Sopwith 2F.1 Camel N6812

[Womble]

Here's the original


Here's the runway!


My version


The 2F.1 Camel is smaller than a normal Camel. Here's a comparison with an official Camel and a Shapeways kampfflieger Camel.



Thanks to Reduced Aircraft Factory for designing this. Its a lovely little model. I made a slight modification removing the top wing Lewis and fuselage Vickers and replacing them with a double Lewis on the top wing. It'll come in handy as a balloon buster with both guns loaded up with incendiary ammo.

This Camel is one of the few originals that still exists and is on display at the Imperial War Museum in London. It shot down Zeppelin L-53 in a crazy mission being launched from a small lighter towed behind the destroyer HMS Redoubt and flown by Lt SD Culley. I've been waiting ages for a ships Camel to re-create this flying legend, thanks again Reduced Aircraft Factory.

Ian

[greenalfonzo]

Nice! But my understanding is that the 2F1 Camel only had slightly short wingspan, but was the same fuselage and same length & height as the standard version. Only 12" shorter wingspan - 6" on each size is not noticeable in this scale (1 mm).

[Womble]

It does seem a bit small. A quick check on Shapeways says with 5.076 cm. It had a Wingspan of 26ft 11in which is 8.2 meters, ÷144= 5.69 cm. Yes, it is a bit small. When comparing it to the others it certainly looks small.

Ian

[greenalfonzo]

It does seem a bit small. A quick check on Shapeways says with 5.076 cm. It had a Wingspan of 26ft 11in which is 8.2 meters, ÷144= 5.69 cm. Yes, it is a bit small. When comparing it to the others it certainly looks small.

Ian

Standard Camel had 28' wingspan. The rest of the plane should be identical I believe. Model kinda looks like one of those 3/4 scale replicas!

[ReducedAirFact]

Hi, I've looked into this scaling issue, and it resulted from a typo on my scaling spreadsheet for the 2F1. How embarrassing! I've corrected the model on Shapeways. If you are one of the three people that bought one of the older models, send me a note and I'll see what I can do about getting you a new, rescaled one from Shapeways -- the new one would be about 10% bigger.

In addition to the shorter wingspan, the 2F1 was a few inches shorter than a standard F1 Camel and about 7" taller -- the former presumably a Bentley vs. Clerget difference; and the latter must include the height of the Lewis gun. Otherwise, I think the differences are just due to modeler preferences, e.g. which blueprints were used, how strongly we chose to emphasize certain things. There's more artistic license in these models than you might expect. For instance, it's impossible to produce wings thin enough to be "correct", so we probably all do something a little different to deal with wing shaping.

(PS: All these fighters seem small when you've mostly been working on two-seaters.)

By the way, excellent paint job Ian!

[Womble]

Wow, that was a quick fix Daryl. You did put this on sale quick to make it available before the price increase which I really appreciated. Thanks for looking into a replacement but I'm happy with this one. This must be the 15th Camel in my collection so I don't mind one slightly different. I use the official Spad XIII quite happily and that has a scale error making it too small.

Ian