ICM DH.82A Tiger Moth with Bombs (32038) 1:32

[Mike]

DH.82A Tiger Moth with Bombs (32038)

1:32 ICM via Hannants Ltd

 

 

The de Havilland Tiger Moth was one of the most important and most widely produced trainer aircraft to have seen service with the RAF. It was designed by Geoffrey de Havilland himself in the 1930s and was based on the Gypsy Moth, suitably redesigned to meet Air Ministry Specification 13/31. In comparison to its predecessor, the Tiger Moth's wings were swept and repositioned, and the cockpits were redesigned to make escape easier. The airframe was also strengthened and the engine exhaust system was redesigned.

 

The Tiger Moth entered service with the RAF in 1932 and remained in service until well after the war. Over 8,000 examples were completed and the type also served with the Royal Australian Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal New Zealand Air Force as well as a great many other military and civilian operators. In service it proved itself to be ideally suited to its role; easy enough to fly, but challenging enough to weed out the weaker students.  It was also cheap and easy to maintain. Further variants would be the DH.82C fitted with an enclosed hood for cold weather operations in Canada; and the Queen Bee which was an unmanned radio-controlled target drone that resulted in a thinning of the herd of surviving airframes.  Always popular with civilian users, many Tiger Moths found their way into private ownership after the War, with many maintained in flying condition to this day.

 

 

The Kit

This is a reboxing of the recent tool from ICM that was first released in 2020, so it’s a thoroughly modern model.  It includes additional parts that permitted the Tiger Moth to carry bombs, usually as a training device, but if there was nothing airborne and aggressive above the enemy, it’s possible to drop bombs on them from this frail little aircraft, hoping they don’t get the bright idea of shooting back before you have scarpered.  The detail is excellent as we’ve come to expect from ICM, and providing you aren’t phobic about rigging, should make a straight-forward build.

 

 

 

 

 

Construction begins with drilling holes in the two fuselage halves, using holes that are pre-thinned from the inside to ease the way.  The fuselage halves are then detailed with throttle quadrants, instrument panels with dial

decals, and the bulkheads between the two seating areas.  At this time there are a couple more 0.3mm holes drilled in the top cowling in front of the cockpit to insert more rigging wires, which you’ll need to supply yourself, along with more threaded through the holes in the fuselage sides that you drilled earlier.  Helpfully, the instructions tell you the length of wire that you should plan for, although I’d be tempted to use the numbers as a minimum value, just in case.  You can always cut some off, but adding some on is much more of a skill.  With that the fuselage is closed up, a firewall is inserted into the front, and an elevator inserted onto a rectangular peg in the rear of the fuselage, with a choice of narrow insert in the top of the tail area, or the wider strakes that are fitted to two of the decal options, followed by the standard rudder fin, which has the tail skid moulded into the bottom.  There is a good representation of the four-cylinder Gypsy Major engine that outputs less power than my perfectly normal family car, which makes one stop and think for a second.  The block is in two halves that trap the conical drive-shaft inside, exhaust manifold, mounts and other ancillaries, with a baffle on one side, after which it can be glued into the firewall at the front of the fuselage, and have the cowling parts installed along with the open or closed access doors for the crew, small intake on the starboard cowling, and bumper-strips on the forward edge of each cockpit aperture.  A blind-flying hood is supplied in two parts in the retracted position for one decal option, but it is shown on all three, so ignore that.  The lucky crew have a three-faceted windscreen placed in recesses in front of them to keep the bugs out of their teeth, then we move onto the wings.

 

The wings are full-width parts, and the lower wing is made first, drilling rigging holes in the top surface, and leaving off the underside of this and the topside of the upper wing until after the rigging is complete.  Whilst that might work for some, I’d be a little wary of gluing big parts such as the wings together after painting, although that’s just my opinion.  You may have noticed there were no more cockpit details made up earlier, which is because the rest of the cockpit is built on the lower wing centre, as that’s where you will find the cockpit floor.  A narrow control assembly is made first with rudder bars and control columns in duplicate, fitting into the cockpit floor on eight small rectangular slots, then joined by the aft seat, and the weird front seat that is moulded as a deep depression into the bulkhead between the two.  The lower wing (upper only) is then mated with the fuselage, completing the cockpit at the same time.  The interplane struts are individual parts in the outer wings, with two Z-shaped cabane struts fixed high on the fuselage sides just in front of the cockpit.  More rigging holes are drilled into the lower half of the upper wing before joining it to the struts and adding the ribbed fuel tank to the centre of the upper wing.  The next two diagrams shows the location of the rigging using red lines, dotting them where they pass out of sight, and numbering them in a dot-to-dot fashion.  After completion of rigging, the upper-upper and lower-lower wing halves are glued in place, hiding any messy rigging knots that you might have left.  It does make for a clean job of the rigging, but I’m no expert at rigging.  The upper wing has a pair of slats added to the leading edge, and ailerons to the lower trailing edge, then it’s time to make the landing gear.

 

The wheels of the Tiger Moth are moulded in two halves, and slide over the axle-ends of a single complex W-shaped (ish) strut, which once it is in place is buttressed by four support struts that prevent the gear collapsing on landing.  A little L-shaped tube glues to the underside of the fuselage while it’s upside down, and actuators are added under the ailerons, plus a couple of support struts are fitted between the elevators and fuselage, which also have triangular actuators added to small slots that are mirrored on the rudder, with more rigging added there later on.  The prop is a single part that snugs into the tapered drive-shaft, and then it’s bomb-time!  The Tiger moth could carry eight bombs on two palettes suspended from the underside of the fuselage, which are made up from the flat palette, plus four upstands with two anti-sway braces each.  The bombs have one side and the full core of the tail moulded as one part, to which the other side and two-part cylindrical tail are fitted, gluing four into each palette, then attaching them to the underside according to the diagram.  After completion of the final rigging to the tail, a further diagram has a set of shapes printed that you can use to pattern your own masks for the two canopies if you don’t want to spend extra money on a masking set.  I like these, but haven’t used them yet, and would suggest reducing the tape’s stickiness by applying it to a clean surface first, to avoid tearing the paper when you remove it.

 

 

Markings

There are three decal options on the sheet, with two in typical British camouflage with yellow undersides, although they have different demarcations, plus an all-silver aircraft that was posted overseas.  From the box you can build one of the following:

 

• No.1 Elementary Flying Training School (1, EFTS), RAF, 1940
• Malayan Volunteer Air Force, Singapore, winter of 1942 (probably)
• No.1 Elementary Flying Training School (1, EFTS), RAF, 1943

 

 

 

Decals are by ICM’s usual partner, which is a guarantee of good registration, sharpness and colour density, with a thin gloss carrier film cut close to the printed areas.  The inclusion of instrument dials is good news, as they’re just dials in isolation from the panel, so you can paint the panel yourself, rather than having to put up with sometimes unrealistic panel background that are often included in panel decals.

 

 

Conclusion

Another grand reboxing of this kit that has probably already made more than a few 1:32 modellers happy since 2020, as well as anyone that has flown in one when they were cutting their pilot’s teeth.

 

Highly recommended.

 

Available in the UK from importers H G Hannants Ltd.

 

Review sample courtesy of