Tuesday 29 April 2014

1:300 scale BE2c — WIP

I'm trying to build a 1:300 scale BE2c for aerial wargaming purposes, and this is the result so far. There's some good, and some not so good.

The wings and tailplanes are just light cardboard. That's fine for my purposes; plenty strong enough to take handling with a reasonable amount of care, and I can print the outlines straight on to it, which makes cutting out very simple. It will also, hopefully, make painting the wing roundels a lot easier than trying to get perfect circles by eye and guess.

The fuselage is epoxy resin. I've made a silicone rubber mould from a master cobbled together from various materials. I've embedded a bit of paper in the verical stabilizer during casting to give the epoxy a bit of reinforcement. I'm reasonably happy with the way the casting has turned out, though I neglected to key the two halves of the mould properly, so I'll have to take special care with alignment for future impressions.

The struts are copper wire, and that's where my major dissatisfaction lies. I haven't been able to get decent sharp bends around each loop, so the struts don't look like they're properly bedded into the wing surfaces. I'm not entirely sure how to resolve the issue, but do I have an idea to try: I might just pierce the lower wing and push the strut-pairs through it, gluing them from beneath (the undersides are never really visible anyway).

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