Sopwith Dolphin Retrospective No. 1 - The Theory

In my initial posts, I promised more details about my overambitious project to build a Sopwith Dolphin in 1/72nd scale,and now at last here is a post that looks like bearing out that promise, by means of a superb video followed by some no-more-than-adequate explication.

If you're going to scratch-build a fighter plane at all, then a First World War fighter plane is your only man. I think Flann O'Brien once said something of the sort. But what Flann O'Brien didn't make clear is that this is because there are a lot of flat and simple curved surfaces on a typical First World War aircraft, which you can reproduce by the good old method of cutting up bits of plastic and gluing them together. However, it was obvious right from the start that some vac-forming was going to be necessary for the decking and cowling, and so I had to tackle the problem of making sure that the built-up bits matched up with the vac-form bits. Another problem I made up for myself was how to improve on the methods I had used in the past to represent the internal girder structure. What I had done before, and what a modern kit usually does at this scale, is to represent the longerons etc. on the inside of the fuselage. The disadvantage of this is that it's very difficult to paint neatly. Also, it's quite difficult to make all the bits line up properly.

The solution I came up with was as follows:

1. Build up the framework as a freestanding structure, using a lot of Evergreen strip.
2. Build the lower fuselage separately from 0.4mm sheet, standing in for canvas, plywood and aluminium.
3. Carve wooden moulds for the vac-formed bits, sanding them down until they just fit into the fuselage skin.
4. Do the vac-forming
5. Cut the vac-formed bits to size
6. Put everything together

One nice feature of this technique is that it mirrors the construction of the real thing, to some extent, in that the structural bits in real life are structural in the model. And it means that the fuselage skin can be not too far off scale thickness.

That's the theory. How did it work in practice? Pretty well I think, as you will see in subsequent posts.

21/11/10
Post retooled in order to increase fidelity, with recessed panel lines and addition of the word "fighter" before "plane" in Flann O'Brien quote. This makes it sound a bit more like the original, you see.