History

The Sopwith Baby was a development of the Schneider from which it differed in having the more powerful 110hp Clerget engine and a more orthodox open fronted cowling. Another improvement was the installation of a synchronised Lewis gun above the fuselage, although some Babies still retained the Lewis inclined upwards through the top wing. Later aircraft when built by Blackburn were equipped with a more powerful 130hp Clerget, the first of these were armed with Ranken anti-Zeppelin rockets instead of machine guns.

The Kit

This kit comes in a small top opening box with a colour profile on the lid. Inside the box we find two zip lock bags one containing the decals while the other contains 14 cream coloured resin parts. The parts consist of fuselage, upper and lower wings, floats, vertical and horizontal tail while the engine, seat, propeller, propeller boss, cowling and Lewis gun are attached to a thin piece of resin film. A couple of air bubbles are present on my example the worst being on the propeller blade while the rest should not prove a problem.

One item that may be an issue is a complete lack of struts for both the wings and the mounting of the floats.

The Instructions

Well what can one say about these, they consist of a single sided sheet of approx 5 x 8cm with a three view drawing of a Baby. The plan and front drawings are not to scale while the side profile does appear to be in scale. That is it for the instructions, not even a chart to measure the struts that will need to be made against.

There are no colour call outs, in fact no writing at all.

The Markings

Markings are supplied for one unknown aircraft of an unknown unit. The issue here is that the box top art work profile and the decals do not match.

Now I’m not sure of the method used to produce the decals but when viewing them it is noticeable that I can see the lines that make up the blue parts of the roundels and rudder flash.

In Conclusion

A useful addition for the small scale modeller, but not for the beginner as some scratch building will be required in this very small aircraft. The addition of a template to help with the struts would have been help full.

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