greggles.w

Most impressive, a great finish!! One has to wonder if the painter thought they were camouflaging a plane or instead topping a pizza ...

Beautiful! Congratulations, you can be well proud of that one!

Very well done! Talk about a scratch building challenge well met!! Looks great & a worthy teaser for the group build.

I agree! Always fascinating. Well done again J-W!

Great, look forward to it, thanks Ray.

A great collection of photos there. This really shows what makes these events great: such a diverse range of subjects & paint schemes, but all are clearly lovingly & skilfully prepared & presented. Congratulations to all involved & thanks for sharing!

Thanks Ray, I was contemplating following your lead & bringing the work-in-progress to the Wednesday evening meeting.. if that's the done thing?

I'll join the chorus: congratulations! Inspirational work Ian, wonderful!

Wings!! The Crusader had a '1 in 90' dihedral, so I layered up some sheet offcuts, stepping up at the requisite intervals towards the wingtips like so: Double-sided taped to the smooth level surface of my all-purpose marble slab sample (which proves itself useful over & again). Then on with the wings: Plenty of blending required at the newly glued junction before I can declare it done. I'll also need to shim the edges of the new fuselage junction to compensate for that which was lost to the saw. And then there's those underside oil coolers to be done .. Nevertheless, there's something so very fundamentally exciting about wings on a plane that I couldn't resist cobbling together a rough test fit: Off to bed I go ..

A belated change of plan .. I've decided I need a one-piece wing. This decision has come about because I finally put my mind to the issue of how to add the detail of the underwing surface oil coolers, which are absent from the kit. They can be seen here, just.. .. and here, after salvage.. I plan to scribe them, but they straddle the wing to wing root junction. Those junctions will definitely need to be puttied & worked after joining, and logically scribing should follow. I couldn't quite see that happening easily .. So this evening I've sawn the wing roots out of the fuselage to form a wing centre section: Next a jig to set the correct dihedral as I join the wings. Hope I don't regret this ..!!

... & if I were to do so .. (never mind the production technicalities, which I would need to learn) .. would there be interest?!?

That's true for the competing machines, yes, but the Flycatchers weren't used for the competition, just as team hacks. It occurs to me now that these Flycatchers would have almost certainly been the float version, given the context of the 1929 race at the seaplane base RAF Calshot ... which presumably only has facility for water landings?! Old Man, I can't recall you telling us yet: will your two machines be on wheels or floats or perhaps one of each? And I think your idea of a diorama which contrasts a Flycatcher to a Supermarine racer has much merit!

I found the references to flycatchers within some of the breathless (hysterical?!) pre-race coverage in Flight magazine: https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1929/1929-1 - 0902.html?search=Schneider Trophy flycatcher https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1929/1929-1 - 1058.html?search=Schneider Trophy flycatcher It is only inferred, but I'm pretty confident they were the floatplane version. And - lovely work on those wings!!

Yes, buyer beware! ... I will finish it, I will finish it, I will finish it ... !!

Thanks Ian. And that is a question I find I'm repeatedly asking myself .. & I've checked more than once, putting my vernier callipers over his nut (I am at risk of being called a rivet-counter in any case, so why not admit to a bit of phrenology!). The figure is 1/43rd, but smallish at that scale, so pretty much right on size at 1/48: a couple of cms over average width, and pretty much average length. So I think you're absolutely right to suggest the pilot sat right down in the base of the fuselage. The Solent Sky museum website has a page 'the fastest failures' which quotes an unnamed pilot as describing flying the Crusader as like being "nailed into a iron coffin". So it was definitely cosy in there. I speculate this is why it has a door on both sides of the cockpit - to get the pilot's shoulders out! It's also worth remembering that unlike other radial engine machines, the fuselage diameter is not set by the whole engine size, but merely the diameter of the crankcase, excluding pistons. Having said that, Dave in his IPMS Bent Throttles article suggested the kit fuselage diameter may be a little too lean (I chose to ignore that!!). Few useful photos for reference, this here being the best to illustrate the issue, with a mechanic in place for engine warm-up: And here's mine for comparison .. so a case of strange but true?! edit (tell you what do look too large in that last image above are those mooring eyelets .. might redo them half the size at least .. hmmm)