Aircraft build

Mały Modelarz 6/93 Hawker Typhoon

A very nice paper/card model released in 1993 by Mały Modelarz. I have had it since ’95, but didn’t think of starting it… I was put off by the cover, which is appalling!

Then one day I took it off the shelf and had a look inside; I was ‘wowed’ by the clean, sharp graphics and vowed to make it ‘sometime’. I like the form of the Typhoon/Tempest line all the way from the first ‘car-door’ versions right up to the Sea Fury. As a youngster I collected some great reference material on them (and others!), superb, large drawings in A1 by the legendary Arthur Bentley and various other publications and printouts from modelling magazines. In the early days I was a keen ‘plastic modeller’, until I discovered the magic of paper and card modelling in the mid 70s.

This is a chronicle of the build, which I started in November 2024 and finished just after Christmas, due to time constraints caused by working full-time, a 4-year-old son who is entitled to a certain amount of personal attention and other family commitments 🙂

I shall spare you the very beginning, cutting out and gluing the frames together for the fuselage, not very interesting, I’m afraid. So I shall add a whole lot of photos of the build, with as little text as possible and only where I see it to be useful or by way of explanation. For the most part, I expect that the picture speak largely for themselves.

Forming the front of the cooler using a lead/tin rod

Still a little untidy and the wrong shape, which I should have corrected at this point, but ended up doing later…

 

Definitely the wrong shape. Changed later to:
A rather untidily made spinner… More practice obviously needed here!

 

 

On its feet at last!

 

Starting on adding the landing lights, cutting out of the wings and required parts…

A spacer for the reflector…

Covered with ‘glass’, which is clear ‘Sellotape’, painted over to the line with watercolour

 

Badly fitting Canopy more obvious here

 

Parts laid out for undercarriage
Parts laid out for undercarriage

PZL-106 Kruk GPM build

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

…………………………………..

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…