Post by ozmac on Apr 15, 2022 3:31:43 GMT -5
Forget your fighter planes shooting at each other or your bombers blitzing cities. Forget your sleek shiny jetliners zooming across oceans with hundreds of holidaymakers and business folk on board — what I decided to concentrate my time-wasting model-building skills on was ... planes with skis!
And so here's my home-built Arctic and Antarctic aviation thread. Nothing sleek, zero bullets. Not the best holiday destination, either...
Let's go back to the early days, via one of my dioramas. Here's a Ford Trimotor Antarctic Expedition plane from 1928, with the doggies and sled happy to be out of the rattly, smelly, noisy confines of the Trimotor, finally landed on a glacier somewhere very far from home.
Without a doubt the best part of this model build was the dog sled team. I've got a soft spot for this plane, as it was the first model plane I ever built, a weirdly odd-sized 1:77 kit that came complete with plane and dog sled team. I presume that's Admiral Byrd driving the dog sled.
What's a DC-3 doing in the Antarctic? Wrong! It's a Lusinov Li-2, you fool, and that's the Arctic snow it's parked on, too.
Built under licence from Douglas, the Lusinov was an ideal Russian back-country transport plane. Fun model to build, too.
My real interest in Arctic and Antarctic planes was not just the skis, but also the fact that single-engined light planes did best in those harsh conditions. This is a Noorduyn Norseman, bit of a weirdo the way the skis were mounted, but totally flash in the paintjob department.
The model kit I bought had extremely boring decals, so I invented my own paint job based on a photo found online.
The little British Built Auster found the going quite tough in Antarctica, but even the bigger, tougher and more famous Canadian plane, the DeHavilland Beaver, such a long-running success story in Canadian aviation, got clobbered in Antarctica.
The Beavers lasted a couple of years, did well too, but then those pesky blizzards with 150mph winds caught them on the ground, and they were pulverised. Time for an official rethink.
Here's a little Beaver in the front, and a Russian behemoth, an Antonov An-2, behind. They never put the An-2 to the test in Antarctica, but way up north it thrived in the Arctic.
The An-2 is a big boy too, the biggest single-engined biplane ever, and I can't remember the exact number, but it's right up there in the list of planes with the most examples ever built. Many thousands.
Finally, here's what replaced the skittled Beavers, the good old Chinook chopper. What an aircraft; still going.
Chinooks formed a big part of the Argentine air presence in Antarctica, so I took great pleasure in making the correct (tiny) 'Islas Malvinas' decals for this example. You can barely see them, but in small scale model building that's a fact of life, not a criticism.
And so that was more than a year of my model building life spent making fake snow (out of bicarb soda and wood glue) and planes with skis. So much fun, too.
And so here's my home-built Arctic and Antarctic aviation thread. Nothing sleek, zero bullets. Not the best holiday destination, either...
Let's go back to the early days, via one of my dioramas. Here's a Ford Trimotor Antarctic Expedition plane from 1928, with the doggies and sled happy to be out of the rattly, smelly, noisy confines of the Trimotor, finally landed on a glacier somewhere very far from home.
Without a doubt the best part of this model build was the dog sled team. I've got a soft spot for this plane, as it was the first model plane I ever built, a weirdly odd-sized 1:77 kit that came complete with plane and dog sled team. I presume that's Admiral Byrd driving the dog sled.
What's a DC-3 doing in the Antarctic? Wrong! It's a Lusinov Li-2, you fool, and that's the Arctic snow it's parked on, too.
Built under licence from Douglas, the Lusinov was an ideal Russian back-country transport plane. Fun model to build, too.
My real interest in Arctic and Antarctic planes was not just the skis, but also the fact that single-engined light planes did best in those harsh conditions. This is a Noorduyn Norseman, bit of a weirdo the way the skis were mounted, but totally flash in the paintjob department.
The model kit I bought had extremely boring decals, so I invented my own paint job based on a photo found online.
The little British Built Auster found the going quite tough in Antarctica, but even the bigger, tougher and more famous Canadian plane, the DeHavilland Beaver, such a long-running success story in Canadian aviation, got clobbered in Antarctica.
The Beavers lasted a couple of years, did well too, but then those pesky blizzards with 150mph winds caught them on the ground, and they were pulverised. Time for an official rethink.
Here's a little Beaver in the front, and a Russian behemoth, an Antonov An-2, behind. They never put the An-2 to the test in Antarctica, but way up north it thrived in the Arctic.
The An-2 is a big boy too, the biggest single-engined biplane ever, and I can't remember the exact number, but it's right up there in the list of planes with the most examples ever built. Many thousands.
Finally, here's what replaced the skittled Beavers, the good old Chinook chopper. What an aircraft; still going.
Chinooks formed a big part of the Argentine air presence in Antarctica, so I took great pleasure in making the correct (tiny) 'Islas Malvinas' decals for this example. You can barely see them, but in small scale model building that's a fact of life, not a criticism.
And so that was more than a year of my model building life spent making fake snow (out of bicarb soda and wood glue) and planes with skis. So much fun, too.
