1:72 Spitfire Mk.V six-stacks exhaust fishtail

Six short stacks instead of three

On the first Spitfires the Merlin engine exhausted through three grouped ejector stubs on each side of the cowling. They were soon replaced by six separate stacks, one per cylinder, and many Mk.V machines already flew like this. The advantage was twofold: the stream of exhaust from each cylinder left more freely, and its thrust added a few kilometers per hour to the aircraft. The version with the outlet flared out flat earned a nickname among the ground crews after a fish tail.

What you will find in the box

The accessory replaces the stacks molded in the kit with a resin casting whose outlets are genuinely open. It is precisely this difference that shows most in a small scale: the part from the mold has blind stacks, and at close quarters that gives itself away even with a carefully masked joint. The whole set of six is cast in one piece, so you do not assemble individual stacks side by side and do not have to watch their spacing.

Installation and painting

Separate the casting with a saw with very fine teeth, level the face left by the block with sandpaper and first try the part dry in the cutout of the cowling. On older molds the opening tends to be a little narrower, and a few strokes of a file will put that right. It is glued with a thin cyanoacrylate applied with a pin. For color, start from a dark metal, lighten the outlets with rust and lightly dirty the surroundings of the cowling with ash pigment in the direction of the airflow. On machines from dusty airfields the area around the outlets tended to be more heavily dirtied, while on machines operating from grass it stayed cleaner, so choose the amount of deposit according to the particular subject.