The Burgess Cup Defender was an honorable but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to grant US representation and participation in the 1912 Gordon Bennett race, backed by the members of the Illinois Aero Club who formed an ad-hoc organization in Chicago.
As one in three millions among you will surely know, the
race was won by Monsieur Vedrines and its modernist Deperdussin, being second
Monsieur Prevost with an almost identical machine (more on the Deperdussin on a
future article).
The Cup Defender was a traditional machine design-wise, with
wing-warp roll control a la Wright (no ailerons for you model rail-roaders), which
goal was not innovation but reliability. It had a two-row 14 cylinder Gnome rotary,
the best you could get at the time, but no pilot was found willing to fly it
since at that time controls were not standardized.
The Cup Defender model was a commission which I took gladly
since it aligned very well with some recent interests (you have perhaps seen
here in the past months a plethora of racers I posted, like the RB-1, Kawanishi
K-2, Nieuport-Delage NiD-37 and Caudron Simoun Oasis racer).
The model construction followed the known method of putting
everything in a blender and have a coffee while everything is done, but
nevertheless here you will find some photos to illustrate the process,
including the carving of the wood prop.
The research was lengthy but fruitful, and required many
hours on the Net exploring arcane beginning of the XX century publications in
the darkest, almost inaccessible crags of the Virtual World.
Home-made decals were used to depict the plywood areas on
the fuselage tail and the “Burgess” legend on the cockpit sides.
Although this plane was the product of well-intended
citizens, the “Cup Defender” -that never had a chance to prove its value-
illustrates the contemporary more conservative thinking. As fate had it, it was
the much modern and daring French Deperdussin Monocoque the one that took the
trophy.
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