Hobbycraft 1/32nd Sopwith Camel

No photographs today; my camera battery is dead and photos will have to come later. Besides, I didn't think this model came out all that well. The kit actually wasn't bad. The main knock I had was that the struts didn't seem to meet the wings at the right fore-aft angles, but it's possible I screwed that up myself, seeing as how I generally make a hash of biplanes anyway.

What's most interesting about it is that I started it over a year ago and then lost interest in it and left it sitting in an open box in my garage for a long time. This is usually the kiss of death for a model - if the squirrels or roadrunners don't make off with some of the parts, and if it isn't so heavily colonized by black widow spiders I just throw it away, then the decals decompose in a crazed patchwork of cracks.

But when I finally got back to it, I found that not only was it still complete, but the decals even worked! They were a bit crispy and I managed to break one of them, but I was able to shove it back together and I was frankly astonished at the toughness of the Hobbycraft decals.

As I said, biplanes aren't my bread and butter. In fact, I almost never build biplanes, though I do have a fatal weakness for the Revell Sopwith Triplane. I know going in that any biplane I build is not going to turn out too well, so I often adopt a six-footer outlook going in. No rigging, brush-painted, perfunctory interior, no particular sweat over the precise shades of paint meant to represent P.C. 10 or clear doped linen, that sort of thing. The last biplane I really sweated over was a 1/72nd scale Re-8, which turned out pretty well before it fell upside-down to the ground and came apart in a ball of stretched-sprue rigging.

So I did my Sopwith Camel as a six-footer, and it'll do. The machine guns were relatively undetailed, and the interior seemed sparse given the scale, and the decals weren't particularly crisply printed, but it came out all right, especially for having sat out in the open for a year.