Combining Parts from Multiple Kits
by Ora Lassila / So Many Aircraft
Sometimes a single kit is not enough to get you the result you want, or the kit has problems that are easiest to correct by taking parts from another kit. This approach to model-building is called "kitbashing", and while you may think this could be costly, you will want to do it if the end result is what really matters. For me personally, the turning point was dispensing with the thinking that 1 kit = 1 model, and starting to think of kits as mere "raw material" for models.
In an ideal world, parts from one kit would be a perfect fit for another kit. Of course this is not always the case, due to two reasons: first, kits are engineered differently, and second, kits are not always completely accurate wrt. the original objects they represent. Most often I notice this when fitting a canopy from one kit to another kit (because of accuracy, or lack thereof) or when using the cockpit interior from one kit in another kit (because of differences in engineering). In both cases, you may need to work the parts involved to make them fit, by either sanding off something or "building up" some structure using, say, styrene sheet and putty.
Here are some examples of my own projects where I used kitbashing:
- I combined parts from Airfix's de Havilland Vampire and Revell's Sud-Est Mistral to build a Finnish Air Force Vampire. In this case, both the Airfix and the Revell kits were re-boxings of old Heller kits. The Revell kit was molded in harder plastic than the Airfix kit, something I prefer, so I wanted to use as many parts from the Revell kit as possible. Mistral, however, had a different engine than the original Vampire, and thus I had to take the fuselage (and engine intakes) from the Airfix kit, but the rest came from the Revell kit. I also re-built the cockpit interior using a photo-etch set from Eduard.
- When I built my early Junkers Ju 87A Stuka, I took the fuselage, wheel spats, and the cockpit canopy from an old MPM kit (which is rather terrible), and the rest from an Italeri kit of the Ju 87B. Because in the Italeri kit the ventral fuselage between the wings is molded together with the wings, I also had to build it up a bit. Some details had to be scratch-built, but the end result is a great-looking early Stuka.
- I built the prototype 30 mm cannon -equipped Messerschmitt Me 262A-1a/U4 from the rather decent Hasegawa kit (of the standard Me 262A) and the rather terrible old MPM kit (of the U4 variant). I did this by cutting off the nose of the Hasegawa fuselage and grafting on the MPM nose; this worked out well, since both kits are quite accurate when it comes to the fuselage cross-section.
- At the time of writing this article I have an unfinished Heinkel He 115 that combines parts from Matchbox and (early) Revell kits (the "late" Revell kit is a re-boxing of the Matchbox kit). Neither one of those kits will alone result in an accurate He 115, but my investigation shows that by combining parts I will eventually end up with a more realistic model. It will be a lot of work, though.
Sometimes you want to use aftermarket parts made for one kit in another kit, and this typically involves some "surgery"; parts engineered for one kit will not fit in the other kit without some modification. Cockpit interiors are a typical case of this.
Related to what I have described above is the case when the kit you use requires substantial parts of the final model to be scratch-built (see my model of a powered version of the Grunau Baby glider built from a standard Baby kit), or maybe you end up scratch-building most of the model, but can utilize some kit parts (my Bereznyak-Isayev BI-1 is a good example).
