cockpit were used. It's the first time I'm using PE parts for aircraft and "it's a challenge" would be an understatement even though it was only the Zoom set that I've used. Still I liked the results enough to want to use PE parts for my cockpits in future.

Pictures of Meteors seen in my references showed a rather clean machine, so I didn't go to town with the weathering. Initially, the cannon ports were to be weathered with soot, but not one picture I saw had the gun ports dirty, so these were left clean, opting only to do chipping to that area, oft accessed panels and the canopy sills.

The base used was a picture frame from Ikea, stained cherry red and then coated with 2 coats of matt quick-drying varnish. I scribed a grid of 6cm for the tarmac, sprayed it with concrete coloured grey before washing the scribed lines with a dark custom mixed grey of Vallejo paints. Some cracks were painted on freehand. For the yellow line, I felt it helped break the monotony of the grey area so decided to mask off that area and spray a yellow mixed with some white Mr Surfacer to tone it down.

I used the nameplate of the Eduard PE set as I felt it was quite a nice touch. It was first coated with gloss black then sprayed with Alclad Polished Aluminium before being buffed with a soft cloth. Time to expand my Alclad range me thinks.

Gareth 

Photos and text © by Gareth Phua