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Hawker 'Persian Fury' circa 1935


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Revell of Germany has re-issued the old Matchbox Fury, an excellent old 1/72 scale kit, and a great 'beginner's biplane' build.

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I will not be building this as a standard Kestrel engined Fury, but as the radial powered model exported to Persia in the early thirties. Some people think the radial export versions of the Hawker classics are ungainly or even ugly, but I am very fond of them. The motor will come from a Revell Swordfish, and the cowling will be contrived from the leftover cowling of a PM Models Fokker DXXI.

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This kit is an old one, and while it certainly builds up to a very nice model of a Fury, in common with many kts of its period it does have a few 'issues'. In this case, they involve the length of the fuselage, and the relation between the cockpit opening and the lower wing. As provided, the kit places the trailing edge of the lower wing behind the rear of the cockpit opening, and this is noticeable, and hence worth fixing. The fix is aided by the lower wing having a bit too much chord. Sanding about a half millimeter off the trailing edge of the lower wing, and moving the cockpit opening back about a millimeter by filling in at the front and carving out at the rear, makes things look alright....

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The first order of business has been to do the interior. The sides were sanded and scraped thin, to the point of transluscence, the 'socket' for the lower wing crosspiece cut away, and the centerpiece of the lower wing thinned considerably where it does not engage the fuselage sides. Sidewall detail was then made and put in place, with the instrument panel and gun breeches being built into the port side piece. The kit, by the way, provides a very nice instrument panel decal.

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The Fury does not, properly speaking, have a cockpit floor: elements like the foot-rests and seat and such are perched above the bottom of the fuselage,

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At this point, I am pretty much ready to close the fuselage; only a bit of touching up and a couple of cross-pieces remain to do....

Edited by Old Man
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Work on the engine and cowling is well underway as well. Here are the raw pieces again....

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The Persian Fury as actually delivered used an early Bristol Mercury radial, and the Swordfish kit provides a sort of Bristol Pegasus, but the engines are very closely related, the Mercury have a slighly smaller diameter. The unused cowling from the DXXI kit was chosen because it as for an early generation Mercury, and has the proper outside diameter, though its chord is much too broad, and its profile needed much alteration. Of course, it also had to be thinned out considerably on the inside.

After the engine was sanded down to match the inside of the cowling, I have added the fuel manifold in the rear, and push-rods on the front. Ignition wires and the exhaust manifold will be the next steps here, and the latter is something of a bear....

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Here is the motor dry-fit to the altered cowling.

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  • 3 weeks later...

A good deal of further progress here, Gentlemen.

First, the motor: the exhaust manifold has been added:

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And painted:

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The fuselage has been closed:

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The fit on the pieces, including the upper decking in front, was very nice. I have left off the cabane struts: Matchbox employs a well engineered method for ensuring alignment of these, by joining them with a sort of 'shelf' that is trapped under the upper deck piece. But there is so much work necessary to get the proper nose for a Persian Fury that I did not want to have to work around these struts and risk damage to them.

Edited by Old Man
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To make the nose for the Persian Fury, the nose must be cut back and reconstructed:

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The 'new nose' is built up with blanks of two millimeter sheet. I employed three, but should not have: I mis-estimated how much room there was behind the motor in in the cowling, and so had to file away about a millimeter plus o0f the new nose, and do some re-shaping as well.

Here is the thing now, with proper surface detail for the nose:

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Old Man,

This is going to be an AWESOME and such a FANTASTIC build.........

I am looking forward to the Persian Colors ......

Nice Kit by the way....

Tidy, Neat work so far..Keep up the good work.. :crying2::angry:

HOLMES :D

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great looking build of a great looking plane Old Man.

Now is it just me, or has Revell box-top art become truly top-notch (and enticing) as of late?

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  • 2 weeks later...
Old Man,

This is going to be an AWESOME and such a FANTASTIC build.........

I am looking forward to the Persian Colors ......

Nice Kit by the way....

Tidy, Neat work so far..Keep up the good work.. :whistle::tease:

HOLMES :salute:

Thank you, Sir.

The colors will not be too much, I am afraid, except for the Shah's crown, of course. Straight aluminum dope and natural metal, with roundels of red, white and green, and Arabic numerals in black in various places.

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great looking build of a great looking plane Old Man.

