Earlier this year we were on holiday in New Zealand and visited the Croydon Aviation Heritage Centre. We took a ride in a Tiger Moth (ZK-BFH), did some aerobatics and had a great time. So I thought it would be fun to make a model of the plane we flew in.
Fortunately, Airfix recently released a
new Tiger Moth kit in 1/48 scale. Even better, it so happens that decals are available for this particular plane and there are photo-etch parts available to provide some more detail:
For the paint I'm using Tamiya TS47 for the yellow, the Tamiya gloss white for the wings and Mr Metal Color MC218 for the fuel tank.
Variations to Airfix's instructions.
I've noticed there are a few differences between the Tiger Moth I'm building and the one you'd get if you followed Airfix's instructions. Both of the Airfix schemes call for a tail section with anti-spin strakes but ZK-BFH doesn't have them. Fortunately the kit has a tail without the strakes. Also the props in the two Airfix schemes look different to ZK-BFH but again the Airfix kit has a third alternative which looks like a match to me. So here are the variations I'm going with:
- Skip step 18 in the and use part A3 in step 19 instead of A9
- Use part C10 for the propeller
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| ZK-BFH. Note shape of the prop and lack of anti-spin strakes. |
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| Two tail options. The one in the lower-left has no strakes and is the one to use for this scheme. |
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| Part C10 looks like the best match for the propeller. |
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| Alternative prop #1. Note clipped ends. |
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| Alternative prop #2. ZK-BFH's prop has symmetric tips. |
Inspection ports?
The Eduard photo-etch kit comes with a bunch of small round discs which go on the top of the upper wing, bottom of the lower wing, and on the tail and rudder. I think these are inspection ports to allow access to the wing, tail and rudder cavities, but I'm definitely no expert! Looking at the photos I took, it seems that some of these ports are still in use on ZK-BFH and are quite prominent, while others are not there or at least difficult to see:
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| Discs on the upper wing of ZK-BFH. Some are more prominent than others. |
So I think I'll just go with adding discs for the 'in use' ports.
Cockpit detail
The Eduard PE kit comes with some nice bits to improve cockpit detail, so I'll put those in. Bronwyn at the museum has also sent me some nice reference photos of the cockpit, so I hope I can get the details reasonably close. I'll have to build some seats and I remember the harnesses are different to the ones provided by Eduard, so I'll think about making those from scratch too.
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