Special Hobby 1/48 Miles M.14A Magister

Royal Thai Air Force, Thailand 1951

Another unexpected addition to my collection of postwar aircraft in 1/48 is the Miles Magister. Well known as a 1930s trainer for the wartime RAF, it saw service with several other air forces, including the Royal Thai Air Force until the early 1950s, and thus qualified to be built by me.

Special Hobby released this boxing in 2014 with markings for Egyptian and Turkish aircraft, as well as this Thai example. It actually harks back to a moulding by Flashback in 2001, which accounts for why the plastic parts are (generally) much better than contemporary Special Hobby releases. This is also a ‘Hi-tech’ boxing and contains a couple of sheets of PE (one pre-painted), quite a few resin parts and a small vac-formed sheet for a deployed blind flying hood. The resin pieces mainly cover the interior and offer marginal improvements in detail over the kit plastic, but also an alternative wide-chord rudder and cushioned pads over the instrument panels. Flashback only released the kit with a spatted undercarriage, so Special Hobby have moulded a small sprue containing the naked legs. The difference in moulding quality is obvious.

Attention turns first to the interior. The resin floor needs to be separated from its substantial pour block, and that took a long time. Once free, I played around with how it fitted into the fuselage halves. There are no locating devices for any interior parts, and one needs to get the floor, bulkheads and instrument panels Just Right so that the fuselage halves will close. My strategy for this entailed gluing the floor to one half with PVA which gave me time to test fit the fuselage around it. Once set, I attached the bulkheads in the correct orientation to the floor only, using super glue. I could then peel the floor away from the bottom of the fuselage ready for painting.

There is some PE supplied for sidewall detail which I found did not match the instructions very well and was generally a waste of time. Although the cockpits are open, not much of the sidewalls or floor can be seen. Nevertheless, I did fit the rudder pedals with their titchy PE straps as instructed.

Some good old-fashioned yellow resin parts improve the interior along with a smattering of PE.

I painted the cockpit floor (with attached bulkheads), seats and sidewalls separately with Mr Color 364 over a medium brown primer. This was lightened with some pale grey for highlights. I made a mistake with the PE seat belts and followed the instructions; they should thread through the holes in the bulkheads, which is kind of obvious and would look much cooler. I could then stick the seats to the bulkheads, superglue the whole lot in one fuselage half, and then turn my attention to the instrument panels.

All painted and weathered the fuselage halves await unification. Note the seat belts should pass through the holes in the bulkheads.

Special Hobby provide quite nice two-layer pre-painted PE panels as well as items in plastic. I am a sucker for relief, and opted to use the plastic parts – the dials are well-moulded and would take some decals nicely. After I painted them black, I dry-brushed the panels in ever-lighter shades of grey oil paint, and then added some Airscale decals for the dials. These were then covered with small discs of acetate punched using an RP Toolz micro punch and die set.

There is the option of plastic or PE instrument panels. I preferred the plastic as it’s more three dimensional.
My painted and decalled instrument panels compared to the pre-painted PE parts.
Dial covers were made from acetate discs punched with an RP Toolz punch and die set and then glued with PVA.

Attaching the panels is a challenge as they also have no locating devices and need to be fitted central and square. Throwing caution to the wind, I simply superglued them in what looked like roughly the right place and hoped for the best. It went as well as could be expected.

There are no locating devices for the instrument panels, so installing them is a squeaky-bum moment!

Before getting the airframe together I wanted to sort out the undercarriage, as this looked hard. What became immediately obvious is that the legs are way too long. I sliced around 3mm or so off the top. Special Hobby would have you butt-join the legs to the wing, and again, there are no location devices. That will become a common refrain in this article.

The wheel legs are much rougher than the rest of the plastic and the resin wheels are meant to be trapped between the forks.

Irritatingly, the undercarriage legs are about 2.2mm in diameter, and I do not possess a drill bit of this size. My solution was to drill 2mm holes where the legs should go (worked out by eye from photos) and then stick a punched 2mm disc of plastic card to the top of the leg, which could then plug into the hole.

Further fun and games are to be had with the legs. The resin wheels are meant to be trapped between the plastic forks, but the moulding quality of the latter is very poor and the pins ill-defined. I chose to drill through the wheels and the forks and add brass axles around which the wheels freely rotated. My plan was to paint it all in situ and then fix the wheels to the axles at the very end with a drop of super glue, thus ensuring the moulded flats sat flush on the ground. If you’re making a spatted Magister, you can avoid all this hassle.

