Eastern Express 1/72 Sikorsky S.XVI

Eastern Express kit 72218

Purchased: Hannants, £5.99, photoetch wire wheels from Jadar-Model, zł 32.00
Completed: 28 February 2007 (wheels added in May)

• Nation: Russia
• Era: 1910-1919
• Justification: As far as I can tell, this was the only Russian-built fighter to see squadron service during World War I. Some machines remained in service in secondary roles into the 1920s. 

 

The kit

This kit is identical with the S.XVI marketed by Dako-plast - indeed, it still bears the Dako-plast name moulded into the single sprue of hard, brittle white styrene and one can see where the Dako-plast logo has been crudely whited-out on the equally crudely photocopied instruction sheet. Classy!

The quality of the moulding is generally good - with really nice, petite detail on the gun for example. Another, more knowledgeable reviewer has pointed out a number of deficiencies with the kit, including it being about 10% underscale and not representing any particular variant of the S.XVI, but rather, a conglomeration of features from different ones. Decals are provided for a single, generic machine. This is perhaps fortunate because that the paint plan on the poorly-reproduced instructions is useless. With such a simple paint scheme, this isn't an issue though. Options are provided for either wheeled or ski undercarriage, and therein lies one of the kit's greatest shortcomings. The exposed, wire-spoked wheels are a distinctive feature of this aircraft, but here, the four mainwheels are provided with solid hubs - as if they represented canvas-covered wheels. I knew from the outset that I wanted wire wheels, so ordered an Eduard set which three weeks later unfortunately still hasn't graced my mailbox at the time of writing.

One real peculiarity of the kit is the parts breakdown. While it's common for small 1/72 aircraft kits to have a one-piece wing that the fuselage halves sit atop of, generally the cutout on the fuselage halves matches the airfoil shape of the wings. For whatever reason in this case, Dako-plast chose to make this cutout rectangular, and included a rectangular chunk of lower fuselage moulded integrally with the one-piece wing. When you see something as bizarre as this, you just know that it doesn't bode well!

A reasonably detailed little cockpit is provided - with a full forward bulkhead, steering wheel (yes!), and rudder bar. This is fortunate, since the cockpit is one of the most exposed that I've ever seen. A superdetailer could go really nuts here. I am not that superdetailer.

 

The build

Construction

While the major airframe components went together quite well, this kit's devil is definitely in the detail. The main problem early on was, as predicted, the weird wing-to-fuselage joint. This required lots of putty and lots of sanding to get to an acceptable finish. And then there was still a bit more sanding!

The problems with this kit are many, but mostly reflect very sloppy engineering with regard to the fit, placement, and thickness of parts. My experiences, I'm happy to note, paralleled those of Michael Kendix's review that I referred to earlier, and I take comfort in the fact that "it's not just me"!  I'll cheerfully confirm Michael's observations that:

• the fuselage won't fit over the cockpit assembly unless the cockpit firewall is considerably reduced in height first
• the alignment of the fuselage halves is poor (I'll actually disagree with Michael here and say that it is a bigger deal than usual, on account of the fact that the top and bottom of the fuselage on the S.XVI are completely flat surfaces, which makes sanding a real pain)
• the engine cowling won't fit over the engine unless the thickness of the cowling is reduced dramatically. I was especially grateful to have forewarning of this, as I think it would have caused me no end of grief had I blundered into it unaware.
• The location of the machine gun and ammunition chute is anyone's guess really. The only clue provided by Dako-plast, a groove in the forward fuselage, is clearly not an option since in that spot the gun will foul one of the cabane struts. Going on my limited references on this aircraft, it seems to me that the proportions of the kit are quite off in this area, which can't help. The gun also looks a little big to me, making me wonder whether the gun at least is around 1/72 when the airframe around it is in a smaller scale?

In the end, this is all just griping though, and there's nothing here that persistent sanding and a little jiggling about of parts won't fix.

Painting

While there's no surviving example of an S.XVI known anywhere in the world, a full-scale replica was built by a group of Russian enthusiasts and finished by Sikorsky in the United States. It resides at the New England Air Museum in Connecticut and I chose to model this aircraft, not only as the closest thing to a real S.XVI in existence, but because of it's easy and generic markings, that incidentally match the ones provided with the kit!

The whole aircraft was painted in a Clear Doped Linen colour mixed roughly half-and-half from Tamiya Flat White XF-2 and Buff XF-57. The engine cowling and forward fuselage were then brush-painted Flat Aluminium XF-16 and that was it! Yay!

Rigging and final assembly

Rigging was pretty straight forward, although I did experience more breaks than normal, probably because the strut attachment points are pretty weak on this model. In fact, the cabane struts are simply butt-jointed to the fuselage sides. In retrospect, I wonder whether I should have cemented these on before the first coat of paint went on - a bare-styrene-to-bare-styrene cemented joint being undoubtedly stronger than an acrylic-painted-styrene-to-acrylic-painted-styrene CA'd joint. Rigging the intricate undercarriage assembly was tedious, but not especially difficult in any way.

I've left the wheels off while I await their photoetched replacements.

Decals

Decals were pleasantly thin and in register and their application was entirely unremarkable. Good!

 

Conclusions

This provided a nice, relatively simple build. A bit dear for what you get in the box, but that's expected to some degree for these obscure subjects. While there were undeniable problems with the kit, these were no greater or more problematic than those of the average short-run product. While apparently not really that accurate, the finished model does capture the S.XVI's ungainly stance quite accurately. I was left with the impression that having mastered aeronautical ugliness to this degree so early on, helicopters were just the next natural step for Sikorsky! :)

Lessons

This list would have been a long one if Michael Kendix hadn't taken the fall for me! But if I had to build this kit again, I would:

• try and achieve more solid attachment of the struts from the outset, to make rigging neater and less painful later.

 

Postscript: Wheels

Well, the Eduard photoetched wire wheels (set 72-439) arrived after a few weeks. The set is a single photoetched fret with finely-etched discs to represent spoked wheels in eight sizes (four discs per size). Each set of four is to equip a single model, since Eduard suggests that you lightly dish the discs using a ball bearing and then attach them concave-side to concave-side before adding a tyre. With double the number of wheels on this aircraft to begin with, laziness once again got the better of me and I resolved to just use one (un-dished) disc to represent each wheel. The big question was: what to do about tyres? Advice I solicited online was either to find a suitably-sized rubber grommet to fit, or cut discs from a length of styrene tube. I chose to do something like the second suggestion. I took the kit wheels, then sawed them in half across their discs (much easier than it sounds - I simply ran them gently back and forth along a razor saw blade until they parted) then drilled out their centres to leave only tyres remaining. I then glued them back together with the photoetch discs in the middle, and used copious amounts of putty to fill the resulting gaps. This made a world of difference as against the kit-supplied solid centres, and I'm very glad I used them.

 

Images