The Little World

I ask this because I have noted some of the priorities they assign to their kit designs.

In the case of the beer, pretzel, and borscht bureaux, the decisions they make about the level of photo-etch to include in a cockpit area vs the basic fit of the thing into the fuselage hints at it. An entire sheet of thin brass can be devoted to items that are impossible to produce, attach or see in the end product. An entire cockpit can be left to suspend itself between vague fuselage walls like a ghost hovering in mid-air. And we get to pay for it all.

I sat down and looked carefully at an old model kit from the 60’s – a major maker’s aircraft. It had a cockpit tub that was nowhere near as detailed as the modern mid-European one. The seats were crude and the dashboard rudimentary. Yet it clipped into the fuselage sides – or at least one side – with precision, and the result looked fine from the outside.

The actual tabs and ledges upon which it rested were formed on the inside of the fuselage by milling away the convex former that made the male part of the mould. It would be a matter of drilling and milling into the appropriate place after the basic structure was cut – and it is a production technique that would be just as easy to do for a short-run kit as well – even more so if he mould material was softer than steel.

The cockpit tub would also have been an easy shape to make, and perfectly satisfying for that.

We all want engraved panel lines on our models where they existed in the real thing. And correct rivets and vents and beer taps and all. That goes without saying. It is wonderful that the Bohemian mould maker can do these so well, but infuriating that he cannot make the basic inside structure work.