Supermarine S.5 - AMP from Ukraine 1/72nd scale

 (The completed model is here:

https://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2022/08/supermarine-s5-schneider-winner-amp-of.html

Being in general attracted to more esoteric types, it is somewhat strange for me to model planes that are well known. In regards to that, it feels redundant to provide information for this build in the usual abbreviated historical musing, as the S.5 is well-covered and immediately recognized by many modelers that enjoy civil planes and racers. What, then, should I say? What about "The Supermarine S.5 came after the S.4 and before the S.6". There. That, and the fact that it was a racer and won the Schneider Cup in 1927, coming first and second (three planes were built), and second in the 1931 race. For more information please refer to your library or the Internet, thus saving me time to build more models. But here are some contemporary pages:

From the Gallica repository, L'Aeronautique magazine:

 L'Année aéronautique:

Les Ailes:

Box contents:

The kit comes with a photo-etched set, a nice transparency and masks for it:

Nice surface treatment:

The complex shape of the nose forced the manufacturer to render it as four parts. This, given the short-run nature of the kit, forebodes a bit of trouble. We'll see:

 The cockpit has some interior detail:

The floats are engraved with a lot of detail, but very faintly, and I think most won't survive the gluing/priming/sanding stages. Many times I see very good masters that could benefit from a notch above short-run production, but I guess cost factors intervene:

It is nice that AMP included the P.E. set, but to clean the "wires" of their attachment points may prove to be difficult:

My right wingtip was a short poor by several millimeters, something I didn't experience before with an AMP kit. A small section is removed to restore the contour:

One of the float halves was also a short poor, becoming a little annoying now, as these shots were not weeded out by quality control. A piece of styrene is glued to later re-contour the parts:

The fin is molded in just one side. You must clean a mold relief at the base of the fin for the other side to fit properly. I already cleaned it up in this photo, but the arrows point to where you can still see the faint leftovers of it:

The sprue gates of the float struts are located a bit too close to the fairing "sleeves", making their cleaning a tad difficult. Watch out because those sleeves have very good (and very faint) detail, so don't obliterate it:

After careful clean up, the nose parts are assembled:

It is important to carefully clean the remains of the sprue gates and mating surfaces without compromising the parts before gluing them. As the molds are not perfect, be aware of alignment and proper angles:

Three of the parts get along very well:

But the fourth in my sample is either a bad poor or not properly rendered, creating a step. No big deal, as putty and sanding will easily restore the shape:

With the assembly still not complete dry, I matched it to the taped fuselage to see how it went. Difficult to tell as here too cleaning up and refining are necessary, but at least the fit doesn't seem bad:

To deal with the step in the cowl, stretched sprue is used. Filling and sanding will follow:

All the parts separated from the sprues and cleaned up. Corrections in progress:

To the right, the cockpit sub-assembly. Nice, very fine detail here, very small. Strange that parts like these can be molded with short-run technology. On the other hand...to the left, the prop assembly that in this case presents again some fit issues that will need working out, as the back of the spinner seems reluctant to occupy what it considers a too restrained space. This assembly is designed to allow the prop to rotate, which is a good intention, but not sure if this will work due to fit/gluing considerations:

Painting of the base colors on a few parts:

The insert is there, further blending is in order:

The cockpit pan is ready. The inst.pan. decal is laid over the plastic part, then the P.E. part will be added:

In the photo below you may notice that the fin is split in two halves, which is untrue. The fin is molded whole in one side only. Maybe these instructions were just for the 1/48th kit from the same manufacturer and reused here?  The unnumbered part close to (7) is the headrest. It doesn't appear in the instructions sequence:

But then it appears already in place:

The instructions are a bit vague (surprise!) regarding the exact location of the bulkhead and inst. pan. Not difficult to guess, though.

Once the short shot patch is sanded, the rib/radiator line is restored with a dab of filler applied in the gap between two tapes:

The bulkhead needed a LOT of trimming down to fit. This is the curse of 99% percent of kits. Apparently most kit makers didn't hear the physics' tenant that two objects can't occupy the same space at the same time. You may imagine how happy I was, sanding down a just painted, minuscule and fragile assembly in order for it to fit:

Finally I managed to close the fuselage. The fit, surprisingly (not counting the interior) was perfect. So much care in some parts, and not in others. Strange...:

The wing-to.fuselage joint was near perfect, necessitating just a couple touches with a sanding stick. As predicted, the nose to fuselage union will require some fiddling, hopefully not much:

The nose is in, with a few touches here and there. It will need a little more work. Some modelers may prefer to add the nose before the wing, as this gives you more freedom to rectify the fit without the wing hindering the process:

The horizontal tail is added. I should mention how realistically thin the trailing edges are in general, and how thin the tail feathers are. I see what looks like a bit of a wobbly surface on the wing, which is molded in one piece and may so risk that, but the primer will tell for sure later:

A coat of primer reveals some spots that need attention, but nothing major:

Photos show three round holes (A), the center one with a pipe coming out of it. These are drilled, as well as the locating holes for aftermarket aileron linkages, struts and rigging wires. A dab of putty is under the chin, as the molding there needed it:

Floats are primed and the locating holes for the rigging drilled:

A few parts are painted:

The coat of primer helped reveal a few small sink marks in the nose area, above and below the aft end of the side engine row banks. I didn't spot these while studying the nose parts before assembly, which would have been the ideal time to deal with them. The nose volumes are complex and touching-up access is not easy, but I put a small dab of filler on the marks and will have to devise a few special very small sanding sticks to treat them. Self-inflicted in this case, as mi vision strangely enough is not improving with age.

