Roden's 1/72 scale
Felixstowe F.2A

by Andrew Eaton

Rioden's 1/72 scale Felixtowe F.2A Late Version is available online from Squadron

This is recently completed Roden Felixstowe F.2A. I built it over a period of about 8 months alongside a number of other projects. There were times I thought I would never get it finished, particularly when trying to attach the top wing and do the rigging.

With the exception of the rigging and control wires the kit is made straight from the box. For the rigging I used brown 0.14mm fishing line and for the control wires I used stretched sprue. The decals are from the box and went on with no problems and I also made use of the AIMS decal set for this aircraft which gives the black dazzle pattern for the fuselage. Despite the rather complicated nature of the pattern these decals went on without any problem and fitted very well with the exception of the black section coming up around the nose. This section was sprayed black following the suggestion on the AIMS sheet.

There are a fair number of small and fiddly parts to this kit but it went together without too many problems. Construction wise the main problem is getting the wings installed and correctly aligned. Here I followed a different construction sequence to the instructions by installing the fuselage roof before attaching the wings. This enabled the entire fuselage to be painted and decaled without the wings getting in the way. The lower wing was installed using this brass rods pushed right through the fuselage as supports. After much trial and error the top wing was installed by first attaching the engines to the lower wing which can then act as reasonably stable attachment points for the upper wing. The individual struts were then attached one by one afterwards. One thing to look out for here is to make sure that the top wing remains flat. Unfortunately the outer struts on the left wing were slightly short and as a result the top wing has a slight dip at one end.

The rigging was mostly straightforward if rather time consuming, I used predrilled holes in the top and bottom wing to almost sew the two wings together. The holes in the top of the upper wing and bottom of the lower wing were then filled in with milliput. The control wires made from stretched sprue were the last things installed as I felt they would be most prone to damage. The control lines for the tail plane were fist glued together with superglue in a Y shape before attaching to the model. They were then tightened using a heated scalpel blade. It took several attempts to get everything aligned but the result was worth all the effort.

I entered the model into the recent IPMS Scale Modelworld at Telford and much to my surprise won a bronze award in class 6 and the Cross & Cockade trophy for the best 1/72 scale WW1 Aircraft.

You can see a a detailed review of this kit from when it was first released in August, 2003 elsewhere on HyperScale.

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images:

Model, Text and Images Copyright © 2006 by Andrew Eaton
Page Created 27 December, 2006
Last Updated 26 December, 2006

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