In my earlier post on my Esci 1/72 S.E.5a, I mentioned that I plan to keep building models from Esci's 1/72 "Red Baron Flying Circus" 6-pack of the 1980s. Here is my next project, the Camel. I am looking forward to this one. I haven't built a Camel in many years, and I have the Roden kit with its decal sheet covering several good Canadian subjects, so off we go.
First photo is the sprue shot; very basic. The second photo shows the worst thing about these Esci kits, the little boxed-in sauna bench they give you for a cockpit. It would have been better just to leave the fuselage as an empty gaping hole, and in fact your first job building one of these kits is to convert the cockpit to that. This is what I didn't do on my S.E.5a, and came to regret having no cockpit in the model when the rest of it turned out fairly well. Anyway photo 3 shows the ground-out cockpit before smoothing.
There are then two levels of interior detail to be added. First is the framing for the fairing between the flat fuselage sides and the rounded cowling, shown in photo 4 after painting and a brown wash. Then is the fuselage framing proper. I decided to go ahead and rig this with fine thread, which is a first for me in a cockpit interior. With that done, I have closed up the fuselage.
Probably the task I dislike most in modeling is trying to install things that go in the middle of the cockpit, like seats, sticks and instrument panels. It's fine if you have a tub-style cockpit like many jets do, but in the vintage types I build, you usually have to install this stuff in one of the halves before joining the fuselage and I never seem to get it exactly centered and aligned. I like how the new Airfix kits have you build up the cockpit on the upper surface of the lower wing where the aircraft configuration permits, and I think I can imitate that on this model. First I needed to make a seat. I used online scans of photoetch seats in larger scales as a pattern, and traced them onto some metal 300-size mesh (meaning 300 strands per inch -- pretty fine stuff!). I used soft metal fishing wire for the rim. I did a few extra for future projects, and the 5th photo shows one made but unpainted, and another with a coat of ivory paint, a brown wash, and a foil seat belt. In 1/72 scale these things are 5 mm wide, and look pretty convincing.
As you can tell, I prefer to make my own detail parts rather than order from the aftermarket. But while researching Camel cockpits, I ran across a photoetch part series by a company called Part, available at http://www.super-hobby.com. They seem to pack a lot of useful parts on one sheet for the money. The last two photos show their set for the Roden 1/72 Camel. Note that they give you the fuselage framing, with rigging, from the firewall almost back to the rudder. It seems kind of excessive. But, as the shot I've clipped from the instruction shows, it might make an impressive mini-model of a skeletal Camel fuselage. I placed an order, and if it looks as good as it looks like it might look, I might build it as a stand-alone item for a restoration diorama, adding a spare engine and prop from a Roden kit (which gives you two options for these), scratching a landing gear and so forth. You could also do a skeletal fuselage but with full wings and tail from the kit, or just leave one side panel off the fuselage to show the interior detail. Part makes similar almost-full-length fuselage framing for the Snipe, Strutter, several Nieuports, S.E.5a, and Avro 504K, and more partial ones for most of the other WWI subjects kitted by Toko/Roden/Amodel. I'll post a product review when I get mine.
8 attached images. Click to enlarge.
