An Enigmatic Variation

Andrzej Marchwicki builds Lukgraph’s large-scale ‘Mighty Hunter’.

- Andrzej Marchwicki

Hawker Nimrod Mk I

Kit No: 32-28

Scale: 1/32

Type: Resin, with PE and 3-D printed parts

Manufacturer: Lukgraph

www.lukgraph.pl

Successor to Hawker’s private ventureHoopoe naval fighter of 1928 and resembling a navalised Hawker Fury, the graceful Nimrod Mk I had a greater wingspan than its dry-footed cousin. Fifty-seven examples were used by the Fleet Air Arm from 1932, with a further thirty of the more powerful Mk II with wing sweepback arriving in 1934. Nimrods equipped several FAA units and served faithfully through the thirties but by May 1939 had been almost totally replaced by the Sea Gladiator. The last aircraft in British service was S1582 with 753 NAS who used it for daily weather check flights until being retired in January 1942. Single aircraft were evaluated in both Japan and Portugal while Denmark adopted a pair and produced another ten airframes locally as ‘Land-Based Plane (L.B.V.) No. 5’. Eight of these were captured by the Germans in the 1940 invasion.

There is a notion among some modellers that resin kits are somehow inferior to plastic models and possibly far harder to build. Having seen an article in a Polish modelling magazine I decided to test this idea by building this model from Polish company Lukgraph. This was not the first model I had purchased from this manufacturer, so I was already a little familiar with their products.