Sopwith F-1 Camel Fighter

(UNDER CONSTRUCTION)

The Sopwith Camel is probably one of the most famous airplanes of all time - and this spindly World War I biplane owes much of that fame to the Peanuts cartoon character Snoopy the Beagle and his never-successful efforts to shoot down the Red Baron. I got this kit because, ummmm, the decals looked really cool. Great reason, eh?

I was hoping this kit by Revell-Germany  (kit no. 04111) would be the same quality as their 1/72 scale Fokker D VII I had already built. Alas, it was not. The 22 parts were marred by excessive flash, some soft or incompletely-molded details and an overall lack of crispness and fit.  But the decals looked cool, so what the heck!

Taking the easy way out - I know, unusual for me - I opted to use the kit decals and paint the machine as the Camel flown by Flight Lieutenant Lloyd S. Breadner of No. 3 Naval Air Service Squadron in 1917, when on Sept. 3 he shot down two German Albatros D V fighters in 5 minutes in a furious dogfight. Breadner, a Canadian whose score topped out at 10 by the end of WW I, including the first Gotha bomber brought down by a British fighter, went on to become Air Chief Marshal of the Royal Canadian Air Force by the end of World War II. He died at a US hospital in 1952 at the age of 58.

As with the D VII kit, I decided to skip the aftermarket photoetch offerings. Even though the cost was modest, about $6, I have had less than good luck with bending photoetch into tubular shapes like gun sleeves, and none of the other interior cockpit details would really be visible. It's amazing what you can accomplish with a bit of plastic strip and stock, some stretched sprue and a careful paint job.

Unusually for a Revell-Germany kit, there were some minor accuracy issues - cutouts in the lower part of the cowl, Lewis guns that are more like lumps, some missing vents in the engine housing and a few other small things I had to correct with my pin vice, files, sanding sticks and bits of plastic.

Rigging It

Always the most dreaded part of building a biplane, more so the smaller the model is. In the larger scales, modelers use things like metallic elastic thread, jewelry wire and the like, but all of those are too heavy-looking for 1/72 scale. So I reverted to my old standby, stretched sprue, because it is cheap and abundant. And the Revell sprue stretches out into agreeable thin diameters.

But since it was a biplane, there was so much of it that needed wires to help hold it all together! And my limited research led me to decide I needed two colors of wire - black for the wires that braced structural parts and silver for the control cables (of course I managed to reverse that with one set of bracing cables on the outer struts!). There was a lot of debate on the various modeling forums about how things really were during WW I, but that was the general consensus.

The black sprue was colored with a Sharpie permanent black marker. The silver sprue was colored with a Rust-Oleum Metallic Leafing Pen I picked up for free (free is good!) at a home improvements store. Using a paint pen was much easier and gave a much thinner finish than trying to brush paint. Then it was just a matter of measuring each piece of sprue with dividers, cutting once to get it about right, and then trimming however many times it took to get each piece to fit.

The biggest challenge was the doubled bracing wires that go from the outside of the upper wing down to the lower fuselage. How to get the wires parallel?