Fairey Gannet at Moorabin Air Museum

[worldslaziestbusker]

I love air museums and volunteered at the Australian National Aviation Museum at Moorabin Airport, Melbourne, in my teens. The hard yards battling with the ancient and cranky lawn mower, among other maintenance duties unrelated to aircraft, were balanced by opportunities to climb all over the airframes, dismantle some of them, clean, fix or replace parts and fabricate things to aid in their display. Among the less cherished airframes, not yet granted space indoors, is a Fairey Gannet. I liked its quirky layout from visits early in my childhood, and later came to love its ungainly looks and carrier tough components.

When I picked up the Revell kit a couple of years ago I knew I wanted to represent the same airframe I'd clambered over and mown around. I wanted to have a go at folding the wings to represent the Gannet as it was when I volunteered at the Museum, but chickened out. The Revell kit already held enough challenges for me. I decided to shoot for the look it sported for six months while undergoing a re-paint.

[marvin20]

Very nice work! It is indeed an ungainly looking plane, so much so, that it is beautiful in it's own way!

[Litvyak]

What a great build! :)

[ross blackford]

Well done Marvin. When I was in Melbourne in 2011 damo took me out to the museum there. That Gannet certainly caught my attention with its size and unusual shape and features. That's a great model you've built there and it's good to see it here. Congratulations on a job well done there.

Cheers,

Ross

[worldslaziestbusker]

Thanks for the (contra rotating) props, folks.

This build, and the museum at Moorabin, gave me an idea for another project within this genre. The museum's Beaufighter was used as playground equipment at the Lord Mayor's Children's Camp at Portsea. It got pretty beat up before it became the first airframe in what came to be the museum collection. My weekend at the camp came two decades after the Beaufighter left, but I have great memories of that trip and can only imagine how they might have been enhanced had A8-328 still been there.

So, I bought a Tamiya 1/48 Beaufighter VI, which I'd heard came with all the bits necessary to make up a fair DAP Beau Mk 21, and intend giving it the same loving disrespect several cohorts of children gave it before it got the TLC that sees it resplendent today. In my time as a volunteer at Moorabin I got opportunities enough to climb on, in and mow the grass around A8-328 that I probably had as much fun with it as any child at the camp, though I now curse that I gave in to decorum and didn't sit in the cockpit making zooming noises and going ack ack ack ack ack ack ack at imaginary Zeroes.

328 was completed the day hostilities in the Pacific ended and it spent its time with the RAAF as a target tug.

Two of my favourite things in a model: target tug markings and an airframe with a personal association. Woot!

[Floyd]

This is a cracking looking build. Love the weathering.

[worldslaziestbusker]

Thanks, Floyd.

Researching the Beaufighter as playground idea I found out A8-328 was the second DAP Beaufighter at the camp, the first being A8-291, whose fate is not recorded, but unlikely to have been good. This cleared up some anomalies I was noticing in the grainy, black and white images I found and I have now chosen exactly how much child mediated damage to inflict on the kit. This will set me some new challenges, as I will have to scratch build some engine mounts and cut away panels on the cowlings and the coaming around the navigator's seat. I will also be attempting torn fabric on the control surfaces. Wish me luck and don't expect pics for some time.

Also found, along the way, was the Red Roo after market Mk21 target tug conversion kit, available in 1/72 for the Hasegawa airframe, and as a 1/48 boxing specifically tooled for the Tamiya unit. While my build won't require much of what's on offer, it looks too good to ignore, particularly as they have researched and presented the history of the individual airframes their materials represent. Damn! The cheapskate in me is battling the against the will to have accurate markings, and the desire to support Red Roo so that such awesomeness carries forward. Could this be the moment I give in to temptation and pay for something other than kits and consumables? Perhaps another Tamiya kit will be needed, to the cheapskate's horror.

[worldslaziestbusker]

I was at Moorabin Air Museum for Fathers' Day (Australian edition) and took this photo of the Gannet...

...while someone else took this photo of the Gannet and this goose.

Happy Fathers' Day, Aussie modelers.

[spellbinder99]

When did you volunteer at the Museum? (As in what years?)

Cheers

Tony

[worldslaziestbusker]

When did you volunteer at the Museum? (As in what years?)

Cheers

Tony

I think it must have been around 1988-89. Shortly before the Beaufighter was taken indoors. The Junkers Jumo 004 and the Ceres were in the workshop getting some TLC in preparation for the hangar going up.

[spellbinder99]

OK, I was a volunteer there in 1981 when we were still engine running the Beaufighter outdoors. Had a good time manning the admission box and because my Aunt and Uncles house was two hours by train away we often slept in the DC-3 on Saturday nights rather than go home. BY heck that could get cold in a Melbourne winter!

From the Museums old newsletters I gleaned that the first Beaufighter was so completely vandalised by the kids it was scrapped then replaced by the Moorabbin example. It was well on the way to meeting the same fate when the Museum was formed specifically to save the aircraft. This was because the Portsea camp authorities would only release the aircraft to a properly organised Museum.

Cheers

Tony

[worldslaziestbusker]

OK, I was a volunteer there in 1981 when we were still engine running the Beaufighter outdoors. Had a good time manning the admission box and because my Aunt and Uncles house was two hours by train away we often slept in the DC-3 on Saturday nights rather than go home. BY heck that could get cold in a Melbourne winter!

From the Museums old newsletters I gleaned that the first Beaufighter was so completely vandalised by the kids it was scrapped then replaced by the Moorabbin example. It was well on the way to meeting the same fate when the Museum was formed specifically to save the aircraft. This was because the Portsea camp authorities would only release the aircraft to a properly organised Museum.

Cheers

Tony

Thanks for that, Tony. Interesting snippets. How many people can you comfortably accomodate in a DC-3 overnight?

That an earlier beaufighter was in place at Portsea caused me some confusion in gathering reference material for my Lord Mayor's build. Colour vision deficit and grainy images had me uncertain if I was looking at a different airframe or if repairs had been made at some point.