Uncle Pete

That's quite a story and an excellent result. 👍👍 Reminds me of the bloke who claimed his axe was the one that George Washington had used to cut down the cherry tree. When it was pointed out it was in surprisingly good condition for a tool almost 300 years old he said, "Well it's had five new heads and eleven new handles since then..."

Splendid. Six days is barely enough to get me halfway through a cockpit!

Look in "Chat"...

Greetings, Britmodellers, here I offer two more not-ready-for-Telford efforts from the Flintshire Centre of Plastic Disasters. Wanting to increase my WW1exhibit (consisting of a Camel and two Fokker whiffers) I bought a Roden SE5a and an Airfix BE2c. Pulling the SE out of the box first I rolled up my sleeves, spat on my hands and settled down to work. Now I enjoy a challenge as much as the next bloke but this was akin to riding a unicycle up Everest while playing Mozart’s 40th symphony on bagpipes. The detail on the kit is very nice indeed but after several days of struggle with no cheat pegs and seemingly unclampable parts I reached the point where I was wondering how to say, “Your mum swims out to meet troop ships” in Czech so I binned the blasted thing and replaced it with a Revell one. No more Roden kits for me… I’ll leave that devilish east European brand to you clever geezers who have skill and patience. The replacement kit had no interior and the Lewis gun was quite naff so I used the appropriate bits from the Roden box. With my usual slapdash, semi-scale (more semi than scale) approach I got this far-more-user-friendly kit together and present it as another kite flown by the indomitable Squadron Leader A.C. Plonk. In this plane while on patrol in the dead of winter he’d chased a strange-looking red aircraft piloted by a fat fella with a white beard. Fortunately, S/L Plonk was a terrible marksman and despite emptying his ammo drum he failed to shoot down Santa Claus. The Airfix BE was quite well-appointed for an old fumble-fingers like me and the engineers were sporting enough to include a couple of little jigs to get the wing struts in at the correct angles. Alignment was thus quite easy and virtually Pete-proof. I wish they'd done the same with the undercarriage! Paint schemes in the instructions didn’t really blow my hair back so I poked around on Google Images and cobbled together something that appealed to me a bit more. The gun was an interesting wrinkle in this kit… For reasons known only to themselves, Mssrs Airfix had moulded the gun backwards on the mount with instructions to cut it off and glue it back the right way round. S/L Plonk had flown this one with his observer, Sgt Nigel “Mole-Eyes” Bader. Nigel didn’t make a name for himself but you might have heard of his son in WW2, Fred Bader, who played piano in the NAAFI at the RAF base in Uxbridge. Teaming up Plonk’s questionable piloting with the obtuse observational skills of "Mole-Eyes" Bader proved to be a mistake when the targeting information provided by their reconnaissance caused the raid intended to destroy Kaiser Bill’s cocktail cabinet went horribly wrong and a whole squadron of Sopwith Pups (and a couple of kittens) were instead dispatched to strafe a small brothel near Ypres. You may have noticed a mismatch in the wheels. Having both kits on the bench simultaneously I absent-mindedly glued the SE's wheels (already painted) to the BE and the glue had cured before I noticed so rather than trying to detach them and possibly wrecking the undercarriage completely I decided I could live with it. Thanks for looking and, as usual, I hope the prose provoked more laughter than the pictures (although laughing at my builds doesn't offend me in the least... I laugh at them myself!).

Ver nice. 👍👍 It looks big... More like a 48 or a 32 than a 72.

Another cracker! Modeller, photographer, historian... Is there anything you can't do? I'm a musician and if I ever find out you can play John Coltrane transcriptions I'll come to California and slam your fingers in a car door!

👍👍

Another belter, mate! 👍👍 Your builds inspire me... to turn my workbench into a kitchen table! (And your elves deserve a pay raise).

Nicely done and the look of the landscape zooming by is a splendid idea. There's a reason it's green here in Wales... It never stops raining!

Your elves have been working overtime again. 👍👍When I see your builds I wonder why I bother but I'll keep doing it anyway simply because S/L A.C. Plonk and his various cousins insist on having new toys with which to play.

