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This project started life as a 1/48th scale Spin resin multimedia limited run kit that I purchased from another WW1 list member about 2 months ago. I also had the AJP Maquette kit of this airplane laying around, and also acquired the Part PE set designed for an long out of production Airmodel kit. Fortunately, all three sources must have used the drawings in the Windsock Mini Datafile about the A-1, because all three match up to the drawings spot on, with the exception of the AJP kit, which is a bit too long. The kit parts from the Spin kit are reasonably well cast, with huge amounts of flash and varying quality. Fortunately the wings are really good, as is the gunners pod which hangs out in front of the propellor. The fuselage though is overly thick, so I will scratchbuild a new fuselage, use the kit wings and tails, and all the PE bits and pieces from the Part set as well as the AJP kit. I should be able to come up with a decent looking model of a very weird airplane if all works out.

the Spad A1/2 was a two man airplane that had the Observer tagging along in the gondola which was attached to the front of the airplane via the langing gear and a latch on top of a tall pylon behind him. The spinning prop was a mere 6 inches behind him, with a wire guard that ostensibly was meant to prevent the prop from becoming a meat grinder. Not many were built, as the whole concept was proven to be too ungainly and dangerous. Needless to say if the aircraft turned over on a rough landing, which happened fairly often, the Observer didn't stand a chance, and many accounts were written about Observers being flattened "flat as a pancake" in landing accidents. It's still a weird and odd looking airplane... just the type I like.

SPAD%20A2%20photo%203.jpg

This shot is from AJP's website and shows their kit completed. The AJP kit is made completely from PE Brass that is then covered with tissue. Nice idea but too many components are too flat and lack any body, so I will use it for details and other items as needed. This gives you an idea what this contraption looked like though.

Spad01a.jpg

This is the Spin kit, with a few of the resin parts sitting in front.

Spad05a.jpg

The resin landing gear struts were too thick in some places and too thin in others, so I made new struts from 1/32nd plywood, sanded to shape then sealed with CA and painted my own mixture of Mahagony. The landing gear spreader bar is 2 lengths of brass wire with .060 plastic spacers, and the axels are .030 brass also. They poke out of the struts just far enough so I can wrap thread around them for the bungee shock cords.

Spad06a.jpg

This is the Observers coffin... er I mean... gondola. I used the resin shell but added PE sides and screens to the sides and rear. It was also quite thick, but it wasn't too bad of a job hogging out the extra resin from the inside. I've also made new supports for this the same way I did the landing gear struts. The Part PE set has the hinges and brackets, so I am going to make this so that the gondola can be unlatched from the upper wing and laid down in the boarding position for the gunner. It will also permit easier viewing of the engine and prop.

This will be a quite involved project, similar in scope to my DH-10. For the fuselage I plan on building the entire framework, then covering it with .005 plastic with the stringers and longerons being embossed from behind. It's got quite a roomy cockpit so I want to detail it out to the nines as much as possible. If it turns out as well as I like it should be an interesting airplane.

Till next time.

Cheers

Mike

Edited by Skyking
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Holy Crap! :cheers: The observer sat in front of the prop? Imagine getting guys to volunteer for that

gig. I've never seen this bird...thanks for sharing :D

kinda like the Caproni Ca3 bomber where the seat back for the pilot was the gas tank. One stray round or spark and ...

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I will be following this one with great interest, Sir! This is a machine that has long fascinated me, and there are some 1/72 kits of it available. Are you intending to do one in Czarist service? I know of one attached to a French Nieuport escadrille, though I would have to check to be sure which variant it was, and the name of the unit: I seem to recall it was N.49.

The English attempted a similar beast in late 1915, the B.E. 9. It was basically a B.E. 2c with the motor moved back toward the observer's cockpit, and the "pulpit" slung in front. There are photographs. I know one made it to front line service, I believe with No. 9, because I have a pilot's account of flying it on an escort mission around the Christmas of that year. It was not a happy flight: a snowstorm blew up, he got lost, and the observer was chilled senseless by the time they landed on a French aerodrome.

