Here's the Gloster Gladiator Mk 1, in Norwegian colours. If the scene seems a little strange, I set it like this because I have some half-Norwegian friends who happen to be very much into dogs. Also I like to imagine that my Uncle Basil (he was killed towards the end of the Norwegian campaign) may well have seen these aircraft while serving with the Fleet Air Arm in 1940.
It's the Roden 1:48 kit, quite an old one I think. They produced several boxings, including this one nominally for the British meteorological reconnaissance version, but which also included markings for a host of exported and captured planes. I built another a long time ago, a ski-equipped version used by Finland in the Winter War. One memory of that build which came flooding back in this one, was of the drill bits I broke drilling through the wings to anchor the rigging. It's not just that they're quite thick solid pieces, but that the plastic used was noticeably harder than usual.
Never mind. While assembling biplane wings is never the easiest task in modelling, the Gladiator's wing structure is relatively simple. The main thing to look out for is the marked forward stagger, rather more than you get with most of the WWI planes I'm familiar with. In fact their struts are most often vertical, which does help lining everything up.
Some modellers reading this and noting that it's a Roden kit will embark on criticism of the decals (or 'transfers' as we used to call them). They have a continuing poor reputation which is somewhat undeserved these days, and wasn't wholly fair even at the start. As I understand it, Roden faced an impossible problem in that Ukrainian law required Ukrainian products to be entirely Ukrainian-sourced, and there used to be no such manufacturers dedicated to the model kit industry, and the alternatives we were provided with weren't ideal. But I've made a fair number of Roden kits and have mostly had no trouble.
However - I admit I did have near disaster with these, that is, they began to break up during application. It was unwise of me to use them at all for the Norwegian stripes; it would have been easy to do them by means of masking tape. I guess I thought I could get away with it, and I sort of did, except for some of the leading edges and on the rudder. And then there was the left side fuselage number, which split in several directions, some out of sight: thank goodness they were black and I could do an acceptable touching up job with the paintbrush, barely visible once treated with Johnsons floor polish and then the final all over spray of satin varnish.
One reason for going ahead with this kit was to get back into practice with rigging, not having done any for a while, and the Gladiator not being too complex. I mostly used 2lb monofilament fishing line, and also ceramic wire where drilling through the plastic would have been awkward (the aerial is a good example). I confess I did cross over a couple of lines, but they run so close anyway, you pretty much have to deliberately look for them. I'm glad to see that most of the rigging has stayed straight. Maybe I could have used thicker monofilament, I wonder now if the wire doesn't look a bit on the thin side, compared to what you see on the real thing.
There you have it. The Gladiator was the last fling (along with the Fiat CR.42) of that strangely persistent faith in fighter biplanes. It's not that people didn't understand the value of speed, but that they were sure that fighters had to be manoeuverable, and biplanes were usually more manoeuverable than monoplanes. But this faith wasn't sustainable as engines became more powerful and the speed gap between monoplanes and biplanes widened. Still, Gladiators were sold to many countries in the late Thirties, and were thrown into battle in several places, such as the Winter War in Finland, and the early, desperate part of the Siege of Malta. History apart, the Gladiator was simply a very elegant, good looking plane, don't you think?
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