A while ago, sometime in September 2023, Armstrong watched  a Disney cartoon, ‘Planes’, in which a crop duster was the hero. After that, he wanted me to build one for him… Not the most popular subject for a paper model, it would seem, so I started looking around.

It didn’t take long to find the two early offerings from Mały Modellarz, a Dromedar and a Kruk and a Kruk from GPM. I already had the Dromedar, bought a thousand years ago (!) and so I managed to get one of each of the Kruk on different groups on Facebook, which I was thankful for 🙂

Unfortunately I could not find a paper model of the Piper Pawnee  (which I think that the hero, ‘Dusty’ was based on) – Not actually quite true, as I DID find one on a site in Japan, around 1/72 scale as a shortened sort of cartoon of one. Oh well, I got it and built it immediately, of course. He loves that and I had to make space on one of his bookshelves in his bedroom

That started the ball rolling for Armstrong (4) and he started asking me to go through my shelves and cases to see if there was something there that he would like me to build next. After a while I gave in and we went through the ‘few’ (60?) I have, covering ships from all eras and aircraft mostly, with a few tanks, trains and other vehicles and other stuff. He was blown away and decided on a few ‘favourites’, the standout with him were the Typhoon/Tempest variants and the P40.

I had already started the GPM Kruk, but was persuaded to immediately build the Typhoon, subject of another blog-build on this site and which now takes pride of place on the shelf next to the Pawnee in his bedroom.

Back to tha Kruk. After the Typhoon, he wanted me to build the P40 (I have an early Halinski offering which he liked), but I insisted on finishing the Kruk first. After that, I wanted actually to build something else, but that’s another story 🙂

Here are a few pics of the GPM Kruk, which didn’t start particularly well. Poor fit of some othe parts and just plain incorrect sizing of laser-cut frames made it frustrating (which is the reason why I agreed to do the Typhoon before finishing!) and so I lost momentum. After most of the fuselage I started on the engine, which is totally inaccurate and so that also had to be added to to make it a satisfying job. I love ’round’ engines (real ones…) but they are complicated and a challenge to build in paper! Anyway, the start of my efforts on this one (which I may decide to do completely differently in the end!) can be seen in the last photos here:

I shall keep the comments to a minimum 🙂

Some work needs to be done on the engine to make it look anything like one fitted to the plane. I’m not going to go mad on it, but the cylinder heads are obviously completely wrong and addressing that should make a big difference regarding the placing of pushrods, so a little inventiveness is required 🙂

The parts are handed, so it will take a bit of time to make up the 9 pairs required. The rear of the cylinders will also need work to allow for the addition of the inlet tracts from the heads to the collector-ring. I shan’t even try to make the carburettor and engine mounts, since I don’t have drawings or photos of the setup.

The shabby scribbles on that one cylinder will be sorted, of course

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Moving on on 10.01.2025

A few things have to be corrected, like the fact that above the doors, there should be windows (not a door as I suspected), which the instructions failed to mention or illustrate., so I assembled the roof of the cabin without cutouts, as shown below…

Now is the time to address that and so I cut out the necessary holes and moulded a window each and glued them in, while adding a few other details, too: Not as clean as I would like the work to be, but at this magnification…