To Mr. Clark 1945: the position of the Caproni's fuel tank was far from unique in those days. In fact, just about every pilot was either leaning back against, staring straight at, or sitting on top of, the fuel tank. All the heavy items were clustered together close to the centers of gravity and lift, and the crew and fuel generally outweighed the motor by a sizeable margin. The position of the gunner in these "pulpit" types was indeed unenviable, but his predicament was not much different from that of the crew in any machine with a pusher configuration, in the event of a hard nose-over.

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Once again Mike shows his level of masochism. :soapbox:

I'm interested in seeing your take of the insides of the gondola. Diego sent me a drawing of his "guess", of which I used for my A.2.

So, are you truly making an A.1? If so, you better look over your references again, as there were plenty of differences between the A.1 and the A.2. But then again, you probably knew that.

If you don't have it, definitely pick up the FMP book on the SPAD two-seaters. Lots of stuff in there, some I wish I had for my build.

I didn't know Part made a 1/48th p/e set! Cool.

I'm looking forward to seeing more, especially since I know where you're coming from. :thumbsup:

meb_spad_07.jpg

Edited by mbittner
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Thanks for the replies guys.

Are you intending to do one in Czarist service?

Hi OldMan, no I will be doing a French a/c. I don't have the specific Serial in front of me, but it's the color profile on the back of the Datafile of a NDL machine with the French Tricolor done Chevron style on the rear of the fuselage.

I'm interested in seeing your take of the insides of the gondola. Diego sent me a drawing of his "guess", of which I used for my A.2.

So, are you truly making an A.1? If so, you better look over your references again, as there were plenty of differences between the A.1 and the A.2. But then again, you probably knew that.

If you don't have it, definitely pick up the FMP book on the SPAD two-seaters. Lots of stuff in there, some I wish I had for my build.

Hi Matt. My take on it is that it is nothing more than two wood baffels that direct incoming air past the Observer, through the vents in the rear of the Gondola. I'd be interested in seeing D's rendition just the same. Thanks for the Heads-up on the FMP book. I just ordered it from FMP.

Yes you are right about the A-1 and it's a good catch. I am building an A-2 version, not the A-1. I really shouldn't be typing threads at 12:30 AM after getting up at 5 AM the previous morning. :whistle:

Cheers

Mike

Edited by Skyking
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  • 2 weeks later...

I've decided to not use the Spin kit's resin fuselage. Although it's accurate in outline and reasonably well cast, the resin is very thick and would make scaling out the interior difficult. For that reason I've decided to scratchbuild a completely new fuselage, and to do it I am building it up like an old stick and tissue balsa model. The exception being of course, I am framing the fuselage frame out of .030 Evergreen strip, and it will be covered with embossed .005 and .010 skin. It will allow me to pack as much stuff on the inside of the fuselage and assemble it much like the real thing.

I copied a side view out of my Datafile to use as a set of plans and pinned them to a piece of fiberboard. I then used stick pins to act as guides, and cut my stringers to length. I pinned them in place, then cut each of the verticle ties and glued them in one by one. Towards the rear of the fuselage I used a solid peice of .020 for strength, as it won't be seen way back there anyways. At the top of the picture is the completed left side, and the glued up right side is still on the plans. After it dries tonight, I will lay them both out on a copy of the top view, and cut my lateral braces and glue them in. I can then begin adding all the other structure before painting it all a light tan for the ash framework.

Spad07a.jpg

Once painted I will begin making all the interior bits and peices, and then make the outter skins. This brings back some memories of my Dad and I building some of the old Comet balsa kits when I was a kid.

Cheers

Mike

Edited by Skyking
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:cheers: Beautiful work Skyking. I sure wouldn't want to be the gunner/observer in either this SA1.2 or 4. Just a little more on fuel tanks. It wasn't only WW1 aircraft that the pilot sat on or leaning back against or looking at the tank. In the Messerscmitt Bf 109 he both sat on and leaned back onto the tank as it was a kind of 2 box affair, one small box sitting on top of a larger one. The Focke Wulf 190 had a similar arrangement and the Spitfire and Hurricane had the tank directly ahead of the windscreen.

