From Airfix to Cardboard

Yesterday I began making Christmas cards. I usually start around this time of year. In fact when I was a teacher I’d sometimes start as early as the Autumn half term holiday – end of October. But the middle of November is fine – I already have six done.

I have hardly done any drawing for months now. I did a commission for a friend of my wife’s, 3 pictures for my wife to put up in the house and another as a present, but that’s it. Why haven’t I been sketching and painting so much? Well, it all goes back to June’s 30x30 challenge. I made a painting of an SRN4 hovercraft, which made me think of the airfix model of the same, from when I was a kid. So I started painting some of the craft that Airfix made kits of that I never made but kind of wish that I had. Okay. Then back in August I bowed to the inevitable and bought an Airfix kit. The another. Then another . . .

One of the last I made was a model of a Type B London Bus. I started to think how wonderful it would have been if Airfix had made a model of a London Tram. Then, while on youtube, I found a video of a guy who’d taken the bogeys from a 00 scale model railway carriage and constructed a model tram on it out of cardboard. This led to me taking two weekends, and using the plastic tops off a dozen pop bottles, cheap card from The Works and a packet of kebab sticks, I built a London United tramways tram, based on a photograph of one in Boston Road in Hanwell, where I grew up, in the early years of the 20^th century (that’s the tram. I grew up in the late 60s and 70s).

Now, as you can tell from the picture, it’s not that it was done particularly well that I’m pleased with because it isn’t – it’s that it was done at all. When I was a kid as much as I enjoyed assembling Airfix kits I got even more pleasure from using left over bits, sprues, and plastic card to make my own stuff. So having been able to come up with anything at all was really pleasing.

The next model was a lot less ambitious. This was a Model T van. One of the things I learned from making the tram was that if you use plans you can sort out the scale before you begin to put anything together. Of course, to use plans, I had to make them first. Which was really interesting in itself, because you have to figure out HOW you’re going to make a particular part of the bodywork – how many parts you’ll need to make that feature and how you are going to attach them to each other. All of which has to be worked out on the plan.

The biggest problem I came up against with the Model T was that the card I’d bought for £1 a pack in The Works to make the tram was just too thin. This especially showed when I made the wheels. By and large the plan really worked and with just a more careful selection of materials, then I could make something I was even more pleased with.

Airfix used to make a model kit of a 1930 Dennis fire engine. As soon as I finished making the Type B bus I tried to buy one off a well known internet auction site. Every time I found one within my price range, someone else would outbid me to the point where I wasn’t prepared to bid again. Being a cheapskate is not a fairweather thing. However, being a cheapskate also means you develop the ability to look at a problem sideways to see if you can come up with a cheaper solution. Once I’d built the tram and the model T I reckoned I had enough skills with cardboard modelling techniques to be able to have a fair crack at it.

I believe the airfix kit has 144 parts. Well, each of my fire engine wheels has about 15 on its own. Each individual rung on each ladder had to be stuck into place, each spoke on each wheel etc. It turned out to be quite an undertaking, but using just white PVA glue, some of the thin card from the Works, thicker 300gsm card I bought specially, cardboard from the sides of an Amazon delivery box and kebab sticks left over from the tram, I built my version of the fire engine. I’m really pleased. 

In fact I was so pleased that I nearly bought a couple of the plastic firemen from the Airfix kit that I round on that well known internet auction site to go with it. But then I thought – well, buying parts from a plastic kit would be cheating – in the spirit of cheerful bodging that had embodied the whole build, I should make them. So I bought some air-dry modelling clay and the two little men on the engine are the result. No, I won’t be appearing on the pottery throwdown any time soon. (I should probably admit that out of 4 I tried to make, these are the only two that ended up being usable.

I’m really pleased. Not least because I spent £7.99 on materials, and I have loads of material left over for the next model, whatever that might be. I spent another £6 on paints, again, though, I have paint left over and I would have had to buy paint to make the Airfix model as well. It’s enough to gladden my cheapskate heart.

DeHavilland DH88

 DeHavilland Comet

Yes, before the more famous DeHavilland Comet became the world’s first jet airliner, there was the 1934 DeHavilland D.H.88 Comet Racer, built to contest the MacRobertson Air Race from the UK to Australia.

There were three planes built for the race, and a further two afterwards. The one pictured, Grosvenor House won the race. Funnily enough I saw it many years ago in a display at the Shuttleworth Collection.

