Two WW1 Planes for S/L Plonk

[Uncle Pete]

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!).

[swralph]

Two very nice Builds Pete.😀

[Farmerboy]

Master story teller! You have an imagination of a small boy, and for that l salute you Sir! Made my day🤣

[ColinChipmunkfan]

The Bard of Buckley gives us another chapter just in time for Christmas.  I always enjoy your missives as well as your models- no Goons reference this time?

[Uncle Pete]

8 minutes ago, ColinChipmunkfan said:

just in time for Christmas

Look in "Chat"...

 

[RMCS]

Niiiice 

[Homer]

Two very nice models ,well done 👏 

[Serkan Sen]

Lovely tiny models. Well done...

Serkan