I would think that one incediary hit on ANY fighter aircraft and the pilot is looking at baling out or ejecting.

:thumbsup:,

Ross.

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Will you make the side panels, near the cockpit, moveable, too?

Well actually Matt, now that you mention it, I wasn't planning on making them operable, but I was going to leave one open for a better view of the interior. But now that you mention it, the Part PE set gives seperate doors and slide rails.. hmmmm... :D Would I do something like that?? The plot thickens...

Cheers

Mike

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One step forward two back. The buit up fuselage I made form .030 evergreen square strip looked like... well... crap, :cheers: so, back to the drawing board. One of the biggest things I dislike about the AJP kit was the lack of dimension and fidelity of certain parts. Seeing the kit is totally made up of photo etch, everything is flat and without any "body" to it. As I sat there and looked at the fret holding the fuselage framework an idea hit me. Why not add dimension by CA'ing the Evergreen to the PE parts before folding it and assembling it. Hmmm.. might be doable. So late last night I started by cutting the plastic strips into length for the stringers and formers. I CA'ed them into place using the PE fret as a guide, then I cut the uprights and cross pieces to fit in between. I folded the seat and cockpit rails and installed them, and then folded it all up and CA'ed it together and voila'... a mostly completed fuselage structure that looks like it's made up of square stock and not flat PE frets. I will cover this with .010 sheet for the forward metal panels, and emboss .005 sheet with the bracing cables and uprights and glue them over the areas where the real aircraft was fabric covered. I'm also going to use theAJP Turtledeck framework and cover that with .005 also. I ordered a Le Rhone rotary from Vector, and I am fitting that to the engine opening next. I want to get all the fabrication of parts done before I start jigging everything up for assembly.

Spad08a.jpg

I placed a 6 inch (150mm) scale next to the fuselage for a size reference.

Cheers

Mike

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OK Mike! I surrender!

Hi Pete, thanks for the comments. Nah don't surrender, the challenge will keep me from going stale. Besides if you were to do a low speed dirty fly by your vortex would shred this old crate in an instant :cheers:

Hi Rusty. Wow I am not sure what to say to that, but I do appreciate your comments and I am humbled by them. I guess as any artist we tend to be our own worse critics, and I see stuff here and elsewhere and often find myself wishing I could build at that level.

....but you must come clean here. You have us all believing instead that you have incredible monocular magnifying vision

Yeah right... you should see me with my Optivisor on so that I can see up close, my glasses slid down my nose the same time so I can see far away, and me peering in between when I am looking for something on my bench.

that you can handle parts with your hands that are smaller than a bug's whisker

Uh huh sure. You don't see the parts that go flying across the room after my cross actions tweezers decide to launch them, or how many times I've had to remake a part because my part-eating concrete floor devoured the first one... etc etc.

and that your mind is able to interpret information on a vastly miniscule scale.

Mind? :thumbsup: That's been gone a long time Rusty :) Luckily I work for Xerox and I just enlarge everything 'till it makes sense.

Seriously I think the advantage I have is that in my formative modeling years back in the mid 70's, I had the pleasure of associating with and learning from, some of the best modelers in the country. Dan Dossert and Marty O'Conner, both from Syracuse and both gone but not forgotten got me started with scratchbuilding and a love for early aviation. Mike Piarillo from my home club in Binghamton, who's techniques for making seemingly complex parts and components easy to master by breaking things down into their simplest elements. My freind Steve Hauther who I grew up with and built models with and we'd compare our latest creations. Bill Whitley for airbrushing techniques, Gary Loveria for decaling... the list could go on and on. If I am as good as you say I am it is because I was able to learn from some of the best, who took the time to take a geeky teenager under their wing and teach them how to build better models. These guys will never be forgotten.

