SCALE MODEL AIRCRAFT

Of the many aircraft designs by Louis Bechereau that were produced under the name of Armand Deperdussin from 1910 to 1914, The Type D Monocoque flown by Maurice Prevost at the 1913 Gordon Benett Air Races is the most famous for being the first aircraft to reach the 200 km/h milestone. Here is an attempt to depict that very subject.

I found a 12 Squared 1/72 injected kit of this aircraft in the bottom of a dusty carton while attending a model show in Belgium. It was a rather crude kit of the "Cottage Industry" type presented in a tiny plastic bag and the parts needed a fair amount of cleaning. The instruction sheet was well documented and suggests different construction options depending on which aircraft you want to represent, letting one realize that many different monocoque designs were actually produced, being constantly modified from a race to another, and from a pilot to another. Web research for photography confirms that idea in showing almost as many different monocoque designs as pictures available.

Building the interior was inspired by pictures of the aircraft displayed at the Paris Musee de l'Air (which by the way is not a 1913 Gordon Benett aircraft!) using either kit parts or parts from the spares box or scratchbuilt items.

About powerplant, I also scratchbuilt something that look like a 140 hp twin Gnome rotary engine through the several holes in the cowling, better than a total void. As I disliked the spinner provided by the kit , I replaced it by a metal one from the spares box which look better like the real one. This necessitated to cut off the prop blades to reinstall them onto the new spinner. 

The raised wing ribbing was not looking very nice either, so I elected to sand it away to replace it by Scale Master white decal stripes later on.

It was not an easy task getting the landing gear legs symetrical while butt joining them as I couldn't trust in the adjusting pin holes location after all the plastic I had to remove earlier from each half fuselage, but once completed with the cabane mountings and tailplane, the model was ready for painting process.

While the instructions were suggesting an overall "chocolate" color which I don't think is very realistic (I believe that they were probably meaning "milk chocolate") as most documents and preserved aircraft tend to suggest a range between dark sand or ochre, to cream or light sand, I airbrushed the entire model a mix of Humbrol 74 (linen) and 133 (leather) enamels. Upon decalling, several coats of Future floor polish were hand brushed to seal the decals and get a gloss finish.

Rigging was the last step of this construction. It was completed using stretched sprue which was painted with a darkened silver.

To decorate and cut with the sobriety of this model, I built a 1/76 1914 Vauxhall Fifty Bob from a Scale Link metal kit, and took some pictures of both my tiny little models together.

Cheers!