The struts have minuscule pips that go on minuscule dents in the floats. I drilled the float locations, and now added metal pins to the struts, something I prefer to do in order to provide more wiggling and adjusting room and a more secure anchoring:

I reckon that there a few sticky points in this build: 1) The alignment of fuselage, struts and floats, always a challenge on seaplanes; 2) The asymmetrical position of the floats, not contemplated in the kit (right float should be 2.7mm further right from center-line); 3) The complex masking needed for the paint scheme considering how small the model is (the instructions are not completely accurate in that regard); 4) The rigging, that as we know is provided by the manufacturer as P.E. parts, needs to be extracted and all those little holding tabs cleaned up, without deforming the "wires", and the fact that it should have been asymmetrical to span the float that is located further apart. So quite a bit to mull over.

Once the blemishes have been sorted, all the components are given a coat of Alclad Gloss Pale Grey base. This is something I used in the past and half-forgot. It provides a good base for aluminium as well as blue, but it needs a certain time so properly cure:

I think the way to go now would be to scratch a beaching dolly, something I wish manufacturers or aftermarket entrepreneurs would provide, as it can be used to rig the model. If not a proper beaching trolley, at least a simple cradle to pose the model and help with alignment, something not spectacularly difficult to produce, as all the measures and shapes have already been taken for the model itself. Or even templates.

So I tried to separate and clean one of the photoetched rigging parts. This is not a hard metal, so care must be used. Separation was ok, although those pesky little tabs remained there. I have successfully dealt with those in the past by holding the part just behind it and using a file to remove the tab:

But in this case, being the wires "to scale", that is very thin, there is no way to grab the part from anywhere, and my attempts just bent the part. I carefully straightened it, tried again, and mangled it again. But maybe it's just me, and other modelers may obtain a good result. I even tried pressing the "flat wire" with a vise to bend and hold P.E. parts, but it's just too small and fiddly, and some lengths won't fit in the vise I have. Thus, I will just go for my usual rigging, thanks very much. Perhaps if they would have used steel or another hardened metal, maybe, or again, perhaps other modelers won't find this difficult at all:

The cradle/trolley is scratched taking measures from the instructions blown-up drawing, following photos. This is seen with and without wheels. If the wheels are present, auxiliary supports are added. I will leave as it is:

Now the floats can seat...on the comfy chair! This should help at the moment of joining the fuselage and floats via the struts, always a nail-biting stage of the build:

Now, as noted, the right float should be offset by 2.7millimeters or so to the right, so I accounted for that on the trolley. This means the struts on that side have to be slightly longer, or that float would be higher if we just displace it, and the whole geometry would be off. So, then...fabricate two longer struts, with their sleeves? splice a short length in the struts? add a little styrene piece at the base of the sleeve of the struts preserving the attaching angle? Hum...

Aluminium base on the floats, cradle painted:

A coat of aluminium paint. The shine revealed something I was afraid of: as the wing is molded in one piece the surface had some shrinkage, visible on the left wing close to the fore rigging attaching point. There are other couple places where you can feel an almost imperceptible anomaly on the surface. I am not about to go back and sand the whole wing and re-do the ribbing, but if your sample has this sinking plastic effect (it may not), you may consider it:

I made a longer pair of right-side float struts. They may work ok, but I am still hesitant...

This is the only AMP kit I have built or have that has presented the issues described in this post. I don't know why, but in part could be just my sample, given the short-run nature of the product.

After masking the metal color, I painted the floats blue. And then sanded them and repainted then in a different blue. And then a third time. When the color seemed to match a number of discussions on the color of the S.5, I painted the fuselage too (which had a quite complex and not very comfortable masking):

Masks off:

These are not locating holes for the rigging, but some vents seen in photos. You will have to locate and drill the rigging holes:

The headrest is glued. I discarded the kit's photo-etched rigging, and used my own materials to give the floats sub-assembly some rigidity and thus helping with arguably the most fiddly operation that is joining them with the fuselage via the struts, using the home-made cradle as an alignment tool. You can also see the prop assembly. I dry-fitted all components before and had to adjust them, because as molded they wouldn't fit. Now, with a couple of paint coats, they again won't fit. A little further work is needed there:

Prop and canopy on. The transparency is very good, it's thin and painting masks are provided for it:

With the two home-made longer float struts, and not without plenty of imprecations, hard words, and maledictions, the model stands now on its floats. My school math to calculate the double triangulation for the elongation of fore and aft struts was a bit off, and I ended up with the right float 1mm too far to the right (3.7 mm instead of 2.7mm, which is noticeable in such small model. Still, if I would have things as they were (inaccurate), I would have been 2.7mm off to the left, instead of 1mm off to the right. The asymmetry is now quite visible, and my work hasn't been as neat as I wanted it to be... so be it. And all for what? as fellow modeler Tim Nelson remarked in an email exchange: "-And then all your fellow modelers will point out to you that you got a float out of wack" (or words to that effect), which is so very true. This is a hard one: leave it as it is, no headaches, but your model won't have that displaced float of the original...or have a nightmare, risk to ruin your build or procrastinate it forever due to the additional complexity and building shenanigans, and who knows how well the "fix" would go. Modeler's life in a nutshell for you!:

Next steps are rigging (not using the kit's P.E. parts) and decaling.

And ready:

 (The completed model is here:

https://wingsofintent.blogspot.com/2022/08/supermarine-s5-schneider-winner-amp-of.html