As far as Old Rhienbeck, yes I would agree to give them some of my stuff, but I approached them some time ago (10 years I think?) and they told me nicely they weren't interested, that they had "all the models they needed". OK No biggie, I have a close working relationship with the Glen Curtiss Museum, so I have a home to send stuff to when my cases get a little too full. I do agree though, it's a wonderful place to spend a few days around old airplanes, and I love the work they do and the legacey left by Cole Palen. I just hope they don't get caught up in the beaurocratic (sp?) crap that sinks all too many museums, as was the case with the National Warplane Museum in Geneseo NY.

Thanks again Rusty.

Cheers

Mike

Edited by Skyking
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Thanks again Rusty. I've had the link for sometime. I really do need to get back down there. It's been a few years. OK.. a lot of few years.. :lol:

Well more progress tonight without mucking up something. I added the brass AJP Turtledeck frame, most of the cockpit stuff is in place with exception of a couple of instruments on the shelf surrounding the pilot, and throttle. The rudder bar is in place and rudder cables run, as well as the control stick and elevator cables. Aelerons are controled by push/pull tubes and would be hidden under the forward part of the seat frame. The tach is next to the pilots seat and there's an airpseed indicator in the dash. I used the Part PE Seat back and wicker seat, in conjunction with the AJP PE Interior stuff. So far it's all playing nicely with each other without any major fit problems. I am a bit dissaponted in that I can't use the Vector Engine, in that it is too big to fit in the engine area. My drawings show that my dimensions are spot on, so who knows. I used the resin engine that came with the Spin kit, as it's almost completely buried in the fuselage anyways, and I'll save the Vector for another project. The fuselage bottom sheet metal forward of the cockpit, and the fabric aft is in place as well. I have most of the other parts made, you can see the turtle deck and cockpit cover, as well as the two forward sheet metal side panels. I hope to get this all buttoned up by tomorrow evening or Saturday afternoon.

Spad10a.jpg

I placed the Observers gondola in front of the fuselage to get an idea what this beast looks like. Behind you can see the .005 plastic turtle deck with embossed stringers, and one of the forward sheet metal side panels are laying nesxt to it.

Spad09a.jpg

Here's a closeup showing the Part PE Seat, Tach and instrument board with altimeter. You can also see the stick and torque tube for the Aelerons.

Thanks for looking

Cheers

Mike

Edited by Skyking
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Wow.....this is such a great build.

The close-up shot showing the internals is tremendous. The panels look so much like plywood and the instrument sat there in the middle of it is lovely.

I hope I can create something 1/10th as beautiful as this when I attempt my Camel.

One question......when you say you intend to cover the framework with plasticard, will that allow the shape of the lattice to show through? (Sorry to be so impatient if you plan to cover this later but I'm intrigued :( )

I can't wait for the next update Mike.

:unsure:

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WOW! Really fantastic work. For all who are interested check out the pics of the A2 and many other WWI & WWII pics at this link

http://archive.xusenet.com/f/Urecommend/al...tion/index.html

Keep in mind 1) You have to join, but don't get any spam or junk from them. 2) That you will get to view and download only 1 to 5 pics a day unless you pay, so pick carefully. Once you click on one download it if you want right then.

HTH

Mark :bandhead2:

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Thanks Matt and Pete, appreciate the comments. Gee I am sure your Camel will turn out OK. Besides, I've seen your Flanker in progress so you aint fooling me any. :wave: The Camel's a good kit, just watch out for fit issues with the lower wing to fuselage joint, and you will find you will have to grind out the inside of the cowl a tad to fit over the engine. Otherwise it's straightforward.

One question......when you say you intend to cover the framework with plasticard, will that allow the shape of the lattice to show through?

Sort of Gee. I used .005 plastic for the fabric areas and .010 for areas covered in sheetmetal. The .005 embosses easily. I have several tools I use to do this with. One is a blunt, square tipped tool for doing framework pieces, and the other is a a dual pointed tool with a really blunt point on one end, and a slightly "sharper" point on the other. I use this for ribs and bracing wires. I emboss from the back side, and use drawings, plans, or original kit parts as a guide for spacing. Once they are in place it gives the appearance of fabric with the framework in relief. Hopefully the following pictures will illustrate better than I can describe.

