CMR 1/72nd Curtiss R3C-2
|
 |
Background
Last time I was in London, amongst the highlights of a splendid morning
in the company of friends and aircraft (add food and drink and a man could
live forever on such a diet….) at the Science Museum, I once more
had the sincere pleasure of admiring that most exquisite art noveau solid
silver and bronze trophy that materialises the memory of all those that
gave their best, and many times more, for the honour of winning for their
country the much coveted Coupe d'Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider,
the brainchild of French Industrial Jacques Schneider, who one day believed
that by promoting a race for seaplanes he would be leading the way for
further development of this particular type of aircraft with a view to
its future use in civil air transport.
 Held
between 1913 and 1931, except with a 4 year interval from 1915 to 1918,
during which plenty of seaplanes were used in much less commendable deeds,
the trophy races were finally brought to an end when the United Kingdom
team finally managed to win them for the third time in a period of five
years, thus fulfilling the rule that had kept the trophy without a definitive
owner for quite a number of years.
Documentation on the Schneider trophy isn’t scarce as a simple
Google search on your computer will easily prove, so I will not go into
further historical details and will instead concentrate on trying to transmit
my impressions on how the CMR kit of the winner of the 1925 edition held
in Baltimore, USA, the little Curtiss R3C-2 (that I first looked upon
in the July
2005 edition of your favourite modelling e-zine) translates into another
nice scale model in your display case.
The Kit
 The
hostilities started with a good rub of both fuselage inner faces with
a sanding stick to clean the mating surfaces, since their fit can quite
benefit from his treatment. After that I turned my attention for the usual
cockpit detailing and have to say that this was mostly wasted time since
once the fuselage was closed there was not much to see bar the seat and
the tip of the control column.
Probably because of this the kit only provides a control column and
a floor with some sort of cushion to pose for seat. Still I felt that
at least a decent seat should be in the order of the day, so I scratchbuilt
one as I also did an instrument panel and added some more bits and pieces.
As I said, before, though, you might as well just fit a seat in and get
on with it, since not much will be graspable once the model finished.
Since the aircraft was a wooden monocoque, I painted the interior plywood
colour using my usual humbrol and watercolour pencil technique (I’ve
described it many times before, so if you’re not familiar with it,
either read some of my previous articles in the archives section or just
ask). The seat was left in aluminium colour with khaki painted lead foil
seat belts.
 To
glue both fuselage sides together I used 5 minute epoxy since, as opposed
to fast setting CA, not only it allows enough setting time to be sure
to get the surfaces correctly aligned but it also fills in any unwanted
seams that can, once dry, be easily scrapped and sanded flush.
The wings came next and these presented no special problem other than
cleaning the recesses in the fuselage into which they fit, this being
paramount given he fact that all seams in these areas will be particularly
hard to fill and clean, given the very narrow gap between the wings and
also the complicated, far from flat, surfaces around the wing to fuselage
joints.
The horizontal and vertical rear control surfaces are all meant to butt
join into the fuselage so, to assist their placement, I inserted copper
pins into each part and made corresponding holes on the fuselage sides.
Again, 5 minute epoxy was used to ensure a good and strong bond.
 And
now we come to the hard part: the small interplane struts. These are not
only small and butt joining onto the wing surfaces, but are also of the
slanted type, what creates an added complication as I’m sure anyone
who has tried this kit will be completely aware. The problem is again
compounded by the very narrow gap between the wings that can at times
become quite exasperating (the more so when you finally discover that
you’ve messed so much with the wings that the joins all broke up
and have to be redone. But that’s a sad history I won’t tell
anyone….).
In the end what I did was to insert a foam spacer between the 2 wings,
close to their root so as to force the gap to widen towards the tip of
the wings. I then made pencil marks on the exact places of the wing surfaces
where the struts should abut and after slanting the tips of the struts
with a sanding stick I dabbed them in super fast (2 minute setting) epoxy.
