Fairey Swordfish

[Ralph_S]

A good friend of mine, known on flickr as Lego Monster, is building a ridiculously huge minifig scale model of HMS Hood. He's asked me to build an aircraft to go with it. Since it was instrumental in the sinking of the battleship Bismarck in the second world war -the ship that sunk Hood- I chose to build a Fairey Swordfish. It has a number of first for me, at least in a long time. Normally I build my aircraft too big for minifigs, but since the ship model is minifig scale, my aircraft had to be too. It's also the first bi-plane MOC I've ever made as far as I can remember.

It was a fun build with a few interesting challenges, such as the undercarriage, the slanted wing struts and the folding mechanism.

all photographs

I hope you'll like it.

Cheers,

Ralph

[Fluyt]

Very nice moc

I especially like the folding wings, crossbeams and landing gear.

[Guss]

wooow really nice ^^ and the HMS Hood of your friend will be huuge and it s really going to be a beautiful moc ! Let us know when he finish it!

[Plural]

Ah yeah, I remember seeing this on The Brothers Brick. Excelent model you've built really good scale and brilliant stringwork.

[JopieK]

very nice job!!!

[Ralph_S]

I was initially going to build an RAF Catalina flying boat -the aircraft that found Bismarck after its engagement with Hood- but realised that I wouldn't have enough parts. I'm running out of white plates. A Swordfish seemed like a suitable alternative. I was hesitant to start building that because I expected all kinds of problems, with the gear and with building it to minifig scale. Fortunately it came together a lot quicker than I thought and I am quite pleased with the reception it got, both by you guys and with it being blogged on TBB.

The strings almost drove me nuts by the way. If I tightened them a bit too much, something would come apart or one of the knots would come undone. I ultimately had to settle for them drooping a bit here and there.

Cheers,

Ralph

[Captain Green Hair]

Excellent work Ralph!

That ship is gonna look so awesome when it is done.

[Siegfried]

It's beautiful work; especially the strings! I love the torpedo and the undercarriage as well. You're a very talented man.

(The Hood is stunning.... )

[LEGOMAN132]

Thats real cool and one of the best plane of WWII

[Duke]

Wow.. the detail in such a small creation and the camouflage is outstanding.

[Basiliscus]

I saw this on TBB and was particularly impressed. A great minifig-scale aircraft which has a high fidelity to the original. My favourite parts are the rear-facing tail gun, the alternate plate/tile arrangement on the top of the wing (it looks aerodynamic to me!) and the awesome custom stickers.

Keep up the good work mate

[Ralph_S]

Thanks guys. I'd done camouflage before, so that wasn't too hard. The trick is to never have a border between two colours be more than three studs long before having the border step at most one stud.

The landing gear was a bit tricky. The wing fold mechanism was a lucky accident of sorts. The outer panels on the upper wings are slightly swept back and I knew that the best way of getting that right was using a plate hinge. I then realised that this plate hinge would sit exactly where the hinge for folding the wing on the real aircraft was located. So, all I needed was a similar hinge in the bottom wing. What was a bit tricky was building the connecting struts strong enough to keep the outer wings together when folding the wings. It all work reasonably well.

Indeed, Lego Monster's HMS Hood is going to be amazing. For those of you in the UK, HMS Hood and the Swordfish it will be on display in Swindon in the first weekend of October. For more info:

http://www.brickish.org/steam

Cheers,

Ralph

[Asuka]

Simply a wonderful and intricate work, elegant and most impressive

all the way from head to toe - um, or better, from propeller to fin.

[Zepher]

I saw this over at the TBB and was quite impressed, until I saw the reference picture. Then i was INCREDIBLY impressed. Awesome job, looks almost exactly like the original.

[iamded]

This is one stunning creation, Ralph_S! I love it, I can't find anything wrong with it!

~Peace

[darkrebellion]

Awesome MOC Ralph S . This is a really MOC I need to said, the level of detail is stunning and the color sheme looks great. Great Work .

[Ralph_S]

Thanks guys. The Swordfish seems to be a fairly popular model among die-cast aircraft kit builders and I found a number of websites with photographs of their models. Those were a great help in figuring out all the details. I also had a number of three-view drawings to help with the shape. When building a model of a real aircraft much of the time I spend actually goes into finding and studying photographs. By the time I start actually putting bricks together, I'll already have a pretty good idea of how big it will have to be and how I'm going to build various bits.

Cheers,

Ralph