Plywood sheet and basic materials are relatively cheap. However the initial costs of making the Spitfire would be low. A Spitfire fuselage is thirty foot long, with a wing span of nearly forty foot and original parts are very expensive. Now most sensible people at this point would have had a reality check and said this is madness. The 1/3 scale Spitfire had a wingspan of 83 inches, so this was going to be big. So, I dug out my old plans and found that I had 1/6 scale MKV Spitfire and a 1/3 scale MkIX in my archives. He reasoned that if I successfully made a large model, I could exhibit it at events and perhaps make money to supplement my lack of income while looking for work. It was my brother in law who suggested that if I made a model like a Spitfire, or a Hurricane it might create a job, as job hunting wasn't going well. I just needed something cheap to do to to fill my time. A life changing moment and not something I was used to and with it comes boredom. I didn't limit myself to aeroplanes and made all sorts of model ships, boats and even a submarine. I started off with gliders, before moving onto rubber powered models and finally radio control models. However I was hooked and I started to buy magazines that had free flying aeroplane plans and started to make them. It sadly broke in two and that's where the hobby of aeromodelling ended for my father. The glider flew straight and true, caught a thermal and flew over our house and nestled beautifully in a neighbours fish pond. We lived opposite a field a natural place for a test flight, however we decided to try a test flight in the front garden. After much anticipation we were ready for the first flight. The model was made from balsa strips and covered in tissue. The big change from plastic models came when my father made a glider. The 1/24 Spitfire was the best, with it's rubber tyres and moving parts. I started with the simpler models before moving onto the larger and more complex offerings. A stable diet of all sorts of Airfix models and of course the Spitfire were built in many scales. I was very lucky as a child in having parents that encouraged my hobbies and interests. I had always been a keen aviation enthusiast from an early age.
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