1/48 Aeroclub DHC.1 Chipmunk

by Matt Bacon

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If you were in the Air Training Corps (a junior branch of the RAF, where kids between 11 and 18 get to fly, fire rifles, make models and, err… “square-bash”) between 1960 and 1995, the chances are you got your first hands-on experience at the controls of an aircraft in a Chipmunk like this one. Basic, but a joy to fly, you could almost imagine yourself in a WW2 fighter as you strapped the little beast on and tooled off into the wild blue yonder - with some guy up front doing the hard work, but it felt good all the same...

I decided to recapture my teens in styrene - I had about 6 hours on a Chipmunk (we got to fly a LOT) from 4 Air Experience Flight, based in Exeter.

The Chipmunk was originally designed by de Havilland Canada, and first few in 1946. Intended as a successor to the irreplaceable Tiger Moth, the Chipmunk proved to be a vice-less trainer, and 735 were built for the RAF. From 1953, Chipmunks equipped University Air Squadrons, Reserve Flying Schools and Air Experience Flights all over the country, giving hundreds of young men and women their first taste of piloting. The Chipmunk served the RAF for over 40 years, and is still flying widely in private hands.

Click on images below to see larger images

The Aeroclub kit is based on the masters of their earlier vac-form but is now offered in toffee-coloured injection plastic. You get a relatively small number of plastic parts (fuselage halves, wing top and bottom, tailplane, rudder, extreme nose, seats) and equally few white-metal ones (prop, wheels, undercarriage legs, instrument panels, control columns, tailwheel). You also get 2 (NB: I didn't realise there were two, one snug inside the other) vacform canopies.

The plastic is soft and easy to carve or sand to shape: this is good, you'll be needing to do a fair bit of it!

The upper and lower wings make a complete unit, including the cockpit floor, which slot into cut outs in the bottom of the fuselage halves. There's a lot of carving, sanding down trailing edges and test-fitting to do to get the wing halves together, particularly around the gull-wing at the back. There are some serious lumps that get in the way (a short-run thing, I suspect) of fitting them close, and the back edge of the top half is a lot thicker than the flaps and ailerons moulded on the bottom half. Scrape and sand away.

The cockpit is basic: just seats, sticks and panels. The seats are actually quite accurate: the real things are plain buckets with a cushion. The sticks are also fine. The instrument panels are white-metal semi-circles with raised blobs for the instruments. I found a nice black and white diagram of the real thing on the web, scaled it down to the right size, and mounted it behind a thin piece of plastic card with holes drilled in place for the dials. A drop of clear varnish in each hole gave the "glass" effect.

I used Eduard seat-belts from their pre-painted "Late WW2" set to busy up the cockpit, and made a couple of handles from wire for the flap levers. I also added two compasses and rudder pedals. All this, bar the instrument panel, mounts on the floor in the upper wing.

Getting the wing into the fuselage is NO FUN. The floor is still sized for a vacform, with thin plastic card walls; the injection fuselage halves must be 3mm thick. Hence, you have to carve away the sides of the floor until the fuselage will close around it.

Serious filler is needed in front and behind the wing, and at the root.

The white metal prop and undercarriage legs are good shapes, but need cleaning up a lot, and are then superglued into the suggestions of holes.

I opened up the hole under the prop, through which you can see bits of engine; as supplied, it's a rectangular dent with some dubious engraved lines at the bottom.

The tailplane fits reasonably, but not brilliantly; again, filler underneath, this time smoothed with a cotton bud with acetone on the end. The rudder fits very well, and I turned mine a bit for animation’s sake.

Wheels need cleaning up, again, but the hub detail is nice.

The canopy is harder. At first glace, it looks all wrong - too high, to "sit up and beg". I was always going to have it open, so I separated the windscreen, and re-cut the bottom so that it sloped a bit more. The engraved windows in the roof of the main canopy are the wrong shape, size and position: the real ones are much shorter, wider, and asymmetrically cut out for the canopy release levers. The engraving on the rear window is also in the wrong place: the top line should be horizontal, not vertical. I made templates from the (accurate) drawings in the kit, and masked the canopy as it should be (and massaged the top so it was flatter and broader). I added the prominent red release handles on the port side from stretched sprue

There are four colour schemes in the kit: 2 RAF, one RN and one Danish. They are silver with dayglo, silver with red, and the classic red, white, and black from 3 AEF, which is the one I built. The decals are very good, and go down well. Don't use harsh decal softeners, though!

Overall, a neat little kit (and the only game in town in this scale), but you do need to give it some TLC, and be prepared to scratch build some details.

Matt

Photos and text © by Matt Bacon