Uncle Pete

Nice. Elegant. 👍👍

I hear ya, bruv! I call it "Recreational Engineering". My wife calls it "Playing With Toys".

Adjectives fail me! http://gph.is/2cGfuUH

Mine should look so bad! 👍👍

Knockout! 👍👍 You're new to the hobby? I've got 3 years on me and nowhere close to where you are. You're a natural! 👍 👍

Lovely job and beautifully photographed. 👍 👍 It's great that one can actually see the interior through the glass... I can never seem to pull that off no matter how clean the perspex is.

I have a DR1 in the stash so I believe Von Plonk will be making a WW1 entry at some point. And, having researched the family tree further, I might even have a crack at the Spad flown by the French pilot, Capitaine Le Plonque, during the raid on Kaiser Bill's cocktail cabinet.

Greetings, Earthlings, from Planet Pete where plastic and paint find themselves cruelly tortured until they form the approximate shape of an aeroplane. My three latest efforts, (built as usual with more enthusiasm than skill) are a trip through the generations. I’ll begin with the D VII. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Somewhere along the way I’d read “Von Richtofen is usually associated with the DR 1 but actually preferred the D VII” (or words to that effect). That settles it… Nurse, put down your magazine and unlock the knife drawer, it’s time to supervise me for my own safety, I’m about to build the Red Baron’s D VII. Except he never had one. Yep, googling like a madman turned up no pictures and asking on this site told me what I should have known in the first place… Ask Wiki. Turns out what I hadn’t retained from whatever it was I’d read was he’d test-piloted it, given tips to the engineers and thought the final result was the best thing since striped pajamas but the poor schmuck used his heart to slow down a .303 before he got to unpack his from the crate. The good news is, I can now get it wrong and still get it right. Basing the scheme on his Tripehound I followed the K.I.S.S. principle, a plain all-over red with white control surfaces and a bit of aluminium around the engine. The kit had come with plain crosses but I thought the old boy deserved a bit more fizz so I printed up some proper iron ones. While I had the decal paper going I decided he also deserved a monogrammed cockpit. This is only my second bipe (not counting the Wright Flyer but that’s in a scale of manageable size) and I salute all of you who specialise in WW1… I studiously avoided camera angles that betrayed my somewhat …”alleged” alignment. That was about the time my old dad was being born (and while his dad was being awarded a one-way ticket to the front). On to roughly the time my brother was being born. It’s another (yawn) Spitfire. It was an Airfix, if I remember correctly, Mk V (and probably another letter in lower case). Rather relaxing build, I must say. As I cut the parts off the sprues they gave me a cheery wave, wandered over to the assembly area and gathered themselves together. Everything OOB except our hero, Squadron Leader A.C. Plonk. This was the plane in which he was shot down by a V1. In his official debriefing he stated, “I approached the V1 from directly behind in order not to alert the pilot…” (I should mention at this point S/L Plonk was not the sharpest knife in the drawer) “…and gave it a short burst. One of my bullets must have hit the spinny thingy on the front because it flew back at me and clipped a few inches off my prop.” His subsequent hard landing on Brighton Pier bruised his coccyx and qualified as enough of a battle injury to earn him the occasional pint at the local. And bypassing my own generation we go on to an (ahem) indeterminate number of years after I was born. May I present the F 35 or, as I like to call it, the White Elephant. Examining the lines of this as I was wrestling it together it occurred to me if the stealth engineers and the aerodynamics engineers drink at the same pub they’d be fighting in the car park most of the time. Italeri kit. I really like their big, detailed, in-colour instructions, they’re so fool-proof they’re almost Pete-proof. It was one of those kits that are very friendly for a while but then turn around and bite you in the bum during final assembly. I believe the kit engineer designed the weapons bay doors while in the throes of a crippling hangover. Those doors treated me like they’d caught me in bed with their wife. And painting the zigzag stuff on top had the nurses running to my side as my howls of frustration echoed through the asylum. I scoured the Plonk family tree and discovered S/L Plonk has a cousin in the US, Lt Col P. Lincoln Plonk of the Rhode Island Air Force. (“Plink” to his friends). This is the aircraft he used in the Great Toy War of 2018. (He was supposed to use an F 117 but it was so stealthy he could never find the blasted thing). Mattel was attempting to attack Pawtucket with an invasion force of Batman Action Figures and the defending force of Cabbage Patch dolls from the Hasboro factory was being overwhelmed. When Col Plonk dropped a full load of Hasboro’s Disney Princesses, the Batman Action Figures were thrown into confusion and the invasion ended as they all took the princesses to fancy hotels in Central Falls. Plink Plonk was given the key to the city which he promptly used to start it and drove Pawtucket to Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut for the weekend. As usual, thanks for looking in and I hope you found the text funnier than the models. (If you knew Rhode Island you'd know "fancy hotels in Central Falls" is hilarious!)

