Let´s start with the conclusions: I´m a cheapskate with a tendency to self-punishment and the urge to redeem myself amongst the aero-nutical crowd.

 My recent ventures into ships and dios have left me with the desire to prove I can yet build a plane. Right now I´m in the active phase of dispersing and probably wasting my energies into various fields and projects, but it´s fun. I´m planning yet another dio for which I´ve already bought a 1:72 tank, moreover I´m building a 1:600 Airfix destroyer with the use of references (!) and lotsa PE.

 Getting all this stuff needs frequent online shopping, and online shops do have minimum orders. That said, you probably know why I ordered somewhat more than what I needed – and why my group build Hurricane is OOB (I can´t afford shopping at Hannants yet again for the excellent decal sheet PA recommends at 4.26 GBP and pay 15 or 20 GBP minimum order.) Anyway, to get a teensy-tiny set of PE german AA guns from WEM at 6.60 EUR I had of course to shop for somewhat more money to get the minimum order at NNT of Germany, so I also got Revell´s 1:400 Oil tanker kit and, sifting through the discount area (cheapskate!) happened upon Eduard´s strip-down 1:72 Piper L-4 Grasshopper liaison aircraft, a real frightener and bugbear of a kit. At a mere 10 EUR. What a bargain. One click and it was mine. So now I can punish myself with dozens of PE parts and indicate I still belong to the aeronautical crowd ;-)

 You in fact get quite something for your money. You get a so-so styrene Piper L-4 kit (looks like the KP kit. Ed)  plus three PE frets with the skeleton of the plane. In the essence, the completed model has a styrene engine plus struts and wheels, whereas the rest is PE. Comes close to the visible cow mentioned recently. Instructions are Eduard style which means very clear yet not 100% correct. There are of course no decals in this kit. I didn´t dare to unpack the PE for photography but am determined to get started on this thing as soon as possible.

 I´ll be able to report better on how things worked (if at all), or someone else might do it for me if I should get completely mental and resign myself to mutter seemingly meaningless snatches of words in my soft cell after this attempt.

 Wait and see! 

As this preview was indecently short, I´ll add as a bonus – just FYI – a peek at White Ensign Models´ 1:600 German Anti Aircraft Weapons Set.

 I need this for my Kriegsmarine destroyer Z28 I´m currently building. You already need two PE sets from WEM for this kit, a generic set with railings and ladders and hatches and watertight doors and stuff,  plus a set with more specific parts that covers the cruisers and destroyers. That one contains things as PE yards and footropes and cranes and radar arrays and other flimsy and tricky stuff. Being proud owner of these sets you´ll find out that this is - despite the considerable price tag – not yet enough, as you´ll definitely want to replace the kit´s AAA. It just doesn´t come up to the rest of the model as it is when added PE, especially given the fact that in late war outfit Kriegsmarine ships (as well as Japanese) just bristled with AA and that makes a good part of their look.

 So here this PE fret comes into play. It contains 16 20 mm quadruple AA guns, in german Flakvierlinge, 8 of them of the type C/30, the other eight of the type C/38.  Moreover there are eight 37 mm twin gun mounts and 11 20 mm single mounts. These AA guns build up from up to eight individual parts and are utterly delicate. I´ve included a scan of the fret plus a scan of the instructions for the C/38 4x20 mm and that set of parts in higher resolution. This part of the fret for this one individual gun sizes .354 x .511in (please do your own computing in 1/16^th, I´m just a European with limited maths skills). So this might give you some idea of the delicacy of the work involved to produce models from this sort of kit.

 Well: If the strip down Piper doesn´t drive me nuts, ship modeling has a fair chance!

March 2005