injection-molded plastic, decals. $7.98
The Snipe was the last Sopwith fighter to see operational service. It entered service late in the conflict, following rather protracted development, and not all of the bugs had been worked out of the design before the conflict ended. The Snipe soldiered on into the 1920's as the RAF's first fighter aircraft. In the post-1918 period, the original, WW1 design underwent some obvious changes. The vertical fin, rudder, and ailerons were enlarged, and the ailerons fitted with aerodynamic balances. The Toko kit depicts the latter configuration.
Toko has produced another high quality kit. It is crisply molded in hard gray styrene with virtually no flash. The wings are remarkably thin along the trailing edges and feature very subtly molded wing- rib detail. The engine molding is a reasonably good representation of a Bentley BR2, though the cylinders feature crude, overscale cooling fins.
Some recently published reviews have criticized the kits dimensions. The fuselage is said to be too long because it does not fit the plans featured in the Datafile series from Albatros Publications. For this review, I compared the kit pieces to drawings from three other sources and compared kit dimensions with the published dimensions of the original (length 19 feet 10 inches). A careful examination of Sopwith factory drawings showed that fuselage in the Datafile drawings is in fact, too short. If you build the Toko model straight out of the box, the fuselage is 1.5 mm too long. The Datafile drawings also do not represent the wheels consistently from view to view. This can make the kit wheels seem too small for the aircraft. But once again, the kit part is the correct scale size for the dimensions given by the Sopwith factory drawings. In one minor respect, the kit parts inaccurate: the struts are too long by about 2 millimeters. The builder will have to shorten them or the wings won't fit right.
While Toko has established a reputation for high-quality moldings, they have also become notorious for inaccurate decals. The kit supplies markings for two machines: E8102, the aircraft in which Maj. W.G. Barker won the Victoria Cross October 1918, and E6467, one of three Snipes known to have been used by the Bolshevik air service during 1919-20. The decals are very well printed, but the proportions of the RAF roundels are completely inaccurate and the blue is much too dark.
Decals not withstanding, the toko kit should produce a good model of a post-1918 Snipe out of the box. A truly accurate early production machine is also possible, but requires some substantial reworking of the wing tips and ailerons plus a new, scratch-built fin and rudder.
Highly recommended.
injection-molded plastic, decals. $8.98
The Sopwith TF.2 Salamander was a Trench Fighter, a close-support, ground-attack derivative of the Snipe that mated the latter's wings and fuselage structure with a slab-sided armored cell surrounding the pilot and fuel tanks. The Sopwith TF.2 Salamander was a ground-attack derivative of the Snipe, designed to provide close support to ground troops. Although large numbers were ordered from six different manufacturers well before the end of the war, Salamanders saw little if any action. Production continued after the armistice and up to 200 were ultimately built. But the airplane never served with any regular RAF squadron. When it came time to select a standard postwar fighter, the RAF preferred the Snipe (apparently on grounds of cost and altitude performance, since the Salamander's performance was reportedly excellent in other respects--Ed.).
Like its subject, the Toko Salamander kit derives from the manufacturer's earlier Snipe. It includes all of the Snipe parts except for the fuselage. A new sprue holds the Salamander-specific parts—fuselage halves, cowling, forward upper deck, lengthened landing-gear struts, Cooper bombs and bomb racks, and an early pattern fin and rudder. The latter could be swapped with those from the Snipe kit if you wished to build a wartime Snipe, such Barker's machine, but you would still need to modify the wings some. The Snipe kit's late-style vertical tail was used on many of the Salamanders.
The kit dimensions agree, to varying degrees, with plans of the Salamander published over the years in a variety of sources (see References, below). Unfortunately, Salamander factory drawings published in the Autumn 1987 issue of Windsock Magazine prove that most of these plans—and, hence, the kit—contain dimensional errors. The kit fuselage is 2 mm too long and not as deep through the middle part of the fuselage as it should be. To fix this, you'd have to deepen the fuselage with a shim of sheet plastic and move the tailplane forward two millimeters. The wings of the Salamander prototype and early production machines had unbalanced ailerons on the top wing, like those on early Snipes. But when the Salamander went into production, the upper ailerons received balances and all ailerons were lengthened by one wing rib station inboard. Unfortunately, this modification is not reflected in the kit wings. The kit's landing-gear struts are slightly too short, too broadly splayed, and too thin and fine to represent the originals, so you will need to replace them.
The decal sheet is well printed and features two sets of markings: one scheme for a camouflaged machine featured on the box art and one for a standard, PC10-doped aircraft. The camouflaged aircraft, E.5431, featured an experimental, multi-color pattern that was described in the Summer 1987 issue of Windsock magazine. At least two Salamanders were painted in this multi-color camouflage (Cellon Ltd. advertised the shades used as "Salamander Colours" after the war, and other types were painted in them, including at least one BE.12—Ed.). A second example appears in one of the photographs in Bruce's The Sopwith Fighters. The PC10-doped machine, Sopwith-built F.6602, was part of the post-Armistice production run. Upper-surface fabric areas were PC10 and metal panels were grey POV enamel. The roundel decals are much more accurately proportioned than those on the Snipe sheet, and the ultramarine blue color is better represented.
Given the problems with the fuselage dimensions, this kit could be a bit tricky to build, if y insist on a really accurate Salamander. But Toko has done its usual fine work. Moldings are clean and crisp, and decals are very good. It makes an unusual—and desirable—addition to a collection of World War I aircraft models.
Conditionally recommended.
J.M. Bruce. Windsock Datafile #46 (Albatros Publications Ltd., 1994).
_____.The Sopwith Fighters, Vintage Warbird Series #5 (Arms & Armour Press, 1986).
_____."Sopwith Snipe, RAF's first fighter," Air Enthusiast International (April/June) 1974.
_____.Warplanes of the First World War, Fighters, v. 3 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969)21-27, 45-50.
Peter Cooksley, Sopwith Fighters in Acton, Aircraft Number 110 (Carrollton, TX: Squadron Signal, 1991).
Fighter Aircraft of the 1914-1918 War, Harleyford Publications, 1962.
R.L. Rimell, Windsock Magazine, 3:2,3 (1987).
"Sopwith Survivors, Part 2: Triplane, Pup and Snipe," Scale Models (May) 1970. Drawings by P.L Gray.