Airfix made a kit of Grosvenor House and I more than once thought about buying it as a kid. I suppose the seductive delights of WW2 aircraft kept my attention from buying it.

Well, The budget supermarket Lidl have had a deal in the last couple of weeks whereby Airfix have produced 6 different starter kits for them, with paints , glue and brush contained within the kit, for £6.99 which is a price too good to refuse, especially when the DH88 Comet is one of them.

It’s probably the easiest and most basic kit I’ve ever made, even if the decals of the stripes on the fuselage did rip up under my sausage fingers. Oh for the fingers of my 10 year old self.

Most definitely NOT the simplest and most basic kit I’ve ever made is the 1910 type B Bus. I put between 15 and 20 hours into it – and horrors! The Dewars Whisky decal broke. What you see on the bus in the photo was one I made using the PC and printed. The colours ain’t spot on but it’ll do.

Kit 2 - Fairey Rotodyne

In my last post I described how, after all of my bluster about not wanting to get into Airfix modelling again after a gap of 50 years, I had bought and built a model of the Bristol Belvedere helicopter. Well, since then I have made rather a nice painting of the Grumman Widgeon/ Gosling, another kit I wish I’d made back in the day.

Grumman Gosling/Widgeon

But I also bought a Fairey Rotodyne kit off eBay.

The Belvedere was just the dry run, to show me if I still possessed the very basic model making skills to do something vaguely recognisable. But the rotodyne was the one I was really interested in.

What a journey this kit took me on! For one thing it was an eBay buy, so to that extent it was a gamble. The bag of parts was sealed, but there were two small parts missing and one of the propellers was broken. I fixed the propeller and I had bought a small model making took kit from Amazon, and what with this and my Dremel I managed to bodge copies of the missing parts. I’d also bought some proper model making acrylic paints. I completed the painting of the interior and the pilots and the build on Saturday. I’d forgotten the frustration of small pieces pinging off into the carpet and then melting into the ether. I lost one of the window pieces and had to make a new one out of a piece of clear plastic. Then one of the small wheels on the front did the same, and I had to make one.

On Saturday night two of the rotor blades fell off, leaving their ends in the holes. It took some ingenuity and not a little swearing to bodge them back in and make them secure. I hand painted the model – not having and airbrush I didn’t get perfect results – and then applied the decals. I was worried about these considering the age of the kit and indeed one of them disintegrated before application. Still, a judicious bit of paint disguised this. The rest were applied and proved less fiddly than the modern decals in the Belvedere kit.

So here it is. Very far from perfect, but better than I did with the Belvedere and I’ve learned quite a bit from it.

The inevitable has happened

Last weekend I completed numbers 10 and 11 of my Airfix project: -

10) Dennis Fire Engine

Along with the Type B Bus, Airfix offered a model of a 1914 Dennis Fire engine. Unlike the bus this model was never really high up my to buy list, but looking back I do wish that I’d had a go back in the day. Dennis were a British firm manufacturing specialist vehicles, and they manufactured fire engines until 2007.

If I’m totally honest I am not 100% sure if this is the exact same model of Dennis fire engine as the Airfix model was, but it’s certainly of the right era. 

11) 1930 41/2 Litre Bentley

This was, I think, a larger model than some others of Airfix's vintage car range and some how it grabbed my imagination.

The Inevitable . . . 

Right, the inevitable. The whole project came about through my thinking about the Airfix models that got away – models that I never made when I was a kid and kind of wish that I had. I have said on this very blog that I had no intention of building them now.

The reason is that I did try to build an Airfix model 3 or 4 years ago. It was an Aston Martin DB5 starter kit – which came with glue and the necessary paints. I bought it on ebay. Maybe this was why the glue was very weak and hardly worked. The parts didn’t fit very well. As for the paint, it would not coat the plastic at all. It was a very frustrating experience. So – thought I – I don’t like modelling any more and I don’t plan to do it again.

Well, since finishing the 30x30 challenge and starting painting my Airfix challenge, I’ve been doing a little research to try to find out the models which were around in my 70s heyday which I never actually built. I’ve watched quite a few videos of builds on Youtube, looked at the official Airfix group on Facebook and slowly rethought my attitude. Last weekend I took my oldest grandson Ollie to the Helicopter Museum in Weston Super Mare. They have several Bristol Belvederes there. By Thursday I had decided that I was going to give modelling another try. I popped into our local Hobbycraft after work on Thursday and bought the Airfix Bristol Belvedere and a small tube of glue.

