Hi there, I'm normally an armour modeller but I've got a few aircraft kits in the stash and want to do a diorama of a swordfish dropping it's torpedo, it's the revell small scale kit, and I've got the colour scheme sorted, but I was hoping someone could help with good pictures of the bracing wires as I'm going to be doing a bit of scratch building and want to make the kit as realistic as I can.
I've got the wings sorted but I'm struggling with the front wires and the rear wires.
Many thanks in advance

The swordfish's rigging was fairly simple as biplanes go. There was cross bracing between the struts fore and aft, then a set of flying wires and a set of landing wires running spanwise between each strut.

Flying wires carry the flight loads. They run from the lower wing root to the upper wing strut and attach to the inboard side of the strut.

Landing wires carry the weight of the wing when the aircraft is on the ground. They run from just outboard of the cabane strut (the one that holds the upper wing onto the fuseage) to the bottom wing at the inboard side of the wing strut.

It's difficult to show in 1/72 scale, but the flying wires are thicker than the landing wires, and the fore-and-aft cross bracing was even thinner.

Since the swordfish had foldable wings, they had a rectangular pattern of 4 wing struts rather than cabane struts and wing struts. The wires made an X between all 4 pairs of struts as seen in this picture. Note that there is one supplemental landing wire coming from the top of the front inboard strut and going to a point about 1/4 of the way along the wingspan from the root.

Thankyou Jessie, I'm also struggling with the wires at the rear of the plane, I've noticed there appears to be a few top and bottom, and all the pictures I've found don't show clearly, exactly where to place them for accuracy.

There were a pair of bracing wires that ran from near the top of the fin to a point about half span. The lower side of the tailplane was braced by a pair of struts.

There were also silver braided cable elevator and rudder control wires you can see in the pictures. This is a view under the tailplane
showing the double rudder control wires and the single elevator wire. These came from fairleads in the rear fuselage. They can be seen just behind the 'M' on this aricraft.

Most of these pictures came from a walkaround set published here. This aircraft appears to be lacking its tailwheel.

This picture of a different aircraft shows the tail area from slightly farther away.

This picture is a useful view of the area under the upper wing in front of the cockpit.

Thankyou so much for your help!
That walkaround is just what I need, I was getting close to travelling to duxford museum to take some pics, now I can make a start on the kit!
As a side note, I'm going to be going to the Hendon museum soon to get some walkaround pics of some of the aircraft and Id be happy to post these on the site once I've got them
Once again, thankyou for helping me with this

Murray

have a look here there are two sets of drawings free to download http://www.airwar.ru/other/draw_ow.html

Regards

Den