Scratchbuilt 1/72 BICh 14

From the archive (2006):

Boris Ivanovich Cheranovsky dreamed about the half-moon gliding on the frozen surface of the lake. And he designed a series of planes with a charm that is hard to ignore. The daring configuration created some stability problems, but most of his planes at least flew, and some times they flew very well.

I include an image of my scratchbuilt BICh 7a, a smaller, previously designed plane, for size and type reference.

The BICh 14 was a transport (four passenger) version, and both date from the early 30's.

For the construction of the model I used some styrene, wood, metal, invocations, imprecations, a magic wand and some pixie dust.

The interior was provided with five seats, control column, instrument panel and rudder bar, all to be forever forgotten under the dark, impenetrable canopy. The Townend rings were made of two layers of .010 styrene wrapped around the right size of metal tube, and later a half-round styrene rod was added as a lip to the inner front side. Once dry the part was sanded close to shape. The engines were made of scored styrene rod and stretched sprue, and the half-round front covers are heat-and-smash styrene over a rounded dowel end.