Sopwith Dolphin - progress of a kind

Well, that's the main paintwork done. I was hoping to have started doing the decals by now, but there have been a few setbacks and I've started recognising a certain reckless tendency in my recent efforts. This tendency probably arises from boredom and pressure, and has on previous occasions led to disaster. So I'm calling a halt now for a few weeks, before the quality of my work goes into a steep dive that can end only in the wastebasket.

Realistic Historical Battles on Film

I happened to catch a bit of Oliver Stone's well-meaning biopic of Alexander the Great the other night. The critical panning was perhaps well-deserved but his heart was in the right place and it's worth sticking with until the battle of Gaugamela. After that, by all means, switch off without any fear of missing anything of importance. But the battle itself has to be the most realistic ancient battle ever depicted in film. As far as I can remember, it happened pretty much as described by the ancient historians, though the dramatic touch of an eagle's eye view featuring an actual eagle was slightly novel. Perhaps Harry Hill was a consultant.

So anyway, here's my top two historically accurate cinematic battles

1. Gaugamela (Alexander)
2. Waterloo (Waterloo)

There must be more.

Sopwith Dolphin - At last...

Le PC10 est arrivé - finalement

I've finally reached the stage of mixing up some PC10, but only after another hard day's masking.

Sopwith Dolphin - more progress with paintwork

A bit of a grey area

This is my Dolphin after a bit of tidying up. As I had expected, there was a bit of damage when I removed all the various types of masking, and the main culprit was the masking solution. It was impossible to stop it straying slightly beyond the edges of the apertures, so it left ragged edges. So then I had the job of rubbing down with 1200 wet and dry and retouching. Under a magnifying glass, you can see the patches, but to the naked eye (or a 3 megapixel camera) it looks fine, doesn't it?

But then, having patched up the real damage, I'm going to add some simulated damage later. Apparently, the paint was prone to flaking off the aluminium panels in real life, so I'm going to do some drybrushing on the edges that would experience most wear. But for the moment, it can keep its factory finish.

Sopwith Dolphin - nose corrected

Right, that's the nose job done. This time I managed to reduce the swarms of dust and small particles to a more manageable level, much as NASA has just done with its asteroid survey. And I am pleased to say that it's all been a complete success. The colour is a slightly darker shade of grey now - and that's a phrase you don't want to hear after a nose job. In this case, however, I think it looks a lot more convincing. Tomorrow I will, so to speak, remove the bandages and assess the damage.

Sopwith Dolphin - more paint being splashed about

Pope surrenders to half-built model aeroplane

More progress on the paintwork. The picture shows the first coat of battleship grey on the plywood and aluminium panels. It's been quite a job to get this far, though. I've spent most of the day applying various types of masking. I suppose it's a bit easy to criticise a design 94 years after the event, but the Dolphin did seem to have rather a lot of apertures of one sort or another.