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.

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

ANother One that Got Away - Ford Trimotor

Funny how many of the ones that got away with me were civil aircraft. This is the Ford Trimotor. Henry Ford bought an airplane manufacturer and this was the result. It looks very similar to the Fokker Trimotor, but the Ford plane’s fuselage was metal, while the Fokker’s was plywood. There were almost 200 of these Ford planes made, a significant number, but Henry Ford lost interest in aviation and ceased production in 1933. Nonetheless over 100 airlines used the plane at one time or another, and they continued in use even after the second world war for some time.

2nd Painting Today

 Yes today was one of those Saturdays when, in the early evening I decided that there was enough time left to do a second painting. So this is a painting of a Bristol Superfreighter. 

Yes, there was an Airfix model kit of this plane and no, I never made it when I was a kid.

The Superfreighter itself was first made in 1953 and it was used essentially for cross channel air services. Sir Freddie Laker, the budget airline pioneer, got his start in the aviation industry with his airline Channel Air Bridge which used Superfreighters and other planes.

I will be honest, now. I am running out of subjects to paint of which there is/was an Airifx kit that I never owned and built, which I wish that I had done. I’ve got three or four more up my sleeve, though.

Another kit that got away

This is my painting of the Fairey Rotodyne, which was another well known Airfix kit that I never owned and I wish that I had built back in the day, like the SRN4 Hovercraft, the Type B Bus and the Short Skyvan. 

Was it a helicopter? Was it an autogyro? Was it an airplane? Well, actually it was none of these. The official description of it is that it was a compound gyroplane, and it was just one example of a number of what-might’ve-beens of post war British Civil Aviation.

The rotors were powered by tip jets – literally jets on the tips of the rotors – which would be used during take off and landing. During level flight the rotors ran free, like the rotors of an autogyro, and the machine was powered by the engines mounted on the stubby wings.

On paper, this certainly looked like a good idea and the one prototype that was built performed well in trials which began in 1957. But there were concerns about the noise generated by the rotors and firm orders from commercial airlines failed to materialise. The project had been funded by the British Government and they ended this in 1962. The prototype was dismantled, although pieces of it are on display in the helicopter museum.

I painted this using my new Daler-Rowney watercolour set.

I'm No Roy Cross

It’s quite possible that the name Roy Cross doesn’t mean a great deal to you. That’s okay, this is not a test. However if you’re a man who grew up in the UK or several other countries during the 1960s or the 1970s, I bet that you’ve seen some of his artwork. For Roy Cross produced the artwork that graced the packaging of many, many Airfix model kits. He was, in my opinion, a very fine artist, who, in the hope of securing regular work, wrote to Airfix headquarters enclosing samples of his work. Airfix, knowing a good thing when they saw it, commissioned him to produce artwork for the packaging of a model of a German Dornier bomber. Thus began a long and fruitful partnership. Sadly, Roy passed away a little while ago, having just reached the age of 100.

For me, one of the huge advantages that Airfix models had over rivals was the Roy Cross artwork on the boxes. Even now just looking at the artwork brings wee tingle of excitement to me.

Okay. Now, if you cast your mind back to June , you may recall that as one of the 30x30 challenge paintings I made this-

I worked out when I was doing it that I wanted to use this specific livery , the Hoverlloyd livery, because that was the livery in the Roy Cross painting for the Airfix kit of the SRN4. Now, even if I had permission to reproduce the Roy Cross picture here, I wouldn’t. This is not a copy, and believe me, as you would see, I’m no Roy Cross. But it did set me thinking.

Now, I was a pretty dedicated Airfix modeler from the age of about 5 or 6 right through until my O Levels. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t turn my nose up at Frog, Revell or Tamiya, or Matchbox when they produced model kits for a while, but Airfix were my faves. Then life intervened. My son was never interested in modelling or anything craftwise in general and so that way back in was never opened to me. Then, maybe five years ago, I discovered that Airfix – who have passed through different owners more than once since, is still out there. I bought a kit of the Aston Martin DB5 to see if I could rekindle the flame. I just didn’t really enjoy it – maybe because I have other outlets for my creativity now.

Still, thinking about the SRN4 kit. I could afford to buy it now. But I don’t want to. I’m not interested in building it. But. I can’t help wishing that I’d bought it or had it bought for me back in the day. Which led to me thinking about other models that got away. Another one was the Type B London Bus. Which purely coincidentally I also painted during the 30x30 challenge – straight after the SRN4 –

AS it happened I also painted this type of bus as my last painting of the 2018 challenge

Which set me to thinking. Why don’t I make a few more pictures of the subjects of the kits that got away? And today, I made another one.

It’s a rather unusual looking plane called the Short Skyvan. The back of the plane opened up and you could drive a vehicle into it. They also carried passengers. I’ve painted this in the Olympic Airways livery artly because this was the livery of the plane on the painting of the box lid, but also because I did actually see one of these on my first visit to Greece in 1982. I was island hopping and could only afford ferries, so I didn’t get to fly in one, more’s the pity. The 30x30 is over so I sketched it roughly in pencil first:-

I did think about going straight in with paint as I’ve become more and more confident with y draughtsmanship with direct watercolour over the last couple of years, but what the hell? Here’s the finished painting

Now I somehow doubt that this painting would shift that many model kits, but it’s pretty decent. As I said, I’m no Roy Cross.