Not long after I got the trainer to the stage you see in the pics, the canopy Evan sent arrived. So I got to thinking just how could I make a two-seat Spitfire have ejection seats and look right too. Now I've had something on my mind for quite a while, I've always wanted to have a go at a Twin-something or other, and here was an opportunity because all of a sudden I had a spare Spitfire Mk.22 fuselage. And recently I bought about half a dozen XtraKit Mk.22's because they were going really cheap at Hannants (6 for C$45) just for what-iffing.
The first thing I did was to sort out the cockpit, I decided to use Martin Baker Mk.4 seats in the version I was going to build (a NF Mk.28) but quickly found out that a much longer space would be needed than the trainer has. This was to accommodate the radar control panels etc plus the much larger seat area. I did the same thing as the trainer by moving the front cockpit way forward but I had to cut much too much out of the rear end so the only solution I could come up with was to stretch the rear fuselage out some, which I did, about 9mm (24"). This played into my design because it now looks more in proportion.
Once the cockpit was sorted I then turned to the center wing section, for this all I did was to cut the kits bottom wing part right down the fuselage center to make two separate wings, then scratch built a new center section using various types of styrene strip and card. One thing I decided to do was to give it wing leading edge radiators because having built quite a few Spitfires over the years, it always struck me as being really sleek looking aircraft without the underslung radiators. So having a few sets of Tempest Mk.I conversions I decided to use one of them here.
In the pics below, you can see where I went about cutting and adding styrene and you can also see what I did with the other fuselage ---- I've since refined this from what you see here, but I taped it together just so I could get a visual on it.