1:32 Caudron C-714

A wooden fighter born of necessity

The Caudron C.714 was an attempt to produce a fighter quickly, cheaply and without cutting into aluminum production. It therefore grew out of a racing machine, had a wooden structure, a slender fuselage and a weak V-type engine of around five hundred horsepower. Compared with contemporary opponents it lacked climb as well as armament, and yet in the spring of 1940 it got into combat. It was flown mainly by Polish pilots in France, who even managed victories with it, though at the cost of high losses.

A blurred boundary between the fields

French regulations of the time prescribed three shades for the upper surfaces, brown, dark green and blue-gray, but unlike German practice the fields were not separated by a straight line. The paint was sprayed freely, so a blurred band several centimeters wide arose between the fields. A soft transition has a different logic from a sharp edge: it does not try to break up the outline with geometry but to imitate the shadows and blurred margins we see in nature on vegetation and on plowed land. From a distance such a surface therefore does not come across as an object with a shape, but as a blotch. For a modeler that means spraying lightly and without a support laid on the surface.

Box contents

Two glazing masks are available, one for the view from outside, the other for the inner side, and two masks of the national marking. The French cockade has three concentric rings and spraying it through film is more certain than assembling it from freely cut strips. Keeping the rings concentric by hand is very difficult and an error is visible immediately.