It’s high time I finished the tale of my Airfix plastic kit which has been in suspense for over two years – the tale, not the kit.

 We left the 1/72 Fairey Battle here, nearly complete but in need of painting. The last few bits were duly added and the model painted in accordance with the instructions. So far as I can remember all painting was done with the acrylics supplied (there were 15 pots in the gift set). I did my best to reproduce the camouflage scheme freehand and I tried to paint the canopy bars as neatly and carefully as possible. I can quite see why an aftermarket product for aero modellers is paint masks for cockpit canopies. The supplied transfers were applied and micro sol applied when over raised detail.

And here we are:

This is all built strictly in accordance with the kit. Not something I usually do as a railway modeller…

The Battle currently lives on a clear plastic stand on top of the bookcase. (These came from Airfix and to make the web order up to mitigate postage I bought a 1/76 Cromwell tank as a potential load for a Warflat. More of that when I get round to building the etched Warflat.) However as a single engine aircraft the Battle is a fairly modest sized model and the long term aspiration is to build one of the twin engine aircraft in the gift set, probably the Hampden as it’s the largest and has Lincolnshire connections.

That then leaves open the question of what I do with the Battle. So I decided that I ought to attempt a diorama display base suitable for displaying a single engine aircraft in 1/72. Where I would actually display the display base I’m not sure, but in the meantime I had a stout hexagonal box going spare to keep the display base in.

That accounts for the otherwise odd shape of the display base: it’s a hexagon with two of the vertices chopped off to get fingers into the box to extract it.

As far as the inspiration is concerned I’ve a couple of military modelling books on terrain modelling, both by Osprey and Richard Windrow. Mostly the projects aren’t the right scale for a 4mm modeller, but one of them has a chapter on Modern Surfaces and item one is concrete hardstand with an illustration of a simple base set on an airfield. My display base is a straight crib from that, although different materials may have been used.

The surface is a piece of foamcore board cut to shape and scribed for the joints between concrete panels. This was painted with Humbrol concrete paint: apart from anything else I wanted to check the colour was ok before I use it on Mercia Wagon Repair. I drew out a large radius arc on the edge and sprinkled a little Woodland Scenics material on it. The joints are picked out with a dark pin wash.

The core of this base is a spare shelf from an Ikea CD/DVD tower like the one shown here:

(this one has been used as a ballast test piece for the N gauge project). This was built out with spare bits of balsawood, edged round with more balsa and then thin card edging applied. Most of this was done with aliphatic resin: I’ve bought several bottles of this from Rocket, I know not why, and now I’m looking for opportunities to use them up and save my stocks of more useful glues. Finally a thin card backing was applied.