Hawker Hunter T.7 XL 577 229 OCU Project

There has been a project that I started planning a few years back which was to build several aircraft from my father old RAF unit, 229 OCU which he served his national service in during the late 1950's. He was based at RAF Chivenor in Devon where the unit was training pilots up to jet fighters certification. The aircraft in this unit was Gloster Meteors, De Havilland Vampires, Canadair Sabres (only for about a year) and Hawker Hunters. The aircraft were initially assigned as 229 OCU aircraft, but towards the end of the 50's, the aircraft then started to be assigned in shadow squadrons. these squadrons were 234 Squadron, 145 Squadron, 79 Squadron, 131 Squadron, 127 Squadron and 63 Squadron at various time until disbandment in 1974, then reformed with 65 (R) squadron from 1986 until 1992.

My initial plan was to build one Meteor T.7, one Vampire T.11, two Hunter T.7's and two Hunter F.6's. There are some aftermarket decal sheets which cover two T.7's and two F.6's. The Meteor and Vampire have no aftermarket decals available, so they will have to be created by myself once I have found out the marking for those aircraft. The number of the aircraft that I was going to build has now increased slightly, as two of the Hunter that I had purchased for this project, ( a F.6 and a FGA.9) have both turned out to have 79 Squadron decals in their boxes. So that is now two extra aircraft which will be in the 229 OCU collection. But I am also thinking about doing a Canadair Sabre and a Meteor F.8 to complete the 1950's line-up of aircraft. Now, the FGA9 Hunter was from the 1970's, so this got me thinking that maybe, I should do one or two more of the later aircraft, which happen to be Tornados. But this is just a thought for now.

Anyhow, back to the initial subject of this post, the Hunter T.7 XL577. The base kit is an old Matchbox Hawker Hunter F.6/T7 kit which was first produced back in the 1970's. I had actually built built one backin about 1979/80 as a T.7, so it was a bit of a nostalgia trip building this model for me. These are basic kits, no interior detail except for basic seats and a flat control panel. The fuselage has the option of building it as a single seater F.6 or the twin seater T.7. This was going to be the first of my T.7's for this large project, so she was built straight out of the box with just two of the drop tank fitted to her. 

After tidying up any joints issues and priming the model, she was given a couple of coats of  Xtracolor's High Speed Silver. The decal sheet comes with  decals to for six different aircraft, but you can only build one model from the sheet. Now as the yellow bands come as a decals, I decided to mask the model and paint these bands on instead, allowing me to do both  of the aircraft  I need from this sheet. Once she was dry and had a couple coats of gloss clear, I started with the decals for this aircraft. This is a model of aircraft XL 577 of 234 Squadron as she was around 1960, a couple of years after my father left the unit. Once the decals were finished, they were sealed with more clear before final detail painting was done and final assembly. 

Even with the age of this kit and the lack of detail, it still produces a nice model which will look great along side the other aircraft that are being built for this project. The photos below were taken late in the build, so there is none from the beginning of the construction, but I plan to rectify this when I build the second T.7.