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What do you think of Occre's Spitfire?

U

ubjs

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Sep 5, 2018
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Yes, I know that the Spitfire is an airplane. Sweden actually had 50 of them for a few years after the war.
But I've seen some airplane building threads here on the forum and Occre is a big manufacturer of wooden kits.
Personally, I react most to the big rivets.


 
GOOD GRIEF! What was Occre thinking with those rivets? That model looks like it has chicken pox or worse. I went further into You Tube for a look at real Spits. Yes, ofcxourse these airplanes had rivets, being the assembly method of the time but flush and nowhere as large in diameter. I can only imagine the air drag had they been so large and the speed reduction.
 
I agree with all the comments regards the rivet size. There is a story regarding the rivets during its early production stage that gives a clue as to their size.

As has been said the design required rivets, countersunk ones would have been best for streamlining but during wartime this was too slow a method of building, these aircraft were needed in numbers quickly. The solution was to only use countersunk ones where they would be of most benefit, to determine this on a prototype all rivets were countersunk but split dried peas were glued over them. By removing sections at a time by trial and error they found out the areas that effected the streamlining the most, these areas were countersunk during wartime and the lesser effected areas were left domed for quicker production. So for scale think of the size of a split dried pea, not the golf ball size that Occre deem acceptable
 
pugwash said:
certainly one for the 'rivet counters'.
Click to expand...


I am probably considered a rivet counter and take it as a compliment, but I would not buy anything made by OcCre based on the build logs we see today.
Perhaps there were some that had huge rivets like the OcCre kit but I could not find any photos showing a Spitfire with smallpox.
Allan

1. Spitfire assembled in Casablanca during the war
1765644854626.png



2. Spitfire today in modern times.
1765644719156.png
 
Perhaps the person that designed this kit never seen a true Spitfire up close. If they were only looking at photos caught in the right light they assumed that the aircraft had a very lumpy complexion. It is a good looking kit, but it does look like it was designed for builders with arthritis in their hands with extra grips built in so as to prevent the model from slipping away while being assembled.
 
Looking at the video, the rivets are the only the beginning of the problems. In my opinion, the airfoil is way too thick, the elevator is shaped incorrectly and the profile of the fuselage just looks wrong. To begin with, the center section of the fuselage looks too tall. Also, the fuselage sides appear too flat. The forward area around the engine looks as if they used configurations from several different MK’s.

Bill
 
Winter said:
so what's stopping you from removing the rivets and making rivets of the exact shape, size, and quantity you need?
Click to expand...
Good idea Winter. If anyone already has the kit but wants to get rid of the measles farm appearance the following may be helpful.
The majority of the Spitfire's structure used flush-head rivets so would not be seen on the model at all but some sections of the earliest Spitfire fuselages used domed (mushroom) head rivets that had a diameter of 3/32 inch or 1/8 inch. The finished "shop head" (the portion formed when the rivet is set) of these domed rivets would be approximately 1.5 times the original shank diameter in width, and half the diameter in height. This would make the largest rivet heads 0,1875" (4.76mm) in diameter. At the kit scale of 1/24 the largest rivet heads would be 0.13mm (if my math is correct) Loading a picture of the kit plane into cad and scaling it to full size the largest rivet heads on this kit appear to be about 1.1 mm rather than 0.13mm or nearly 600% too large.
Allan
 
AllanKP69 said:
Good idea Winter. If anyone already has the kit but wants to get rid of the measles farm appearance the following may be helpful.
The majority of the Spitfire's structure used flush-head rivets so would not be seen on the model at all but some sections of the earliest Spitfire fuselages used domed (mushroom) head rivets that had a diameter of 3/32 inch or 1/8 inch. The finished "shop head" (the portion formed when the rivet is set) of these domed rivets would be approximately 1.5 times the original shank diameter in width, and half the diameter in height. This would make the largest rivet heads 0,1875" (4.76mm) in diameter. At the kit scale of 1/24 the largest rivet heads would be 0.13mm (if my math is correct) Loading a picture of the kit plane into cad and scaling it to full size the largest rivet heads on this kit appear to be about 1.1 mm rather than 0.13mm or nearly 600% too large.
Allan
Click to expand...
Allan, can you tell me what the outer skin of the aircraft is made of in this set, I watched the video but I didn't understand what it was made of.
 
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