I didn’t buy any paints. They’re not ideal, but I knew that Arcylic paints would work okay on plastic, and I have plenty of those at home. If I do build another model then I'll start to get some proper enamels, but I wasn't tooling up just for one kit. This morning I built the model. Now, looking on the positive, the glue worked fine. The instructions were clear and the build pretty simple. Or rather it should have been. I don’t know how old the tooling is, but some of the parts had wee bits of plastic hanging off them, while the slots for the tailplanes were far too small to fit the tabs into. I mean, I remember using my penknife to do a bit of fettling when I was a kid, but nothing like as much as this.

I also rediscovered the delights of hunting the small piece of plastic that you’ve just dropped on the carpet.

The acrylic paint worked okay, but I needed three coats of white to even make it just about acceptable. As for the decals, well, I might have been better off masking off the thing blue lines and painting them in. Trouble is my fingers are now a lot fatter and older and more arthritic than they were when I was a kid. Still, there it is. It’s really not that well built or painted, but what I was looking for was the complete experience of building and painting one of the ones that got away, and I’ve had that. Did I enjoy it? Well, actually, not noticeably more than I enjoyed making my watercolour painting of the Belvedere, and that was a lot quicker. Will I do it again? Dunno. Watch this space.

The unopened box, the tube of glue and my trusty roll of B and M masking tape

What's inside the box? Parts, decals and Insturctions

Completed the build - glue-clouded canopy and all. At least I made the rotors spin freely.

Painting - masking tape in evidence.

Painted and decals applied. The Finished build

A better photo of the finished model

My Bristol Belvedere Watercolour painting.

It’s been a very busy weekend with my oldest grandson Ollie becoming a teenager yesterday. We took him and his first cousins Alfie and Elena to the Meadows Wildlife Park, then we picked up his other cousins Tobi and Amelia then took them to the cinema to see Minions and Monsters. Then we had a sleepover for all 5 of them. I’m exhausted. But not too exhausted to paint another Airfixer after they went home. Here it is

8) Supermarine Walrus

It’s another flying boat. This was designed by R.J.Mitchell. He and the Supermarine company would become much better remembered for another plane he designed and they built, the Supermarine Spitfire. The Walrus was first flown in 1933. They would come to be operated by the Fleet Air Arm, the Australian and New Zealand Air Forces, and the Royal Air Force.

They were used in anti-submarine operations, and search and rescue missions too. Over 700 were made and several are preserved in Museums around the world. I’d say that it’s nowhere near as well known now as the glamourous Spitfires and Hurricanes, or even Britain’s most iconic world war II flying boat, the Short Sunderland, but the sterling service it put in during the second world war must have been what made Airfix decide to create the first kit of it in 1957.

New Painting - Boeing 314 Clipper

So this is the sixth of my 'Airfixers' collection. Basically, it's just a few paintings, the subject of each of which was in the model kit range produced by Airfix. With each of them, I never bought them when I was modeling as a kid and I have no desire to buy them and make the models now, but I still wish that I had done back in the day. 

Designed and built in the 1930s, the Boeing 314 Clipper was certified for civil aviation use in 1939. It was designed for carrying passengers across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and in 1943 became the first aircraft to carry a sitting American president, when FDR flew in one to a conference in Casablanca in Morocco. 12 of these in total were made, 9 of which were operated by Pan American Airlines. BOAC did operate one for a time. The last was retired from service in 1951.

This is the 5th painting I've made with my Daler-Rowney Graduate watercolour set and I have to say I am enjoying using it very much. A little bit cheaper than the equivalen Winsor and Newton it's a highly acceptable alternative.

New Painting - Bristol Belvedere

Last week I painted the Fairey Rotodyne. Today I made something a a companion piece. A helicopter that Airfix made a model of that I never actually bought or made was this, the Bristol Belvedere.

It was Britain’s only tandem rotor helicopter. 26 of them were built and they were solely used by the Royal Air Force. They entered service in 1961 and were finally retired in 1969. There are actually three preserved Belvedere’s with the nose section of another on display at the Helicopter Museum in Weston Super Mare.

Here's a photo of the five paintings I've made since finishing the 30x30 challenge