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Scratchbuilt 1/144 Caudron R.XI

By James Gray

Introduction

I began building 1/144th scale aircraft as wargaming tokens. The first one didn't take a lot of effort, and I finished it in a relatively short time. Being unable to leave well enough alone, the next one I treated much more like a model than a mere wargaming token. It looked much nicer when finished than the first one, but it took a lot more time too. This led inevitably to the decision to do an even more complex and time-consuming project, a scratchbuilt model.

I have a copy of the weighty Flying Machines Press French Aircraft of the First World War, and I was attracted to some of the more obscure types. In particular, I liked a three-seat, two-engine fighter called the Caudron R.XI. My attraction was based in part on its very obscurity. Since this aircraft is not generally as well known as, say, the Mustang or the Bf109, here's a little background: it was the result of an Aviation Militaire requirement of November 1916 for a three-seat long range escort fighter. The Caudron company modified one of their earlier aircraft designs with more powerful engines and 1000 were ordered, of which 370 were actually built by the end of the war. Production delays meant that they were not available before 1918, and only 54 were in service at the end of the war, in six escadrilles. At least two were acquired by the RAF and another two by the American Air Service.

The production Caudron R.XI, with two 215hp Hispano-Suiza engines, had a maximum speed of 113 mph, a maximum altitude of 19,500 feet, and carried five 7.7mm Lewis guns to be operated by the three crew members.

Once again I found myself working from inadequate plans and fuzzy photographs. I took the FMP plans (which are lacking in detail and not entirely accurate) and scanned them into my computer, then reduced them to 1/144th scale.

The Model

I began construction with the fuselage. The scale is too small for sophisticated techniques (or perhaps I'm too simple for sophisticated techniques?) so I laminated a solid blank out of white Evergreen styrene, and carved and sanded it to shape. The side profile was helped by gluing a piece out of the plan to it, but the vertical shapes were done by eye. Then I sanded the cross section into an oval.

The cockpits were going to be occupied, so I was able to leave out any internal detail. It's just as well, since I have not been able to find out anything about the interior at all. The cockpits are basically drilled holes, painted black inside. After that, I had to deal with the very prominant fabric-over-stringer covering. Apparently the fuselage is like most Allied aircraft fuselages, a simple square framework of wood braced with wire, but the Caudron company completely enveloped this with a streamlined shape of light stringers with doped fabric over that. I stretched some sprue until I had enough of a consistant diameter, then glued this over the fuselage in the stringer locations using liquid cement. This is the first of this sort of work I had done with liquid cement, and I was pleased to find I had a minute or so to push the sprue into place before the glue set.

Now, the real fuselage is flat between the stringers, but I couldn't manage to use filler effectively in this scale. I fooled with it for a while, then gave up while I was ahead, for once. After a few heavy coats of paint, the effect was very pleasing and effective and the chance of improving on it was not worth the risk of messing it up.

On to the wings! The wings were not too much trouble but they are not quite what I wanted, either. I cut them out of sheet plastic, not as thin as they ought to be, but as thin as I thought I could get away with. One of the compromises I was compelled to make in this scale was between the desire for scale thickness and the need for a little rigidity. I scraped and sanded an airfoil shape into the top of the wings, rounding the leading edge and making a long taper on the trailing edge. The bottom of the wings was scraped with a curved-edge pocket knife to a noticably convex shape, though because of its excessive thickness, the airfoil is by no means accurate. Then came the hard part, the highly visible scalloped effect caused by the wire trailing edge. These scallops need to be shallow and of exactly even depth and spacing. This is hard to do. So hard, indeed, that I never succeeded in doing it. I did get a pretty fair 'batplane' effect, but this wasn't what I was trying for. Eventually I decided that no scallops were better than badly done scallops, and I made a new pair of wings without them. The lower wing was then inset into a square notch in the fuselage, and the fuselage below the wing was built up with many layers of paint.

The two nacelles were another challenge. I didn't see how I was going to manage them so I just started at the 'shallow end of the pool', which is to say that I did what I knew I could do and left the rest to be worked out later. This is not very efficient but sometimes it's the only way. Anyway, the nacelles are a very peculiar shape, sort of like a brazil nut with the end cut off. Carving one shouldn't be too bad, I thought, but carving two identical ones would be another matter. It was easier than I thought because of a discovery I made when I was laminating the plastic to the right thickness; I glued the blanks around a center piece of thin clear plastic and this gave me a permanent center mark that could not be effaced by any amount of carving or sanding. In the end, they were not so difficult and came out quite well.

Attaching them, though! let me explain. Each nacelle sits in a 'V' of struts, just touching the bottom wing. The struts pass within the outer skin of the nacelles. I noodled over how to do this for quite some time, and in the end I decided to start the wing assemblies first.

The wing and strut assembly is an unorthodox system I evolved for building lead wargaming biplanes. First, get some strut material. I didn't know at the time that brass strip was available in model railroad shops, so I made my own out of brass rod. This was by a rather messy and laborious process involving a c-clamp, a board, and a belt sander. I don't recommend it. Then cut out the struts you will need, the full strut length plus the thickness of the two wings, and file points on either end. Take the wings and very carefully mark out the strut locations. It is very important to get this right, especially with multi-bay wings, as even the slightest misalignment will be obvious in the finished product. Then holes are drilled where marked, smaller than the width of the strut material. Stick the struts into the holes in the lower wing. Being plastic, the sharpened struts will tend to stay in the holes. Turn the model over and apply thin superglue to the opposite side of the drilled holes. This should stick the struts in their holes fairly well. It may be necessary to apply very slight amounts of superglue around the bases of the struts, but the less the better. Note that this is quite fragile at this stage. Then take the upper wing and impale it on the struts. Start at one end of the wings and work towards the other, gluing each pair of struts in succession as you get them set in their holes. Now the advantage of the system becomes visible; there is a significant amount of tweaking you can do with the struts to get them lined up. Try to get the biplane assembly close to the correct alignment, dihedral, stagger, et cetera, but it can be tweaked to make minor corrections later.

