Sopwith Dolphin Retrospective No. 4 - Interior Detail

This is the fun bit, isn't it? Yeah!

I started off by painting the framework. I used a warm yellowish colour for this, like a varnished pine or spruce. This is the colour I always use and it looks great. I did have the feeling that the real thing might be a bit more drab; but I've just had a look at some photos of the Dolphin being restored at the RAF Museum Cosford, and I'm not too far off. The Cosford restoration, by the way, has now become one of my main references for this project: second only to my vade mecum, not to say sine qua non, Windsock 54. Acknowledgment is due to TazWombat and Scrama Vadoosh, amongst others who have posted their photos online. By the way, they seem to be making good progress up there. I'm beginning to fall behind.

The big pieces were the first thing to do. I made the main fuel tank with good old Evergreen tube, closed off with card roughly cut and then sanded to size. The oil tank was carved from solid plastic. It's quite a complex shape to get right, but it's surprising what results you can get with a tiny bit of plastic just by holding it at the right angle and sanding it on a flat bit of wet and dry. After that, it needed a lot more sanding down to fit into the available space under the nose. I painted both tanks gloss battleship grey, going by the example of the restoration project at Cosford. This has been a really useful source of information, as I've already said. I must go up there myself before it's too late to put things right. Otherwise, I will have to avoid it for the rest of my life.

When both tanks were dry I glued them into place. I had to be careful with the petrol tank to make sure the filler cap aligned with the appropriate aperture in the fuselage side.

Now for the real detail. Footboards from Evergreen strip, with a bit of dried-mud-coloured paint slathered on with a sponge. This may turn out to be one of the few examples of weathering on my model. A lot of the remaining detail is metal - copper, brass and nickel steel - because these look more like themselves (or each other) than painted stretched sprue would. The rudder bar, for instance, is something that I've made of stretched sprue in the past; but this tends to buckle a bit even with tiny amounts of polystyrene cement; so in this case I used 0.4mm nickel steel. This is not easy to glue to itself. You could use solder (something that railway modellers are quite used to, I think), but in the event I just used superglue. The resulting joints are not tremendously strong, but in this enclosed context, they're fine. I reproduced some of the fuel lines, using single strands of multi-strand copper wire. To be honest, this looks a bit messy; it's clearly more bendy for its size than the real thing, and I managed to get superglue all over it. But it just about passes muster.

After all the little bits were in place, I added the cross-bracing from prepainted stretched sprue, with the results you see above.

The next job was to paint the inside of the fuselage skin; a bit like this:

Doesn't look too inspiring in itself, but just you wait...

Then it was time to put everything together. I did a test fit, and as I had predicted, because of the paint thickness, the framework didn't quite go in. So then I had the job of shaving a tenth of a millimetre or so from the framework by sanding it on a flat piece of wet and dry. Needless to say, I went about this very cautiously: very gentle sanding, with very light pressure, is called for at this stage to avoid disaster. But in the event I didn't squash it all flat in a big flat mass of broken framework with the paint flaking off and the stretched sprue sticking out in all directions. No. Eventually it all went together quite nicely and started looking a bit like this:

Next? More!