My bubble top Hurricane - DONE!!!

[upnorth]

Today I took advantage of some spare time and got to work on bringing together one fuselage half of my bubble top Hurricane project. Late last week, I marked out where I was going to make my cuts on the donor kit fuselages and today I put saw to plastic. Here's the result of about an hour or so of work:


The donor kits, Smer reissues of the Heller 1/72 Yakovlev Yak-3 (Top) and Hawker Hurricane IIc (Middle) came together much better than I had hoped for.

I've given the combined fuselage a coarse sanding to bring the contours together a shade better, they were pretty close to begin with, but that's all I've done so far. With any luck, I'll have the other half done by the end of the week and the whole thing done by the end of summer.

I am piecing together a back story, the finished aircraft will be Czechoslovakian. I've got some numbers and Czech roundels from an aftermarket decal sheet and I also found some interwar Czechoslovak air regiment symbol decals today.

The basic premise is that the Munich agreement does not get signed, Poland and Czechoslovakia recieve Hurricanes to bolster their own forces of indigenously produced military gear. Poland and Czechoslovakia both also recieve licenses to produce Hurricanes.

For Czechoslovakia, this was particularly good news. Due to a tempermental Hispano engine, the Avia B.135 fighter was experiencing unacceptable performance shortcomings and a modern monoplane fighter was needed desperately, The Hurricane filled that gap admirably. After a couple of false starts, the B.135 was successfully mated to a Skoda produced Merlin engine.

As adequate numbers of B.135s found their way to air defense regiments, the Hurricanes were moved to ground support duties.

Of course it needs more fleshing out, but I'll basically have the eastern front in western Poland and Czechoslovakia. In the course of the fighting, despite having been discouraged from doing so by both Britain and America, the Soviets sent "Assistance Regiments" into Poland and Czechoslovakia to further insure that Germany travelled no further east.

The Hurricanes were instrumental in keeping Poland a Czechoslovakia largely out from under the Third Reich's thumb, however, they were no help against the insideous Soviet "Assistance Regiments" that turned out to be harbingers of Czechoslovak and Polish history from the end of the war until 1989.

I'm going to try to work Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania into the plot somehow too.

Any comments on both the model and back story are most welcome and appreciated.

I will post more in progress pics as progress is made.

[sotoolslinger]

Now that is some nice cut and paste. Like the plane and the backstory.

[red arrow jag]

HAHA     Thats wicked!!!!!

[Brian da Basher]

That's some mighty fine styrene surgery there, upnorth! I'll be watching with great interest!

Brian da Basher

[upnorth]

Thanks for the comments so far.

I ended up buying the donor kits separately, but I took in a Hurricane fuselage half when I went to buy the Yak so I could compare them to some degree. I looked at a few others before deciding on the Yak.

The Hurricane and Yak certainly looked joinable, but from first impressions I expected a bit more of a fight from them than they gave me. Hopefully a good omen for the rest of the build.

The key for this build is to keep it as "Hurricane" as possible, I want it to be unmistakably a member of the Fury/Hurricane lineage despite the bubble top, so mods will be conservative.

The wings will not be changed at all in planform but I will probably relocate the landing light from the wing leading edge to some other spot on the aircraft. I'm also planning to add complete doors to the main landing gear as the Yak gave me a retractable tail unit so I think the main gear should be completely enclosed in flight for consistancy with that. I'm planning a gear down build at the moment.

[B777LR]

Hmm, interesting way of doing that, perhaps it could be done on a Bf-109 too? Fw-190 razorback?

[kitnut617]

You might want to keep in mind that the ventral strake back and front of the tail wheel was added to improve stability, it might have to be bigger as well as a dorsal fillet to offset all the missing top fuselage.

[wolfik]

pilot moved something backwards huh?
the idea and the work is awesome and genial!!!!

[upnorth]

pilot moved something backwards huh?

I'm placing my Hurricane in a roughly 1943-44 timeframe so it has a later Merlin engine and extra armour up front to give it more forward protection in the air to ground role that it will have. given the added weight up front, it made sense (to me anyway) to move the pilot back a bit to balance things out.

It also improves rearward visibility without compromising forward visibility too much.

[upnorth]

You might want to keep in ming that the ventral strake back and front of the tail wheel was added to improve stability, it might have to be bigger as well as a dorsal fillet to offset all the missing top fuselage.

The thought has crossed my mind. I was thinking about replacing the ventral strake with small winglets on the horizontal tails such as were seen on the Wyvern and Gannet.

I was also going to replace all the fabric surfaces with metal or wood.

[Ed S]

Looking good.  Great job of cutting and slicing the two fuselages together.

Ed

[B777LR]

You might want to keep in ming that the ventral strake back and front of the tail wheel was added to improve stability, it might have to be bigger as well as a dorsal fillet to offset all the missing top fuselage.

The thought has crossed my mind. I was thinking about replacing the ventral strake with small winglets on the horizontal tails such as were seen on the Wyvern and Gannet.

Why not just make the horizontal tail fin longer and sharper, like late spitfires?

[Patrick H]

Looking good, and intresting. I don't advise on replacing the fin with a Spitfire kind of fin. Might give the aircraft a complete diffrent look. Won't look anything Hurricane annymore then.

[sotoolslinger]

Love this build. About the aerodynamics, if you add a dorsal strake to replace the ventral eliminated by the retractable tail wheel this would be period and correct like the P-51 and 47 but the winglets on the horizontals would look cool as heck.

[upnorth]

Thanks for the input. I think if I do anything about the removed ventral strake, I'll either do the dorsal strake or nothing.

The dorsal strake could be a field modification done at the unit level and ,as such, might take a while to get around the fleet (I believe that was the case with P-47s was it not?). So I might just have mine as an aircraft waiting for the mod to hit it.

As cool as the winglets on the horizontal might be, I feel they may be moving a bit closer to post war looks than I want.

I'l be working more on my back story tonight and trying to work something plausible into the real timeline. I'm trying to create a five nation alliance between Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary that will basically create a wall between Germany and the Soviet Union. They will be allied with Britain and help to increase production of allied hardware.

Britain sees the countries as crucial to the war effort, however, the Soviet Union sees them as a convenient buffer zone to take the brunt of the losses. The Soviet "Assistance Regiments" masquerading under the illusion of helping were actually sent to qietly lay the groundwork for Soviet influence in the area. That influence began in the Balkans and worked north, south and east from there.

Ultimately, the post war map that I am trying to construct will have the socialist republics of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria as we knew them in real time. However, rather than an east and west Germany, we will see an east and west Austria instead. We will also see the rise of the Hellenic Socialist Republic. I'm even toying with the idea of Palestine being handed over to the Soviets to stop them from trying to expand further west into Europe.