The legs needed to be cut down by a few millimetres and I used some brass tube as an axle for the wheels.

The fuselage halves fitted together pretty well, but I always make life slightly more challenging by using super glue and thus having no adjustment time. This resulted in a step along the bottom seam. I know this puzzles most people, but I love super glue to join major components so much I’d rather do it this way; it’s a good thing I enjoy sanding.

The fuselage halves fit rather well, although it’s difficult to tell because I slathered the joints with a mix of VMS Black CA and Filler Powder.
The underside was worse because I induced a step across the join.
The aileron engravings don’t meet across the trailing edge of the wings, so I filled and rescribed them more accurately.

VMS Black CA and their Filler Powder mixed into a thick goo makes a wonderful filler and I had a seamless fuselage pretty quickly. The same concoction was used to fill some sink marks just forward of the tail plane roots on the upper fuselage. The nose was assembled separately (it didn’t fit flush with the fuselage on the real thing).

Painting with silver lacquer as a quick check for how the seams are looking. There’s still filler to sand down at the tail plane joins.
Underneath things are looking quite positive.

There are no locating devices (surprise surprise!) for the wing to fuselage joins, nor the tail planes to fuselage. An outline is engraved on the fuselage sides for the wings, but on one side was deeper than the wing. The wing halves fit okay, but the ailerons don’t match up across the trailing edge, so some of the moulded detail was filled and new outlines rescribed.

The ailerons were rescribed with some fairly wide HIQ scribers to match the moulded lines.

Then came the moment of truth: adding the wings. These were a pure butt join, and matching them as best as I could to the engraved outlines, I stuck them on with Tamiya Extra Thin cement. I made every effort to get them level, but truth be told, since almost everything on this kit is a butt join, I doubt much of it is truly square. I am not convinced that Special Hobby/Flashback got the wing to fuselage geometry quite right on the underside; I think the lower front of the wing root should be closer to the fuselage underside. I’ll leave you to decide.

There’s an engraved outline to show where the wings need to go, but nothing else to help the butt join.

I could not avoid some pretty horrific gaps between the fuselage and wings, especially on the starboard side towards the rear. Once the liquid cement had set, I added lots and lots of CA/filler powder slurry; it took a couple of applications to build it up thick enough to blend in the wing roots at the rear. This filler sands really nicely, and after I was done I checked my work with a coat of Mr Finishing Surfacer 1500 Gray. I was pleasantly surprised and only a couple of areas needed a few more dabs of filler.

This is what the starboard wing looked like from above and below. That’s a pretty big gap! Note the missing central flap.
The wing was also a bit shallower than the engraved location.

Out with the black CA and filler powder to start getting rid of the gaps.
After sanding some imperfections remained and needed a touch more filler.
A coat of Mr Finishing Surfacer 1500 and this is looking quite encouraging.

Miles designed the Magister with flaps underneath the wings and across the fuselage. This latter flap is not moulded into the plastic, and so I scribed it in to match those on the wings. Sanding the wing roots had also removed some of the raised surface detail ribbing along the fuselage, and this was replaced by outlining it with tape and spraying several thick layers of Mr Finishing Surfacer 1500 to build it back up again. In general, the surface detailing is extremely nicely rendered.

That missing central flap can be scribed in.

A separate elevator and rudder are provided, and in real life there were substantial gaps between these parts and the fuselage. Special Hobby mould some large tabs into the control surfaces to replicate this, but the join is weak and poorly defined. I drilled some holes where these tabs go to produce a more positive and tighter join of the elevator and rudder to the tail. According to the instructions, this airframe required the plastic rudder rather than the resin one.

At the rear I drilled out some holes for the tabs on the elevator and rudder to plug into. There should be a fairly big gap between the fixed and moving parts.

More checks with Mr Color Silver 8 and I think this is good enough.

Silver is a good colour to check with as it reveals everything. No one looks underneath my models anyway, so this is more than adequate and we can press on.

Cushions above the instrument panels are provided in resin and clip over the lips of the cockpit openings.

With the airframe largely complete, I contemplated the clear parts. I did not want to use the vac-formed deployed flying hood, and Special Hobby told me this aircraft was fitted with one. However, on the (very few) photos of Thai Magisters I could find, it was clear no hood was fitted, which was a relief as the plastic closed example would be difficult to model well; I was glad to ignore it. Inevitably, the plastic windscreens are over-scale (the rear one, in particular, should be very thin), but they fitted okay. The join was not perfect and more CA/filler powder was used to blend them in. To avoid fogging on the clear plastic, I coated them with Johnson’s Klear first. For fine sanding like this, around quite defined detail, I like to use fine grit Tamiya sand papers.