Very nice. 👍👍 The Pan Am planes always looked good. I used to work with a comedian who had gags about airlines going out of business... "Pan Am? Now it's Pan Ain't!"

Taking part online has the opposite effect on me... I see great builds like yours and wonder why I'm messing about with these kits!

I have two choices.... 1. Stop looking at your builds. 2. Chuck away my collection and stash then take up stamp collecting!

First I have to find a Sunderland then I have to nail a couple of dozen Sidewinders on it for JATO...

Very nice. 👍👍 Usually I hate invasion stripes but on that puppy they work really well.

I call that "Kit Fatigue". Nothing wrong with your end product, though. Looks great. 👍👍

That's the story of nearly every model I build! Your result, however, is a cracker. 👍👍

Don't blame me... I follow NFL but the missus wouldn't have liked to see a New England Patriots sticker on there!

Don't tempt me! 😛

I had actually thought of doing that and using the clipped off bits for winglets but decided that might be pushing my luck a bit too far. It also occurred to me that the stance on the trike gear puts the wings more squarely toward the camera making them look bigger in the chord.

Definitely go with the "laugh"... I take the builds of others seriously but my own? Not so much!

It's a combination of perspective, the colour and the fact that my photography skills are no better then my build skills! (I love that Mitchell quote in your tagline, by the way... Says it all!)

When I was music director on cruise ships there were six words my boss the cruise director could say that always filled me with dread... "Pete, I've had a great idea". Now that I'm retired I find myself doing the same thing to myself. The plan was, take an Airfix Spitfire starter set that I found in a charity shop for £3 and turn it into a pylon racer owned by the airline I created for the missus when I turned this Halifax (charity shop, £4) into a "Handley Page Liverpool." I should know better but with a gleeful cry of "Dunning? Kruger? Never heard of them. Hold my beer!" I got stuck in. The plan was to put blisters on the nose to make room for the bigger and more powerful Rolls Royce Dragonslayer V-Several engine (packing the power of 2800 horses, three camels and a badger), install an oversize prop blagged from the Halifax above (which had come with two sets), add some extra exhaust pipes (also from the Halifax), switch out the undercarriage for fixed trike gear with pants and spats (because it looks more "sporty") and emblazon it with sponsor stickers like a F1 race car. Sometimes that which looks good on the coach's clipboard doesn't work so well on the field of play. Got off to a halfway decent start by gluing the halves of a bomb in place... Then made some underpinnings out of plasticard... Applied a metric ton of filler, sanded my fingers to the bone, then had symmetry problems, masking disasters and a canopy that didn't want to fit for love nor money. It had become a Lemony Snickett build (a series of unfortunate events). "Kit Fatigue" set in after a couple of weeks of futzing and fettling so I just finished the blasted thing with warts and all. (I had built a perfect 1:72 scale model of the Dragonslayer engine out of duct tape, chewing gum and toenail clippings but sadly forgot to photograph it before gluing the fuze shut). A slight miscalculation of the U/C and prop means the plane can also be used to mow the runway. I'm not sure if the canopy popped up a bit while the glue was setting or if I simply hadn't noticed the left side when I installed it but the thought of cutting it off and doing it again was a bit too daunting so it'll have to sit in the cabinet with the right side facing out! But, of course, the right side had the worse masking mess. Sponsors were recruited from the wife's tastes... Marks and Spencer, Versace, Prosecco, Jimmy Choo etc and, of course, her favourite footy boys, Everton... Out of curiosity, does anybody else find Mr Decal paper to be a bit "grabby"? I had a lot of trouble slipping the decals into place (or not into place!) I raise my hat to you clever blokes that scratchbuild successfully! Of course you're cheating with all that stuff you have like skill, ability, patience... Much as my execution was, shall we say, a bit dodgy I still like the idea and having had a bit of practice may give it another whack after Christmas when the £2 and £3 kits show up in Aldi and the charity shops. Here she is with a couple of unmodified Spits... Now it's onward and upward as I'm about to tackle a Roden SE 5 which will be totally OOB. Wish me luck! Cheers, lads.