A reply from the plane manufacturers.
I have recieved an email from Stuart Bailey, from GB Repiclas, the company that make these replicas. I think it only fair for me to publish his email (he gave me his permission by the way) so he can put his side of the story.
We are purely a glassfibre moulding business, the replicas are only a
small part, and we certainly cannot rely on them alone to give us an all
round income, nobody who works here has any interest in aviation, we
have to rely on what we are asked to produce by the customer.
Regarding the massive c**k up on the Spitfire wings…no excuse, cannot
for the life of me explain apart from the fact that the Hurricane
fuselage was painted along with the Spitfire wings and vice versa, this
was purely due to the fact that we were stowed up at work and working
around the clock to fit everything in. We have never painted an
aircraft with the wings on, and you should have seen the horror on my
face as I realised when she was being unloaded.
Finally, our Spitfire moulds are for a MK IX. We do our best to
produce other marques, according to the budget available, so there will
always be discrepancies in wing panels, the elevators as mentioned, the
blades and so on.
I should not have looked at all the comments on the forum, but the poor old
fellows at the Chapel were gutted to realise that all this had been
basically written overnight.
We will be respraying the wings and any other small detail that needs to
be rectified (Hurricane wing roundels not included, more info, ask
Chippy Woods) as soon as possible before the big day. It would not
have been economical to have taken them back to Norfolk to put right as
the mistake was only noticed at Biggin Hill.
Stuart Bailey.
GB Replicas
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