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Master Club 1/48 Sikorsky S-16

By Lance Krieg

Introduction

An unprepossessing brown cardboard box, devoid of any illustration or provenance, conceals some of the finest resin castings this reviewer has ever beheld. There are four hand-crafted wire wheels that are so exquisite that only the truly profligate could bring himself to use them all on a single project. Every well-molded strut contains embedded wire for additional strength. The components compare adequately to the best of the available documentation.

So what's the catch? The kit appeared only briefly, several years ago, and vanished like a Russian Brigadoon, leaving those who managed to snag one feeling incredibly lucky and at the same time bereft that there could not be others as beautiful. Perhaps a glowing build report can induce the creators to materialize again.

Construction

I assembled what little documentation I had, the backbone of which is the Flying Machine Press monograph, along with a handful of photos in Cross and Cockade, all enumerated below. This machine was one of Igor Sikorsky's first designs, and only a handful were built through 1916, mine being a variant called the “S-16 ser”. Chronic shortages meant that engines and armament were a haphazard affair. While a “from the box” build would certainly have yielded a creditable re-creation, the easily accessible cockpit and splendid engine casting certainly benefit from extra attention. Like most resin kits, the attachment points for the lower wings needed reinforcement, which I achieved with telescoping brass tubes embedded in the wings and buried beneath the fuselage floor.

For the engine, this involved some refinement to the 80 HP Gnome's face plates and some sparkplugs turned from brass rod and wired with .002 inch copper armature wire. Pushrods were added from brass wire, and manufacturer's plates and hardware oddments came from PE. I mated the finished engine to a laminated and carved wooden propeller, and devoted myself to the interior.

I kept the majority of the cast interior details, but sliced these off the resin fuselage bottom and applied them to a styrene replacement which would require less filling and sanding around the lower longerons when the fuselage was closed. I dislike having to work with one-piece fuselages, as it is very difficult to do a decent job in painting the walls, but must confess that I did not miss having to fill seams down the spine and belly of the plane. The kit offers both Vickers- and Lewis-armed versions, and there is a sizeable cutout on the port cowling to accommodate the Vickers, which I filled with sheet styrene and sanded smooth. Both machine guns were saved for future projects, as the fine castings will provide a solid basis for superdetailed weapons.

With the rough structural work completed, it was time to pull out all the stops on the interior details. The rudder bar, observer's web seat, petrol tank, and steering wheel from the kit were used with some extra detailing, but the pilot's seat, instrument panel, and various dials and controls were all scratchbuilt from diverse materials as described in the captions.

The seatback framing was soldered together from brass rod, using the end of a wooden dowel as an alignment tool. By bending the rod around the carved dowel to achieve the basic shape, each stanchion was soldered into place and joined to the basic frame.

005 plastic sheet was cut to shape for the leather cover, folded back upon itself to form a sleeve. The cover was secured to a brass tube with miniature clamps, and dunked in hot water to set the curvature. Suitably painted a leather cover, and with the button fasteners added, the seatback was slid over the frame, just like the original. The seat bottom was appropriated from an aftermarket PE set, and the lacing that held the chair to its position was wrapped around the bottom support.

The Sikorsky front seat is an unusual construction, and was not represented in the kit.  (The poor observer/instructor had to sit on a webbing affair behind the pilot, with his legs around the guy in front; it looks real uncomfortable!)  Basically, the pilot’s seatback was a leather sleeve fitted over a wire frame, which meant it could be easily removed, and the seat bottom was caned from rattan.  It cried out for accurate inclusion.

As there are a couple of excellent photos of an S-16 with an 1895 Colt machine gun controlled by a Lavrov synchronizer, I determined to reproduce this combination. The gun was scratchbuilt with brass tubes, styrene, and photoetched bits, and the belt feed and take-up boxes were created by folding .003 inch sheet aluminum. The gun mount is cobbled together from brass wire.

The scratchbuilt gun before and after. The barrel is brass tube, to which a styrene stock and other details are added. The “cooling fins” along the barrel are made from tightly-wrapped copper wire, and the other details from PE odds and ends. That disk below the gun butt is the Lavrov interrupter gear, and the one peeking from behind the muzzle end is the actuating arm that gave the weapon its “potato digger” moniker; it swung back and forth with each shot, which meant the gun had to be carefully mounted to avoid incidental damage from the rapidly-moving mechanism.