Paint the inside surfaces of the wings now, the bottom of the upper wing and the top of the bottom wing. Don't bother with the outside surfaces since you are going to mess them up anyway, at least you will if you are as clumsy as I am.

Now you have a biplane, but very fragile. The assembly does not become strong until you have the rigging installed. Because I didn't know quite how to install the engine nacelles yet, I rigged the outer wing cells on both sides first. For this, drill very small holes in the proper locations for the rigging attachments. I use #80 bits unless several wires are to go through a single hole. Then I take some pre-painted invisible thread. This is a very fine nylon thread available in sewing shops, equivalent to about one pound fishing line. It is said to come in a semi-opaque ìsmokeî shade, but I've only been able to find the clear, so I paint it either silver or black with a paint pen. Run the thread through one hole and glue it. Apply the thinnest superglue you can get to the outside of the hole; that is, the top of the upper wing or the bottom of the lower wing. This keeps you from messing up the paint job between the wings. Once the glue is set, stretch the thread taut. I hang a fly-tying clamp on the end of the line, but a clothespin would be about right, too. I apply glue in the same way as before to the outside of the wings. Work back and forth to equalize the stresses on the wings so you don't get things warped out of shape. Its amazing how much strength and rigidity this gives to the rather limp plastic wings.

Once the outer bays were rigged, I was better able to work on the nacelles, since the wing was more secure. First I installed the struts the nacelle would sit in. I used a modification of the same procedure I used for normal, straight up and down struts. Two holes were drilled in the upper wing and one hole in the lower wing, and the struts were made with the ends bent. Two struts fit in each hole in the lower wing, and the upper ends fit in separate holes in the upper wing.

Of course, there are two pairs of these front to back on each wing. Now, the problem of how to install the nacelles on these struts! any good modeller should be capable of devising a simple, effective, efficient method of doing this. Unfortunately, I was doing this project instead. I cut four rather wide grooves vertically in the side of each nacelle, lining up more or less with the struts. This wasn't very neat, and I had to put them in and take them out and cut on the grooves some more quite a few times until I got the nacelles to fit properly down over the struts. Unfortunately, this meant that now there were these great big gouges in the sides of the nacelle, which I filled with putty and sanded until they were flush. Because of the confined space involved, this was a very messy and time-consuming job, and only fluent cursing gave me the fortitude to complete it. Fortunately, my Navy time gave me the necessary experience in this regard. It messed up the paint job between the wings too, and I had to repaint that as well.

That was perhaps the hardest part of the model, and the rest was 'on the downslope.' I finished the rest of the interplane rigging without too much trouble. The tailplane members were simply sheet plastic, cut to size and installed and rigged.

The wheels were another item I didn't see how I was going to manage. I couldn't cannibalize wheels from one of the white-metal 1/144th scale kits I had, since these are never actually round. I finally found I could make my own. I wound a spiral of plastic Evergreen rod around a dowel of about the right diameter, then boiled it. When it came out of the hot water, I cut a line down the line of the dowel, through the coils of the rod. The result was a series of plastic rings. I punched out several disks and glued these rings (tires) around them and voila! Wheels. I built up the outside of the wheels into a blunt cone (as are real WWI wheels) with layers of paint and a little sanding. The complex landing gear struts are brass wire bend and superglued into shape. As with the wings, the rigging provides a lot, perhaps most of their strength. The wheels are in pairs on a short horizontal axle, one on each side of the strut assemblies. I tied this axle to the strut assembly with fine wire. This seems an odd solution, but there was an advantage; since the short axle can pivot around the strut assembly, there is no problem getting all four wheels to touch the ground. When adjusted, a drop of superglue keeps the wheels from flopping around.

The crew are home-made from Milliput (an epoxy putty) and they are not as finely detailed as I'd like, but a figure half an inch tall in his socks is hard to work on. Next time I'll use some Preiser figures as a base. The guns and Scarff rings are made from tiny bits of wire and plastic.

The painting is just old-fashioned brush painting. Some of the detail, like the radiators, is painted on. I made the decals by the ALPS decal system and Paint Shop Pro 5.0. I'm not going to go into detail on the ALPS process, but I will say a few things. One is that I'm tired of sets of insignia where the size you want is always halfway between two sizes on the decal sheet. So I made an entire sheet of French cocardes in half millimeter increments to 10mm, and one millimeter increments above that. Now I have a lifetime supply of cocardes. Since I can't draw on a computer worth spit, I drew the squadron insignia the old fashioned way, on paper, from photographs, and then scanned it into the computer. One great advantage of this is that you only need draw half of symmetrical insignia, then copy and mirror image it to make the other half!

The last remaining concessions to the Caudron's origin as a gaming piece are the clear disks for the propellers. These were simple enough, made by turning many circles with a sharp pair of dividers on clear plastic. These never seem to come out perfect, always picking up a scratch from somewhere, but a dip or two in Future floor polish improves that to the point the scratches are almost invisible.

I'm most pleased with how this project came out. Scratchbuilding's a lot of fun; lots of challenges, lots of learning, and you are not stuck with what's available in kit form.