The Little World

With boldness, one would suggest.

Scale model kit makers get it right most of the time. Their products are meticulously designed, moulded, and packaged. They are sold at reasonable prices by retailers who have the best interests of the modeller at heart. And every time you wish upon a star a Fairey gets it’s wings and inadequate landing gear…

Every kit box you get presents you with an opportunity to be in trouble. The only thing you don’t know as you open it is exactly what sort.

My discovery that the working landing gear, flaps, ailerons, and tail surfaces on an old Revell kit didn’t, and shouldn’t, was sort of a grand trifecta of defects. The design was an homage to play value – but I am too old and ugly to play with anything.

The rudder and horizontal stabilisers yielded to careful alignment and thin cement. Ditto the ailerons and flaps, though the latter would have been nice dropped. The main gear was folded into the wing, to be pulled out at the end of the build and cemented into rigid position.

The front wheel – this was a tricycle bomber – was a spidery framework on a wheel that supposedly rotated up into the fuselage. I could imagine it doing just that, with a crunch, the first time the thing was set on the shelf. So I blanked off the largely unseen wheel bay with a thick plastic sheet, backed this up with a one-ounce lead block, and cemented the wheel onto the sheet. Enough of the gear leg and axle was cut off and attached to give the correct impression. I have done what Revell never could.

I am half-tempted to revisit a Special Hobby Douglas Havoc bomber with even worse front gear and do precisely the same. The spindly scale gear is too short and too weak to survive. The plane is a beauty, but deserves better legs.