This is a replacement canopy for Sweet’s 1/144 Hurricanes. The Sweet kit is a really great Hurricane, very nice to build, with great fit. The kit canopy is molded as a solid piece, very thick. Well, for a 1/144 kit it’s very thick. There’s no hollow part inside the canopy, it’s just a chunk of nicely molded clear plastic. But that’s not why I really, really appreciated this review item. When I got the canopies in the mail, I got out a kit I bought at a local swap meet. The kit comes with two complete aircraft. Except this box only had ONE CANOPY!! That’s when I really knew I owed Phil Peterson and John Noack a big thank you for this one.

OK, back to the review. The kit was partially built in the box, so it was only a few items to cement together. The Sweet kit is nicely molded, easy to build, and the fit is spectacularly good. Once I had it mostly assembled and the decals installed, I put on the landing gear, the prop and the antenna. I was not ready to install the canopy.

The tricky part about doing a canopy this small is getting the frames right. I have developed a method which works pretty well. In this case, I painted the frames before I cut the canopy out. I used a fine brush and the same Model Master paint I used on the aircraft. While I tried pretty hard to get the frames painted neatly, with lines this narrow and space so small, it’s impossible not to get some extra paint on the windows. I let the paint set for about 15 minutes, letting it get partly set, but not completely dry. Then I used a toothpick to scrape the extra paint off the windows. In this case I had to sharpen the tip of the toothpick to make it fine enough to do the job I needed. There were a couple of spots where I needed to repaint and rescrape.

The Brengun canopy frames stood up from the windows enough to make the scraping fairly easy.

Once I got the frames pretty well done, I put some Future on the canopy and let the whole thing dry. Then it was time to install the canopy. I used a pair of very fine scissors, which I also use for small decals to cut the canopy from the plastic sheet. I had to wear my jeweler’s magnifier to see the edges of the canopy, but I was able to cut the edges pretty well.

Once I got the canopy cut out, I dry fitted it, and made a couple more adjustments. Next came the application of one of those products which saves me tons of work and a lot of headaches, Micro Krystal Kleer. I had to use this as a filler along one of the sides of the canopy, and at the back. Once the Krystal Kleer had dried, I painted the filled parts and the edges of the canopy with the same method as painting the frames.

The Hurricane was done, and I was happy with it.

Overall Evalution

Recommended

The canopy was not very difficult to install, not much more than any other 1/144 canopy I’ve done lately, and it looks good.

If you’ve got serious AMS and want to detail the cockpit interior, you will want one of these canopies to allow the judges to see the inside. The other reason you may want one of these is that you may have a kit with a missing canopy.

Many thanks to Brengun for saving my Hurricane, and to IPMS/USA for the chance to use this needed part.