I recently went to the Evergreen Air Museum and saw (among many other fantastic birds) a little plane I didn’t even know existed. It was a Curtiss-Wright A-22 Falcon, aka SNC-1 Falcon. I instantly fell in love with this sleek little two-seater and now I have to build one. Does anyone know of a good kit in 1/48 of this plane? I found after a breif google search that Planet Models makes a rather pricy resin kit, but I was hoping for plastic. Any info would be appreciated.
I have the Planet kit, and I know of no others in 1/48. It is a very nicely cast kit, very thin fuselage halves, one piece wing, with sidewall detail molded in the inner fuselage sides, and a very good representation of the Wright R-975 engine. Here is a scan of the fuselage components. The instructions are well done, and the decals are also very good, printed by Aviprint. I don’t have any connection to Planet, but I do like their kits.
It does look to be a decent kit. I’ve never actually built a resin kit, just a couple seats and exhaust sets here and there. As brittle as the resin is, it would probably be disasterous if I tried a whole kit. Unless it’s "softer than the Cutting Edge sets?
I am not any kind of a master at resin kits, but the resin in this kit is not what I would call brittle. It has some flex, but not as much as good styrene. If you have been building plastic kits for awhile this one is not too scary. The lack of locating pins and the thinness and flexibility of the fuselage halves will pose some difficulties compared to a good plastic kit, but probably about the same as a limited run plastic kit.
Geoff,
Aside from the Palnet Models Resin kit your only other 1/48 option for the SNC-1 is Sierra Scale’s vacuform Curtiss-Wright SNC-1 Falcon (see link below). I’d splurge and get the resin kit myself… vacuforms tend to turn Quagmyre into this [banghead] or this [censored] or this [BH].
Thanks for the info guys. Looks like my options are rather limited to a somewhat pricy resin kit and a vac kit, and from what I’ve heard, vacs don’t sound like a lot of fun. I tend to aim for kits with good fit, instead of “beat to fit, paint to match”. Besides, the Planet kit canopy doesn’t quite look like what I want. The a/c I saw had a nice smooth transition from the rear of the canopy to the tail spine. Here’s what I wanted:
It is the same airplane except for the canopy. You would have to make a new one because it is taller all the way to the front on all but the first 150 SNC-1’s.
Correct me if I am wrong John (or anyone), but that picture Geoff posted is of one of the A-22 non-trainer versions, correct?
Quagmire:
Pete Bowers did a good article in the October 1981 Wings magazine on the entire Demon/Falcon series of Curtiss airplanes, and there are 3 photos of the airplane that is the subject of this thread. It was the prototype of the CW-22 series and the SNC-1, and was never military. The CW-A22 model number is unique to it, it was a one-off. The original registration was NX then NC18067, later it was changed to N500G which is what is on the airplane in Geoff’s photo at Evergreen. I have photos from about 8 years ago of a CW-22B that had been in South America, when it showed up at a local EAA fly-in. All of the production CW-22’s were called fighter-trainers. There was a version of the airplane, the CW-21B Demon, that was a single seat fighter, with a 1,000 hp Wright R-1820. They all ended up with the Dutch and were quickly lost in Java, though their performance was not that far off from the Zero. According to Bowers the Dutch were unprepared logistically for the invasion and quickly lost the use of their airfields. With the CW-21B’s were 20 armed CW-22’s which also were lost in Java. The SNC-1 was Curtiss model CW-22N.