The Sopwith Camel is one of the tiny number of WWI aircraft which people have generally heard of. And it may well owe its fame to its featuring as Snoopy's mount in the Peanuts comic strip. Pursuing the other plane which people have heard of, the Red Baron's Fokker Triplane. Thus does history distort and grow vague in the popular mind. Other planes were as important, like the S.E.5a, but letters and numbers aren't so memorable. And a bright red triplane is visually striking, but it was by no means the real Red Baron's most successful aircraft.
The Sopwith Camel does have some reason for its fame, principally that it brought down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied type. It was fantastically manouevrable, but that very quality posed a huge challenge for a novice pilot, and far too many were injured or even killed, turning the plane over landing or taking off. When I was researching this scene, I found a large number of pictures of Camel crashes, many of them just like this, the result of the plane going over on their nose on landing.One prompt for building this kit was having it passed on to me from a friend, who must have thought, 'Mark likes WWI planes, he'd like this', which was certainly a kind thought. As it happens, I already have 7 or 8 Sopwith Camel kits in my stash in various scales, so I wondered what to do with this ancient Academy kit (it's from the 1980s). I decided a crash scene was the best way of doing something interesting with it.
In general shape and proportion, the Academy kit is pretty accurate for 1:72 scale. But it is very simple. The rendering of the undercarriage deviates quite a bit from reality, and I'm not sure why I didn't spend time on it, considering that it's so prominent posed upside down. Ah, I think it was because at one time I was going to try and imitate the much more wrecked situation seen in one of the other pictures. Too bad. I was most keen to put the cockpit out of sight. Being open, WWI cockpits are very visible and one has to put some effort into the detail. But the Academy kit had the seat moulded as a crude shelf, and nothing else. I'd have had to spend an inordinate amount of time in that small space in order to create something I was happy with.
Unfortunately, I failed to consider two other features normally hard to see which become prominent when the plane is upside down. One is the area around the tailskid. The Academy version of the tailskid itself is completely unlike the real thing, which fits into an opening under the rudder, totally absent in the kit. Furthermore, you can see that the skid was actually steerable, via a couple of control lines. So, I set to to fashion all of that.
To make things easier, I looked to see if I could source any bits from other 1:72 Sopwith Camel kits; and yes I could. A while ago Roden (Ukrainian company, who I hope and pray will survive along with their proud country) produced a series of Camel variants, and used several common sprues for the kits meaning you could find a lot of unused parts. On principle, I wanted to make sure that the parent kit was still buildable - I mean it would be absurd to spend so much time getting the very basic Academy kit to a better standard, while crippling the rather better quality Roden kit. Anyway, one of those Roden kits was the obscure TF.1 Camel, a single prototype of the Trench Fighter Camel. (This was a failed concept wherein two Lewis guns were fitted firing downwards, ie for ground strafing purposes. They quickly found that it was far more effective if the pilot could fly directly down at the trench using his forward guns, hence being able to see what he was doing) So, I acquired a spare tailskid, and two more convincing Vickers guns.
I also acquired the distinctive cut out seen on the underside immediately behind the engine, a feature which couldn't be ignored. Athough the TF.1 Camel certainly had such a thing, it was covered over by an armoured plate, which would have been seen as quite desirable for a plane intended to be flown above trenches full of Germans with machine guns. To my surprise this section, cut away from the original, fitted quite well. The construction here isn't simple: several bracing wires run across the cut out, as well as rigging wires down to the undercarriage. You'll also see copious oil staining - probably not enough. All machines with rotary engines did this, and on some crashed planes the entire underside of the fuselage and some of the wing is covered in dirty oil.
One last cute detail is the acorn or 'bullet' at the centre of the rigging between the forward cabane struts, above the Vickers guns. I think I deserve some sort of medal for this. It took some time, and more than one attempt, to fashion this seemingly innocuous object. Because it's tiny (it should really be a bit smaller, to be in scale) but still had to be 'dented' in the four places to anchor the short pieces of wire I used for the rigging. It would have been easy to forget it, as having been lost in the crash. Like the windscreen which I ignored. But again, it's so characteristic of the Camel, so I had to try.
So far, so good. The rigging is wonky, but all is explained by its unfortunate 'ground loop'.
Now, for a follow up post, let's create the whole crash scene, with a few figures and an ambulance.
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