Attention turned to the flying surfaces, and these were perfectly acceptable castings requiring only painting. I do not like resin wings, being so thin that they are susceptible to movement and warping, and if I were to repeat this project I would replace them with styrene versions that are less lively. Control surfaces were separated and notched at the correct locations for sheet plastic hinges. Aileron cranks are a prominent feature above and below the top wing, and these deserved special attention using brass tube and photoetched detail parts.

 

 

 

1. Using the scale drawings, the angle of the crank arms was recreated on a sheet of plastic using “stops” for square plastic stock. Individual lengths of .005 mm brass tube were bent to shape by pressing them against the arms of the jig.

2. The round tube stock was crushed flat in a vise, preserving the angle; note that if the tube were flattened before being bent to shape, it would be much more difficult to work.

The fuselage was straightforward, and while the molded-on detail was perfectly acceptable, the many variations in service meant that the provided configuration did not necessarily match my chosen subject. I sliced and sanded away everything but the lacing on the upper longerons and the louvers on the cowling.

Décor

For the unpainted aluminum panels I was determined to try a foiling approach I had seen demonstrated by Neil Crawford, a variation of Harry Woodman's pioneering model techniques. Using standard heavy-duty kitchen foil, I sprayed adhesive on the shiny side and burnished it down on appropriate parts of the model, carefully slicing along the panel lines to remove excess foil. The adhesive beaded up on the glossy surface of the foil and left a subtle pattern visible through the material, nicely replicating machined aluminum. I was pleased (and rather amazed) that I could burnish right over the molded-on cowling louvers, and that wrinkles could be sanded out without a trace. I then cut the appropriate access hatches and fittings from .003 inch aluminum sheet, and added these to the fuselage.

For the fabric-covered surfaces, I mixed a version of “clear doped linen” from Floquil enamels. I painted the interior structure on the bottom sides of the both sets of wings as well as the fuselage sides and bottoms, and oversprayed this with a base coat that was transparent enough to hint at the spars, ribs, and wires, along with a vague shadow from the upper wing cockade.

 

 

 

Wood struts were colored by streaking the raw resin with burnt sienna oils, and overspraying this with a clear brown, which tinted the tan resin and allowed the “grain” to show through. All fuselage hardware was painted with a dark gray enamel, while a variant shade was used for the undercarriage components.

The kit has no decals, and I thought of painting the markings, but settled for America-Gryphon roundels that were the appropriate size. Avoiding the need of matching the A-G colors, I put together the pennant from slices from the same decal sheet, and so only had to come up with the orange canton. This left only black markings, which were easily created on my computer using PC Paint, the simplest graphics package of all time. Only the eagle presented any sort of challenge, and he was purloined from Flying Machine Press publications and reduced to the appropriate size. The marking were assembled, printed on paper, and transferred to decal sheet with an office laser copier.

The model was heavily weathered with various oil washes and stains to match the hard-used prototypes.

Final Assembly

The long wires embedded in the struts meant that the biplane assembly was very straightforward using 5-minute epoxy. No jig was required, as the rigging pulled everything square. What was required, however, was to shorten the cabane struts by 3 full millimeters, cutting them off at the bottom where they protrude from the fuselage. The rigging was accomplished with .004 inch Dai-riki nylon line, secured with superglue and/or epoxy. Turnbuckles were added with brass paint.

The undercarriage assembly also benefits from the embedded wires, but is a fairly complicated arrangement that requires considerable “fiddling” to get square. Since I wanted a ski-mounted version, I had to create the vee-struts that attached the skis to the axle. These four units must be identical so the model will sit square, and strong enough to support its entire weight. I created a simple jig on an aluminum bar so I could solder together several sets, and then made a plastic jig to trim them accurately to size.

References

Besides specific references for the 80 HP Gnome engine and Colt machine gun, these publications offer the most help:

Great War Aircraft in Profile 1: Sikorsky S-16, by Vadim Mikheyev, Flying Machine Press, ISBN 0-9637110-8-3, 1997

World War One Aeroplanes, numbers 114, 145, 148, 156, and 159

Windsock Worldwide, 11/1, 12/4, 14/4, 15/6, 16/3

Cross and Cockade (US), 15/2

In. total, I spent 199 hours on this project from October 25, 2007 through December 4, 2008