April 1918, in the dying light of the day a pilot in the newly named RAF chats to his mechanic as he awaits orders for another night flight to intercept the bombers flying from Flanders and scourging the people of London
From a Valom kit - the ensemble looks deceptively simple when the two tiny sprues emerge from the box. I started off with the intention of building three Valom models together (so you will see the Pfalz appearing in some pictures, although to date it is yet to be complete), so with the sounds of Jerry Goldsmith's stirring score to the Blue Max filling the room I embarked on this epic adventure.
This isn't my first venture into Valom models and planes of the 14-18 conflict, I also built the delightfully intricate Fokker Eindeckers and a Bristol F2b in 1920s Spanish colours, however due to their delicacy the former has never left the house and the latter has been retired from the show circuit due to an instance of it dropping away its landing gear like an Me-163 and attempting to take flight across my show transport box.
Sitting nicely on a Tamiya ET bottle top lid along with a Pfalz gives a great idea of the scale of these tiny airframes.
These are definitely short run kits, with limited locating pins, making all the joints essentially butress.
The included etch fret.
First coats down on the Camel.
Paint concensus seems to be that they were painted in something not dissimilar to RAF Dark Green at first, but this faded slowly to a brown - so I've gone with brown violet to represent a slightly older airframe as it is going to be playing the part of one of the RAF Home Defence aircraft.
The Camel goes into the unusual Night Fighter scheme with green replacing white on the roundels and tail. The roundels actually include the overpainted green, rather than just being transparent, but it is so close to the colour I chose it is not even noticable.
The Camel has combination of metal and plastic undercarriage. Went together without any issues, except I did trim the wheel stubs down as they were too long.
The usual battle then ensued to get the struts in the right place-ish but they did go on eventually and seem to have a good hold.
Paint references vary between green and wooden for the struts. I took a guess that for a low vis paint scheme they would perhaps paint these too.
I started the rigging - I'm using 0.07mm wire for this. It won't be a full process as getting the rigging around the cockpit area will be impossible, but the main spars and tailplane will be done.
So it was on with the vignette. My research showed that Stow Maries airfield in the Eastern Counties was well put together with lots of brick buildings - so I raided the stash for this little cardboard and laser-cut wooden assembly.
A surprisingly complex build with incredible, if largely hidden detail.
Came together with some static grass and some re-purposed Preiser model railway figures, and it was all done.