Exactly how I found mine! I just bought some plexi cut to size for the extra shelves and a bit of dowel for the supports. I promised the missus I'd only ever have one and if I got too many planes I'd rotate them through the display instead of expanding. On the other hand she promised me we'd only have one cat...

Is that the Ikea cabinet and you've added extra shelves? I have the same one and did the same thing!

I like it. 👍👍 Nice that you didn't have to go any trouble over it, eh?! 😜

Very nice and, as others have mentioned, interesting to see a Lanc in anything other than standard "warpaint". Great photos, too.

Really nice. I've been turning my ten magic thumbs to a couple of WW1 kites lately and they're absolutely BRUTAL to put together! 🤪 Hats all the way off to you. 👍👍

Didn't Spitfire-sized kits used to come unboxed in a clear plastic bag with the "box art" and instructions stapled to the top? I seem to remember that from the sixties.

Dear Mr Cancian, You're hired. Regards, Airfix Art Dept.

No mate, a "couple of changes" means making safety belts out of tape! 😜 Great work... I want to meet the elves who painted the woodgrain on the prop. 👍👍

It didn't tag him for you, Tom... I don't know how to get it to tag. He won't see it if you don't tag him or take a quote from him.

Very kind of you but I'm a 1:72 man. 48 frightens me! Thanks anyway. 👍 I'm not that much into detail that I'm bothered, just blokes with the right type of helmet, really. My detail work is insufficient to see any differences. And, yes, I'm a 72... 48 is too big for the cabinet and the detail in a 48 kit is far too heavy for my ten magic thumbs (not to mention my age-of-dog to novelty-of-tricks ratio being a tad unfavourable these days).

Thanks, lads, that was amazingly fast! dnl42... Did you find your Roger Moore? Personally I'd have substituted Sean Connery but I'm old school! Black Knight... I struggled through the swamp usually known as the Hannants catalogue for a while without ever seeing the page you gave me!

This is not a specifically WW2 question but I'm guessing it would be the busiest section in which to ask... Occasionally I'd like to build a plane in flight but pilot figures in the box are as rare as rocking horse poo. I've poked around on the internet looking for a solution but can't seem to unearth anything that fits my needs. Can anybody steer me towards a source of "generic pilots"? (Sorted by era, of course). All I'm after, really, is a bloke sitting ready to go into the cockpit but they all seem to come with everything but... Pilots leaning on things, standing chatting, looking things over, but little in the way of "just sitting there". (I'm not exactly the most skilled researcher in the world and the answer has probably been staring me in the face all along but I'll just hide behind my usual excuse of old dog struggling with new tricks!)

Knockout. Your Spitfire pilot is very thorough... He's saying, "When I get done wiv you I'm comin' after yer family!"

That's what I thought till I tried to get the Humbrol 238 acrylic to stick to the blasted thing! I'm now wishing I'd gone enamel. I find different colours feel different on the brush and old 238 acrylic is treating me like it caught me in bed with its wife. I can't get it to behave at all. Generally once a couple of coats are on I'm starting to see consistency but this is still looking like an early attempt at mottled camo for hiding in a poppy field. Okay... I give up! That's a beauty. 👍👍

Thanks, I'll peruse it. Sometimes a simple £4.99 kit gets away from you and turns into a three act play! Don't expect miracles... I have my reputation as the eternal newbie to maintain!

Hardly proving you wrong, mate, I'm walking around in the dark! I gather, though, he was involved in the design and testing phases... More telling them what he wanted rather than telling them how to do it, of course, but one would assume he'd have a pretty good instinctive grasp of aeronautical engineering. Seems he had the same opinion of it as Henshaw's of the Spitfire some years later... It was the cat's pajamas. I guess I'm off to the wonderful world of whiff.

I'm trying to figure out how to paint a D VII for ol' Manny. He's usually depicted with a Tripehound but I understand his preferred ride was the D VII. Haven't been able to get Google to cough up any pictures of Von Richtofen's VII at all... Have I got the wrong end of the stick somewhere? Worst comes to worst I'll just base it on the millions of pics of his DR 1 but I'd like to do it without so much guesswork. Since waterboarding Google is not an option, does anybody have any old pictures squirrelled away? Edit... Just had a look at Wiki (should have done that before I asked on the forum!) and saw he worked on the development and loved it but never got to fly one in combat. If nobody has a better idea, I guess it's off to the strange world of Uncle Pete's imagination...