The PZL P.11h El Halcón 1/72

[Frank3k]

 Apophenia had some great artwork in his Spanish Civil War - Polish PZL Fighters. I was taken by the P.11h that Stephen drew:



I have an old Encore (ex-Heller) PZL P.11c that I started (and abandoned) back in 1998 or so that would make a good basis for recreating his artwork. Since I have a P.11c and his artwork is based on a P.11f, the main and most obvious mod would be changing the cowl, exhaust ring and prop.
I found some pictures of the Azur P.11f kit and recreated the cowl in 3D. I was going to print it in resin, but since my FDM printer had an ABS-like filament loaded up, that's what I used instead. A few minutes later I had the cowl and the exhaust ring:



I added a small piece if styrene tubing to replicate the flared exhaust, since I forgot to CAD it. The good cowl (next to the engine) has been smoothed and has two holes drilled for bullets from the guns to exit. It didn't take log at all to smooth the cowl - just a combination of acetone, a slight amount of sytrene goop and some sanding and scraping. A rejected cowl is just above.

Here the plane with the engine and cowl stuck on. The artwork shows bullet ejectors/chutes under the wings (that look like exhausts) but I'm going to leave them off.



The prop is a spare from an Azur Frrom 1/72 Northrop Delta that I may keep if I don't find a closer match. One of the blades was a short shot, so I filled the missing part with thin styrene. There are also more vents behind the engine in the older marks, but I'm not going to fill them in. I have to smooth the transition from the flared exhaust to the regular exhaust pipe as well:



I'm not sure of which color scheme to go with. The markings will be slightly different as well, since this isn't quite a P.11f. I may keep the domino on the tail, though.

[Old Wombat]

 

[raafif]

  Always liked the PZL stuff.  I have a 1/48 kit somewhere - wonder what it would look like with an in-line engine 

[apophenia]

Oh yes! Fantastic news, Frank!

Your IAR cowling is gorgeous - especially if that 'reject' is an indicator of your starting point 

On markings, one of the beauties of depicting FARE aircraft is that nothing near to standardised markings appeared until very late in the civil war. Pick a whif FARE scheme and there was probably something RW that was close 

... I have a 1/48 kit somewhere - wonder what it would look like with an in-line engine 

The original PZL P.1 and the later P.8/P.9 series of prototypes give you a pretty good idea.

The P.1/I and P.1/II prototypes both had a 630 hp Hispano Suiza 12Lb V12s.

The P.8/I was powered by a 640 hp Hispano-Suiza 12Mc. The P.8/II switched to a 675 hp Lorraine Dietrich 12H Pétrel.

The P.8/II was later redesignated P.9 ... which may have also been the designation for a planned production variant of the Pétrel-engined fighter (Poland having a long history of fighters with Lorraine Dietrich engines). P.9
development stopped with Puławski's death in March 1931.