Special Hobby 1/32 Brewster Buffalo

By Keith Allott

Trying to determine where to begin my Royal New Zealand Air Force aircraft collection has proved to be a little trickier than what I first imagined. In the end, I decided to start with RAF (NZ) 488 Squadron Based at Kallang field in Singapore in 1941-42. Although 488 Sqn is not considered to be RNZAF in the strictest sense, it was staffed entirely by RNZAF personnel, so I figured that this was as good a place to start as any.

The aircraft I have attempted to represent is one of a number of well used Lend-lease Buffalos transferred to 488 Sqn who were providing air defense for Singapore. The squadron had very little in the way of advanced warning systems and was heavily outnumbered. In spite of this, the Kiwi aircrews managed to keep these little planes in the air until their eventual withdrawal from Singapore.

As Special Hobby had not yet released the Mk1 kit when I started this project, I have used the F2A-2 kit, the tail cones from someone else's F2A-3, the F2A-3 instructions and some 1/48-scale Roundels. The tail flashes and codes were painted.

Although some of the parts have a few fit issues, the build itself was very straightforward. The panels are very nicely recessed and the extra details/photo etch/resin make this a great model straight out of the box.

The entire build can be found here: http://forum.largescaleplanes.com/index.php?showtopic=18653.

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© Keith Allott

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This article was published on Friday, September 27 2013; Last modified on Saturday, May 14 2016