Von Richthofen and Brown diorama, part 1

I’ve been bitten by the diorama bug. Halfway through making the Tomb Raider diorama I was already planning the next one. I thought it would be interesting to replicate a well-known event from history and have been contemplating building something World War I related for a while now. The 1917 Battle of Cambrai would be an ideal subject, considering how much I like tanks. To do that properly requires a bit more space than I have at the moment, though. A slightly smaller subject, then. How about the last flight of famous ‘Red Baron’ Manfred von Richthofen?

Von Richthofen is credited with 80 air combat victories, making him one of, if not the, best known ace fighter pilots of all time. He was finally shot down and killed near Vaux-sur-Somme on 21 April 1918. There has been quite a bit of debate about who fired the fatal shot. The Royal Air Force credited Canadian pilot Arthur Roy Brown with shooting down Von Richthofen. Roy Brown, with ten victories to his name, was an ace in his own right. However, Von Richthofen was also fired upon from the ground by Australian machine gunners and it is now often thought that one of these must have fired the fatal shot.

In any case, I am planning to build a little diorama displaying Von Richthofen’s famous Fokker Dr. 1 triplane and Roy Brown’s Sopwith F.1 Camel biplane. And when I say little, I mean absolutely tiny. Scale 1:144, which means that the aircraft are only about 4x5 centimetres!

I found this kit by Valom that includes a Fokker Dr. 1 and a Sopwith Camel. It was €16 plus shipping on Ebay. I thought that this was perhaps a little pricey for such tiny models, until I realised that the kit comes with two models of each type, so four in total. That seems like a pretty good deal to me. I will only be using one of each type for this project, though. Opening up the kit, I found that the models include plastic, resin and even some brass parts. Amazing how they manage to do that for this price. It does mean that you’ll be needing some superglue alongside your regular model kit glue.

Components for the two Sopwith Camel kits.

So far I was quite pleased with the kit, but then came the building... I figured that these little aircraft would go together in under an hour, like most of the 1:100 scale tanks I posted earlier. Not so much, though. The brass components are very fragile and the v-shaped struts in particular seem to bend when you’re just looking at them. Finally, there are no holes in the wings or fuselage for the struts to fit into, so the connection between them isn’t particularly strong. Usually there are markings, so you at least know where the brass parts need to go. Not always, though. In the case of the Sopwith Camel I had to glue the four separate struts onto the lower wing, holding each in what I guessed was about the right angle for several minutes until the glue had set, and then glue on the upper wing. I’ve lost count of the number of times a strut fell off, got bent or turned out to be slightly taller than its counterpart so that it needed to be trimmed, fell off and needed to be glued on again.

The assembled planes with a 2 euro coin for scale. Look at how tiny and cute they are! And they would’ve been even cuter if they weren’t such a pain to assemble... 

In the end I did manage to assemble both planes. I think it took about 4 hours in four sittings, giving the glue time to fully cure in between. The result is a lot more wonky than I would have liked. I really think that Valom could have traded some of the accuracy for strength and ease of construction, particularly at this scale. I don’t think anyone would have minded if the struts were a bit more beefy and made out of plastic. 

End rant... Phew. Next I’ll have to find a way to drill a small hole into the fuselages and mount the aircraft onto thin rods that will be attached to the diorama base. Hopefully these fragile buggers don’t fall apart in the process!