Sopwith Snipe

Not imaginary

I seem to remember from an episode of Cheers that a snipe hunt is a wild goose chase. Well, as it happens, there was a time when if you tried to find a Sopwith Snipe in kit form that certainly would have been a wild goose chase. See what I did there?

It was seeing a review for the Toko Snipe that inspired me to have another go at scale modelling after a gap of about 20 years. My chronology might be slightly out here, but I have the impression that before Toko set up shop, all there was on offer was the rather venerable and limited stable of Revell and Airfix offerings. But then, there were companies like Pegasus, weren't there? Anyway, I was pretty impressed by the quality of the Toko kits. Looking back on it, I remember that my initial plan was to build it straight out of the box. It would have been OK. But when I made the Revell Camel as practice, I got carried away with the super-detailing, and I wanted to do better with the Snipe.

I did quite a bit of detailing in the cockpit that nobody will see except the futuristic aviation modelling historians that I predicted in a previous posting. But I wouldn't have felt satisfied just leaving a big void. The instrument panel would be very noticeable, though, and I spent a bit of time on that, adding instrument dials from thinned-down sections of plastic rod. This was the same technique I used on the Dolphin, except that it hadn't occurred to me to paint the instruments before mounting them on the panel, so it was difficult to paint them neatly. Apart from this the major bit of work in the cockpit, and the only big modification needed, was to replace the gun breeches, which were moulded integrally with the forward decking and not very accurate. Then I added an instrument (airspeed indicator?) between them. This must have been pretty difficult to see in real life. The result was a bit like this:

The other main bit of work needed was to cut out the control surfaces as usual and to add a bit of exterior detailing: pitot tubes, venturi exhauster (according to Windsock 46), control horns, ring-and-bead sight etc.

The most fun bit of all this was making the telescopic sights. These were suspended from the centre section, but went through the windscreen. So I had to drill a hole in a piece of clear plastic about 1x2mm, push the sights through, add mountings out of 1mm of stretched sprue and attach them to the centre section before adding the upper wing. Then, after attaching the upper wing, I could finally glue the windscreen in place. This had to be right, because it's part of the look of the Snipe. You might just be able to see what I mean in the picture below.

I added the rigging from prepainted stretched sprue as usual - a bit more than the Camel because of the two bays. Surprisingly, it doesn't take all that long.

And that was it.

A couple more views:

I think it was worth the hunt.