World War I Reprise By Scott Kruize

Not literally, of course. We all agree that the First World War’s waste of lives and treasure, butchery of the landscape, and blows to civilization itself, should've been sufficient to satiate the whole planet, for all eternity. Would that at least it actually had been “The War to End Wars”!

But we can't deny the astonishing technological development of those four years, which certainly provided grist for our modeling mills. Mostly in aviation, which had scarcely entered its “teens” before being called on to change the course of history, but the ship and armor modelers got plenty of subjects, also. There's nothing wrong with our pursuit of recreating this epochal hardware in miniature.

Way back Then, around 1963, I was given the Aurora “Famous Fighters” Nieuport 28. Once I got past the trial of putting multiple wings together on struts, the exercise became fun and I put together several more of these Great War “scouts”, finishing with the old Hawk Nieuport 17, around 1967.

(Interval: The “Dark Ages”—name stolen from our Lego-building friends-and-relations: the period where we get obsessed with education, jobs, marriage, mortgages, families, careers…you know: when we were trying to pretend we’d become “Grown-Ups” and didn’t need our childhood toys and games any more…)

When I returned to modeling, I built the Nieuport 17 again. Perhaps it was only happenstance, or perhaps the Fates Sisters have special ploys for us modelers… whichever, my father gave me as a Christmas present the Testors’ yellow-box re-issue of the exact same old Hawk moldings. Dad! --You gave me this present already! Just with nearly forty years in between…!

Anyhow, I had a great deal of fun building it again, and innocently took it to one of the first meetings I attended of the NorthWest Scale Modelers. Many members knew the old Hawk kits, and made favorable comments about the build, simple and crude though it was. I thought no more about it for several more meetings…too late, I found out I’d given an opening to the evil Will Perry, who needed “volunteers” to put together representations of the whole Champlin Fighter Collection. The Museum of Flight in Seattle, where we meet, wanted a model collection to impress its patrons and the public, as it tried to pitch its plan to buy the real Collection. Having seen my single WWI build, Will decided I was qualified to build another, and assigned me the Fokker D-VII. This interesting experience I later wrote up as “Recovering My Perspective”, which is in the newsletter archives of the Seattle IPMS Chapter.

So the second WWI model I'd built since emerging from the Dark Ages is the Fokker D-VII you see here, built as “dress rehearsal” for the Champlin Collection. It, too, is really an old Aurora “Famous Fighter”, that I’d first built way back Then, and Now from the Monogram re-issue. The expensive Dragon kit, which I built right afterwards, is on display at the Museum. Later, one of Will’s other volunteers failed to deliver on a Sopwith Camel he agreed to do—for reasons obscure to this day—and I ended up building that one, also.

This is all out of any sort of logical order, but I ended up doing both the Nieuport 28 and Fokker Dr.1 Triplane you see here as NABBROKEs. Both are actual old Aurora moldings, acquired secondhand: the N.28 in a baggie at the Puget Sound Model Expo Swap Meet, and the Dreidecker from an eBay seller. In both cases, I took the unbuilt kits to show members of the NorthWest Scale Modelers and the Seattle IPMS, and asked if any serious collectors would regard my building them as some sort of sacrilege. No one spoke up; no one wanted the kits, so I built them.

(New readers: a “Nostalgic Aging Baby Boomer Real Old Kit Experience” is a concept my friend Ken Murphy and I cultivate, in an attempt to recapture some of the pleasure of modeling way back Then. They’re rebuilds of old kits from your childhood: simple, out-of-the-box, low-key diversions, costing a few bucks and taking a few hours…before you go back to doing the contest-winning masterpieces you usually work on, that cost so much more and yet still need elaborate, expensive third-party aftermarket enhancements, like authenticity-correcting resin castings and miniscule photoetched metal details…)

As I said in last month’s column, Seattle IPMS Chapter members are doing a group build of the Albatros aircraft of WWI. The subject was picked by the evil John Frazier, after he cleverly won last year's group build of Supermarine Spitfires. Obviously, I did not win, but could only try for a moral victory of sorts, by bringing a display called “Defenders of the Realm” that showed a Spitfire flying next to that Other British Fighter, with an explanation of how important the Hawker Hurricane had been during the early war, and especially during the Battle of Britain.

The Eduard Albatros kit is—as I commented before—orders of magnitude better in every way than the Aurora Albatros D-Va I built way back Then. Its accurate scale detail is both enjoyable to work with, and amazing for someone who clearly remembers just what those old kits were like. I unreservedly recommend it to all who’d like to create on their own workbench a pivotal aerial element of the Great War.

I trust my colleagues in the local clubs will put a lot of Albatroses on the table during the December 13th IPMS meeting, and hope many will be inspired to do further WWI modeling. My Albatros still has to be rigged, but there will be a brief delay before I can get to it. The anniversary of Armistice Day is almost upon us, and the NorthWest Scale Modelers will be changing the display we have filling the new display cases. In the cases now are a set of models commemorating NASA’s 50th Anniversary. It’s interesting and quite comprehensive, full of experimental aircraft, spaceships, and even a NASA-funded “hot rod” representing the one used to tow aloft lifting-body aerodynamic test vehicles. (See the article its builder, Jon Fincher, wrote for last month’s issue of IM.)

The NASA display includes a Mars Rover, assembled hurriedly from a paper printout from a space-related site on the World Wide Web, to fill a “gap” recognized just before the due date. Its organizer, the evil Tim Nelson, searched only long enough to find someone foolish enough to admit having at least 2nd-grade scissors skill, and I found myself coerced into making the Rover. More on this later…

By November 11th, though, we’re taking all that out and putting in WWI warplanes. It seems there’s a gap here, too…we really should have a Bristol Fighter. The WWI display organizer, the evil Stephen Tontoni, has decided I’m going to build it. And I can’t even plead inability to rig all those struts and wires: he himself taught a workshop at a NWSM meeting during the Champlin Collection build, following the lead Will Perry set, thereby leaving no “out” for hapless volunteers! I must return to the workbench now, but in the meantime, please feel free, yourself, to

“Build what YOU want, the way YOU want to, and above all have fun!"