I attached the clear parts with Tamiya Extra Thin and filled the gaps with black CA and filler powder. Note the masking tape strips in preparation for spraying primer to rebuild surface detail removed by sanding.
With the cockpit openings plugged with packing foam and the windscreens masked inside and out, the airframe is ready for primer.

I spent ages trying to find photographs of Thai Magisters, and only located a couple of very blurry black and white images. None matched ‘116’ and I have put my trust fully into Special Hobby and their research (flying hood excepted). In any case, the painted silver finish is very simple, the only addition being the walkway panel in black.

My favourite silver base colour is Mr Color Silver 8, which is very smooth and not terribly shiny. However, I can’t resist shiny, and overcoated this with Mr Color’s Super Metallic Super Fine Silver II SM201, which really is shiny. To try and build some depth into what is quite a boring finish, I cut thin slivers of masking tape using an Infini cutting board, and outlined various raised features and the control surfaces. MRP Smoke, which is a thin dark grey, was then airbrushed around the tape to try and highlight the details. This worked fine, but because the silver was so reflective, it was difficult to judge when I’d gone too far. I went back and forth a few times with silver and smoke to try and get a balance I liked.

The base coat was made up of Mr Color Silver C8 oversprayed with Mr Color Super Metallic Super Fine Silver II SM201. The walkway is various shades of black.
To try and emphasise the surface detail, strips of Tamiya tape were cut and applied so MRP Smoke could be sprayed along their edges.

Once satisfied, I added the ten decals. These were super-thin and went down very nicely, but the edges were fragile and there are a couple of ragged areas as a result. The tail flashes are slightly out of register, with a white strip visible along the top edge, which was a shame as I didn’t notice it until too late.

After the smoke was added, decals could be applied directly to the paint. Note the out-of-register tail flash, noticed too late to fix.

While the model was still shiny, I outlined the recessed detail with a panel line wash. To make it a bit less ‘metallic’ and a bit more ‘painted’, the next step was a thick layer of unthinned VMS Satin varnish over the whole model. I blasted this at about 20PSI through an Iwata RG-3L mini spray gun to avoid tip dry, but even then, build up needs to be removed every so often. Fortunately, it only takes a few minutes to cover the small airframe and leave it to dry.

Over this I brushed a thin filter of sepia oil paint, including the decals to tone them down a bit. More localised applications of dark grey and sepia oils were applied around things like the fasteners on the nose and other raised details. The final weathering steps were to splatter thinned oil paint around the airframe using a lightly-loaded brush flicked over a cocktail stick, and to add some brown staining around the walkway with an AK Interactive pencil. These mix really nicely with water and can be manipulated easily when wet.

Final details could then be attended to. I did not like the PE pitot as it was too flat. I experimented first with one made from stretched sprue, but this did not hold its shape very well, and it’s a complex shape with quite a few bends in it. My second attempt was with 0.25mm brass wire soldered together, which I was happier with. This was butt-joined to the lower wing with some super glue.

The exhaust and two venturi tubes were drilled out and added, although figuring out where the latter go is not easy and I had to guess. One cool detail was the fuel gauge on each wing, which I replicated with an Airscale decal covered with a punched disc of acetate. The pads under the windscreens were given a coat of Klear to make them a little glossy.

The kit pitot is in PE, which is too flat. I made a replacement from stretched sprue (middle) and bent 0.25mm brass wire (right).
I preferred the brass wire pitot, and attached it at the end with superglue.
The wheels were painted black after they were trapped between the forks and then masked with the aid of some die-cut HIQ masking circles for the subsequent silver.
The clear parts, instrument panels and glossy cushions at the end of the build.
Airscale decals were used to replicate the gauges for the fuel tanks and then covered with punched discs of acetate.
The clear parts all faired in place.

Finally, I added each undercarriage leg separately to get them as square as possible, and then set the model on its wheels and rotated them so they sat on the flats before using a slow-setting super glue to fix them in place. Brake lines were added from stretched sprue.

This was a charming kit to build and I had it done in under a month. It’s certainly not easy, but it can be turned into a nice model which punches above its weight.

Year bought: 2016 (Hannants)

Year built: 2025 (New Addington, Croydon)

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