Carefully, I let the lower tip rest against its precise location, then
carefully removed the foam spacer so as to let the top wing slowly come
to rest on the other tip of the strut. It took more than a few tries and
I made quite a mess with the epoxy on the wing surfaces, but any left-on
pieces of unwanted, dry glue were later easily scrapped with the tip of
a blade.
 With
the flying cell done it was time to start painting it, so an undercoat
of flat black was given to the model. The rather distinctive brass wing
radiators were then painted copper colour (some Revell enamel I had laying
around) while the tips of the wings were covered in gold (Testors enamel,
not the real thing, of course….).
The aluminium sheeting between each radiator set (at least it looks
like aluminium on photos but I’m not too sure about this) was replicated
by means of aluminium painted decal strips that were painstakingly applied
one at the time (it does help to have some experience with applying decal
rib tapes, since it’s quite the same process, and there are at least
72 of them….).
The black areas were then given a coat of gloss black, to prepare the
surface for the decals.
 While
the paint dried I turned my attention to the float assembly and for this
I first joined both floats by their transverse struts. Once this assembly
was dry, I inserted copper pins through the tips of the vertical struts
and to assist in locating them on the underside of the fuselage I made
small indentations at the pertinent location with the tip of a blade.
Using the 3 view plan as guide, I then glued the front pair of vertical
struts to the floats, again using 5 minute epoxy, making sure I got the
front triangle right both when viewed from the front and the side.
The float assembly was then offered to the front fuselage, and I made
a simple Lego blocks jig to rest the rear of the fuselage while the glue
mating the front struts to the fuselage was setting.
 The
next step was gluing the rear struts and this was made easy due to the
aforementioned copper pins. The joins were far from perfect but all spaces
were easily filled up by the epoxy.
With all the assembly done I was now ready to decal the model and as
usual with CMR the transfers were nothing short of superb, being solid
in colour, thin, perfect in register and easily applicable. I used the
Future sandwich technique, but I’d bet that if you’re using
a gloss surface there will be no need for any setting solutions, since
they will happily conform to any surface.
The last stage of the build up was approaching and this was something
that I wasn’t really looking forward too since I really didn’t
want to mess much with the float to fuselage assembly, which given it’s
geometry, is quite fiddly.
 In
the end I decided I’d skip my usual structural monofilament rigging
and trade it for the time honoured stretched sprue technique, which I
have to say I hadn’t use in more than 15 years.
All the bits of silver streched sprue were glued with patience and a
drop of white wood glue and this proved not too daunting a task, although
I still prefer my “normal” type of rigging, which has the
added bonus of contributing to the structural rigidity of the model.
Last pieces to go were the wooden batons that rest on the wing wires,
a pitot tube and the clear resin windscreen.
A couple of final coats of semigloss varnish from a rattle can concluded
the works and a delivery flight was made to the display cabinet, where
it now stands in the company of the (very) few pieces of my growing racing
aircraft collection.
Conclusion
 All
in all I was quite satisfied with the end result even if I did have a
few annoying and serious mishaps along the way with joins breaking apart
due to overstressing them and with things turning out to be much more
difficult than they looked at first (particularly with regard to wing
and float struts). Still, you can’t help but feel pleased with yourself
when you manage to overcome difficulties and this kit did give me a fair
number of opportunities for this.
As a consequence of the various tricky bits I reported above I wouldn’t
recommend this kit for a novice, but if you have a bit of experience with
resin kits, than there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have
an example of this important aircraft in your model collection, and I
do happily recommend it to all racing aircraft fans.
One last note to say that due to my camera having broken while I was
doing the kit, this time the article will be a bit lacking in build up
photos, for which I’m sorry.
My thanks again to CMR for the sample kit.
References are, as I said above, easy obtainable and I’ll mention
but three of the several I consulted:
Hirsch, Robert S., Schneider Trophy Racers
Foxworth, Thomas G., The Speed Seekers
Mendenhall, Charles, The Air Racer
Also there’s quite a number of websites with useful info, like,
for instance:
|
|
