Aeroplane In A Bottle: From This One, I Will Be Getting Some Cash....

Glad you like it. I had a lot of fun making it up.

I had plans to meet some friends for cocktails in Los Gatos, Ca, and arrived early with time to take a short walk.

I came upon the "Sierra Toy Soldier Company" and, while closed, they had an impressive window display.

http://www.sierratoysoldier.com/

The term "Toy" is somewhat dismissive of the seriousness and care taken by enthusiasts of that genre of scale modeling, and it may be that some of their products are not representative of the high quality one finds produced by serious modellers and historians.

Nonetheless, I thought of you, Sir, and you were with me in that moment.

Thank you for the post.

Respectfully,

NYC_SKP

I have heard of that place. Some while ago I got a letch to do a 54mm figure ( i did a fair amount of figure painting in my teens ), and they are well known on sites where figure modelers gather. There is some extraordinary work done by figure painters.

You may have noted a 'Britain's' entry in the site. That is a good part of where the 'toy' comes from. They were a company selling toy soldiers to children from very long ago, and the style of their castings came to be a standard and collectable all in its own right among people who grew up with them.

Back when they actually gave children things made of lead....

What's with the superstructure over the engine?

It is the radiator, Gentlemen. Shorts had done a lot of nautical work, and designed something based on steam condensors for the purpose. As long as any water was in it, the jacket around the cylinders would at least be where it would be found. It was not quite so solid as it looks in the model in real life at full size, but it did obscure view somewhat. One of the pilots in Iraq wrote that he would rather not, in such heat, be flying with the radiator in front of his face, but some of these were used for patrols over the North Sea, where I expect the wash of warmed air was welcome.

The pilots hated it because a single round through the radiator and the boiling water would hit them right in the face.

At $1/hour, I hope it was a labor of love!

Looks only a mother could love....

This is one I have thought about building for some time. I came upon an article in an old amateur history journal which contained a great many photographs taken by an Australian mechanic stationed at Basra in 1915, which included four showing various aspects of this machine ( probably taken, at least three of them, in late December ), which is unusually good documentation for a subject so out of the way as this.

(p.s. - it's "Ma'am"

Most of the models I build have some background to them I find particularly interesting. Sort of illustrations for a bit of history.

Yeah, the model is beautiful but I also enjoyed the history about the plane.

Peace

Fantastic detail, please post more of your work when you feel the urge.

I post them up here occasionally, when I feel I have something special.

Besides the obvious one of the rigging, the particular challenges of this were the bare engine, and the spoke wheels. Over-heating was a real problem, and they stripped all the cowling panels off the nose to get some air flow to assist the water.

My brother builds models.
I will have to show him this thread.
He will appreciate the hard work and detail. Excellent craftsmanship!

What sort of subjects does he prefer?

He does trains, too.

Mostly in the early phases, or things that unaccountably could still be found in service. I am fondest of Great War subjects, and of the period between the wars.

Trains can be fascinating. I have run into people who do incredible work making their own rolling stock, often from brass.

The pace of development was incredible.

Model trains as well. I'd wondered if you dabbled in that sphere. I subscribed to Model Railroader for years, in earnest of that "some day" that never quite got around to coming. So many magnificent layouts and models. Hundreds of hours spent on the most finicky details. Quite awe-inspiring.

-- Mal

Much of the interest of that period is that there was not yet consensus on the 'best' way to make a plane, and it was still possible to get equivalent results from different approaches. So there was great variety.

A lot of the materials I use come from the m,odel railroaders section of the shop, the plastic sheet and such, and a various lettering sheets. When I was very young I had an after-school job in a large hobby shop, and some of their trade was in kits for building rolling stock and locomotives in HO.

Job well done.

Glad you like it.

By the time I got to that, dead-line pressure was on, so I made it a solid block with deep scoring. I really should have assembled separate thin planes of sheet, with some small degree of gap between; the thing was not quite so solid, actually, as it looks from most angles.

With the deadline looming, I'd have pulled out that engine and dropped in an air cooled radial engine and been done with it. I kid!

Speaking of patience, I'm still waiting for you to build Roald Dahl's Gloster Gladiator. The Serial number was K7911, if that helps.

I will look into it. I have a couple of the new Airfix Gladiator kits. One will be done up as a Chinese machine ( they were the first to use them in combat ), but other subjects remain fluid....

I'm series.

such great detail! thanks for posting.

I can assure you there were things I left off, and others I simplified. In the small scale, it is often best to suggest, rather than try for every single tiniest thing....

And I love airplanes, so I can really appreciate this. I'll bet it was hard researching such an obscure plane.

It's especially impressive in such a small scale. I can't tell it from a larger model. Incredible detail, and I'd like to see some close up shots. Scratch built is awesome!

Why are both ailerons down? (On edit: I see it's shown like this in the Wikki image as well.)

Mostly it is pretty relaxing, though there are times the air gets blue.

Our camera does not really handle close-ups too well: here is one of the engine, though, when it was nearly ready to install....



The ailerons were rigged in a manner common in the pioneer days.. Lines ran from the control wheel to each aileron, but nothing connected the ailerons to one another to make them work in opposition. The control cable to each aileron could only pull it down. When the machine was at flying speed, the slipstream pressed the ailerons up, and their rise was restrained by their control cables to alignment with the wing's camber. When the wheel was turned in one direction, it tightened the wires on one side and pulled one aileron down; it may also have slackened the line to the opposite aileron, allowing it to rise and so reducing the lift it generates on the other wing-tip, but I do not know for certain that was the case. But it would positively pull one aileron down, increasing the lift of that wing tip, and so banking the wings. Since nothing but the slip-stream held the ailerons up, when the machine was at rest they both just hung there.

It shows in your beautiful work. It's funny that way isn't it? Some of my favorite accomplishments are things in which it wasn't about the money. It was about the enjoyment. I'm interested in other's passions. Thanks for sharing one of yours.

It is done for love, certainly, but it is nice to get money....

eom

thank you for sharing this and you have my admiration for having both the patience and steadiness of hand to accomplish works like this

Some of the trick is to not be breathing while the hand makes its final move....

Thank you for sharing. Scratch building of this type and quality is, unfortunately, very rare.

... and I have just had a nasty thought it may be that 3D printing may take some of the skill away if used to print things like the armatures and frames of the models or to detail lumps like engines.

Some of us do look towards 3-D with mingled hope and dread. At this point the definition on anything affordable is not really suitable for the craft; deposit in layers leaves perceptible steps which have to be worked out. But there are certainly things I would not mind at all being able to cue up a machine to make, rather than assembling them out of bits sometimes of sub-millimeter size. One of the early uses will probably be for masters from which runs of resin castings can be made.

When I was young and built kit model planes I always found the WWI era so intimidating because of the rigging... Scratch building is yet again another few orders of magnitude more challenge!

I hope you don't mind linking to your build thread in a modeling forum, which includes a photo of the original aircraft:

I do not mind at all. Posting here, of course, I try and keep the shop-talk to a minimum.

If anyone would like a bit more of the history, it can be found here:

http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234964852-short-827-converted-rnas-mesopoptamia-1915-scratch-build-in-172/

Are you a member over there, or did the picture come up on a Google search?

I don't recall whether it was an image search or a regular search. I'm not a member there... I still have model kits sitting around and occasionally think, "Maybe some day when I have time..."

.... very impressive!

It does run a bit larger than my usual....

The prize is well-deserved.

-- Mal