Per Popular Request - A Camel!

Grrrr - These pictures have posted in the upside down order of how I wanted them - so I will have to tell the story of Mr. Indi's beloved Camel backwards! In the first picture you can see that the pilot has fallen out of the cockpit with his legs crossed and holding his nether regions - he needs the loo! The Sopwith Camel took about 9 months to build so it's no wonder that the pilot was breaking his neck for a wee!

This is the pilot's view looking down the crosshairs of the gun sight as he lines up the two machine guns. The rigging is actually crochet thread and doing the rigging was the worst part for Mr. Indi. He made up new swear words because he ran out of old ones! Some of them had to do with my ancestry!

The Camel was made from a kit - but Mr. Indi did what is known as kit bashing. This is where you use the kit as an outline but buy or make most of your own parts. The propeller in the kit was a horrible piece of plastic junk. Mr. Indi bought the propeller shown at a proper model airplane shop - it was raw wood and he applied several coats of varnish. The engine ( A Clerget Rotary Engine - France) actually turns when the propeller turns. This is one of the reasons that the pilots wore scarves over their face to stop the oil from the engine flying into their mouth and nose. Yum!

Mr. Indi threw away the dashboard that came with the kit and made his own. He found pictures of gauges on the Internet - shrank them to the correct scale and printed them out. Then he got little silver colored rings from the jewelry section of the craft store and made bezels. He cut the dashboard out of wood and applied varnish. The brown leather things are for the pilot to lean into as he fires the machine guns.

This is the Camel next to the coffee table and you can see the scale - it is quite large. The whole thing is covered in a special kind of paper and some horrible stuff called dope. Mr. Indi would spend hours in the garage doping his Camel! Or that's what he said, anyway! The kit only just contained exactly enough paper and of course Mr. Indi had several mishaps where he stuck his thumb or god knows what through it and had to order more paper. This, of course was my fault and consequentially, the legitimacy of my birth was, once again, bought into question!

These pictures are for my bruvver, Wayne and now I hope he shuts up about the bloody things!

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