Now is it just me, or has Revell box-top art become truly top-notch (and enticing) as of late?

Thank you, Sir.

It is a nice cover they put on this; the ground below has a definite period feel.

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Matters proceed apace, Gentlemen.

The nose has been foiled. The cowling is simply resting against the fuselage, to give some idea of the lineaments of the finished item; there is too much work still to do for its attachment to be safe.

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The foil has been 'aged' by boiling with eggshells, which takes down the shine greatly, and lends a grey-brown patina to the foil. Some of this is taken off by the burnishing, but enough remains to give a very different appearance from foil straight off the roll.

The panel behind the cockpit is painted with silver enamel; that panel is plywood, not metal, and was painted with the same aluminum dope as the fabric. The undercoating will lend it a slightly different appearance from the adjacent fabric portions when that step is reached.

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  • 2 weeks later...

A bit more progress here, Gentlemen. The tail-plane is added and the major parts given their first coat of aluminum paint. In some measure, I am putting off doing the wind-screen, but will bite the bullet on that in the next session and get that a good deal more done....

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A good deal more progress on this, Gentlemen. Cowling and undercarriage attached, upper wing on and rigged, new vertical tail surface made, and the top-coat of paint applied.

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Next step will be the markings. I expect the numbers in Arabic script will pose little difficulty, but the roundels and the crown will doubtless prove tricky....

Edited by Old Man
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Neat conversion, I have one of the old Matchbox kits, but have been thinking about getting one of the Revell issues for the not 30 year old Matchbox decals.

Would you mind taking some measurements of the nose and cowl modifications? I'd like to give one of these a try myself and that would reduce the trial and error quite a bit.

Do you think the Gladiator might make a good donor for the motor and cowl since it also used the Mercury?

Edited by Aaronw
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Wow, you're making some very nice progress over here!

I love the detail, specially because it's a 72nd scale kit!

The foil has been 'aged' by boiling with eggshells, which takes down the shine greatly

Never heard of this technique before (guess that's because I built more "modern" kits), nice to see how that works!

Daniël

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  • 2 weeks later...

No further progress on the model itself, Gentlemen, as it has not been possible to work on the home-made decals yet.

I have, however, made the stand. It is an attempt at matching the ground shown in a photograph of a Fury in service at an airfield outside Tehran.

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Wow, you're making some very nice progress over here!

I love the detail, specially because it's a 72nd scale kit!

Never heard of this technique before (guess that's because I built more "modern" kits), nice to see how that works!

Daniël

Thank you, Sir.

It is something of a wrench to me to realize that even the 'Century Series' fighters count as old nowadays, and I suppose bare metal has no place on current fighters and such.

The technique is useful, though, if you are doing unpainted aluminum surfaces. Another I have read of and mean to try, involves putting lead and copper in a jar with chlorine bleach, and adding foil, leaving the thing to do its work for a few hours. Chemically, a bit of the foil dissolves away, and some of the lead and copper plate onto the remaining foil, giving it a variety of darker hues.

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Neat conversion, I have one of the old Matchbox kits, but have been thinking about getting one of the Revell issues for the not 30 year old Matchbox decals.

Would you mind taking some measurements of the nose and cowl modifications? I'd like to give one of these a try myself and that would reduce the trial and error quite a bit.

Do you think the Gladiator might make a good donor for the motor and cowl since it also used the Mercury?

Thank you, Sir. As I said in the opening, I have a fondness for Hawker's radial engined export products.

The Revell decals look pretty good to me; everything is in register, the colors are right enough.

Short answer to your questions:

I cut the nose off fourteen or fifteen millimeters forward of the front edge of the cartridge ejection chute, and the 'plug' added in front wound up five millimeters thich, meeting the base of the engine at the rear line of the cowling. The rear edge of the cowling should be twenty millimeters from the forward edge of the cartridge ejection chute.

Cowling diameter is eighteen millimeters at its widest point, anf sixteen millimeters at its openings. Its chord is seven millimeters.

I do not think the Gladiator cowling is a particularly good match. You would have to destroy a collector ring in front (if you used the Matchbox as a donor), and file off the blisters for the valves. It was fortuitous that I had the PM Foker XXI cowling available, but it is an excellent match, the D. XXI using the same early variant of the Mercury as the Persian Fury.

Check your in-box for more....

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