Spad11a.jpg

This one shows the rear fuselage fabric, with the bracing wires and framework showing. I have these glued on now, and the inside I sprayed with Natural Doped Linen before I glued it in place. The bottom is also in place, and I am almost ready to put the front metal panels in place. I had to lay out the openings for the carb intake, and used the brass outter deflector as a guide.

Spad12a.jpg

This shot shows the brass deflector laid in place to test fit. I had to roll it over a dowel to preform the curve, then flattened the bottom where it lays against the side. I opened up the left hand access panel ( no Matt it doesn't work, sorry :P) and it shows off the interior to good effect. The bottom shows the stringers for the curved bottom. It wasn't flat like the sides, but had a gentle curve to it begining about 2/3'ds the way back. I have to make yet another Turtledeck, as the one I have now, (my second attempt) is a bit too narrow. Hopefully the third time will be the charm. I have to make the front cockpit cover yet. That has cutouts for the cabane struts and fuel/oil filler caps, so I have a bit of layout work to do before I cut anything.

Cheers

Mike

Edited by Skyking
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What an amazing piece of work, Mr. King! I am speechless.

I have turned over in my mind on occassion the idea of building up the internal structure in the "Gillow" manner (I never saw a 'Comet" kit but did several balsa stringer builds as a boy: they flew....), but have always managed to talk myself out of it. You have made that a good deal harder to do now, Sir!

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(I never saw a 'Comet" kit but did several balsa stringer builds as a boy: they flew....),

Well you are doing one better than me OldMan. Mine flew... kind of. If I was lucky they would fly in a circle because I had one wing warped out of alignment ( My buildingboard was as old cutting board my mother gave me, and its flattness was always dubious) or worse yet, flew straight into the ground because I had built in down trim. It was fun glueing them together and covering them though. Afgter a while I learned to just hang them in my bedroom.

Thanks Matt. I haven't really decided on a particular plane yet actually. I got the book you recommended from FMP and there's a couple of interesting planes in there, so we will see.

Tonight I spent the time on fitting and drilling holes for the landing gear and gondola struts. and getting them lined up properly. The night before it was the gondola's turn. I added the baffels on the inside for directing the cooling air, made the seat, installed the seat support and built the camera for the observer. I primed the gondola to check for flaws, hence the rust brown color. (It was handy) I will sand this down and remove most of it, then I'll spray the gondola a light yello/cream color and finish it. I'll set it aside then and work on the rest of the airframe. The lower wings had a problem in that the inside edge that butts against the fuselage, was, for some inexplicable reason, cast with a 45 degree bevel to it. I sanded the edge flat and CA'ed a .060 piece of square stock to true it back up, and sanded and fared it into the rest of the wing. You can see them as white caps on the inboard edge of the lower wings in the picture. The AJP PhotoEtch Fuselage is also a smidge narrower than the Spin resin kit, so I had to lengthen the lower wing accordingly so the span would match with the upper wing. It wasn't a lot, only about .010 of an inch on each side, but enough that my struts would have been "leaning in" if viewed from the front. One thing I strive for all the time is perfect airframe alignment. Several small little misalignments, when added all together, can really screw up a good model, so I am always checking and rechecking my dimensions and giving it the ol' eyeball. So far so good, it's all still nice and true. I set the gondola on top of the landing gear struts and leaned it against a tin of Xtracolor, just to get a feel for how it's going to look. No doubt, it's a weird looking bird. The gondola will actually ride a tad lower on the "points" of the landing gear struts, rather than on top as they are now. The Part PE set gives you PE hinges and hardware, so that it is possible that I can lower the gondola down into the service position if I choose. I don't know yet whether I choose to get that carried away though.

Spad13a.jpg

Till next time

:worship:

Mike

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