DH 82 Tiger Moth (The Black Island)

The Black Island (French: L’Île noire) is the seventh volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children’s supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from April to November 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who travel to England in pursuit of a gang of counterfeiters. Framed for theft and hunted by detectives Thomson and Thompson, Tintin follows the criminals to Scotland, discovering their lair on the Black Island.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

THE FINISHED MODEL:

THE STORY:

Since I’ve already built the DHC Chipmunk, the Loch Lomond Rail Tanker, the Motorboat, the Ford Zephyr Taxi, and the Jaguar Mark X – and still have plans to build several others, I really don’t have much left to talk about in regards to the story itself. Check those pages out if you want to know more about my thoughts on it.

Suffice it to say that The Black Island is one of the albums (perhaps only outdone by The Calculus Affair) which features the widest section of trains, planes and automobiles – making it a scale modeller’s paradise!

In a nutshell, this is because, when it came time to publish The Black Island in the U.K. in the mid-1960s, Hergé’s British publishers requested a major revision of the story. Since the story is set in the UK, the publishers wanted the story updated to better reflect the current local situations and thus be more palatable to then-modern readers. To that end, Hergé sent his assistant Bob De Moor to Britain on a research trip, and the revised edition in Tintin Magazine bore the fruits of that research.

THE BUILD:

I kind of see this build as “part 2” of my built DHC Chipmunk build project. After Thompson and Thomson commandeer this little yellow beauty in hot pursuit of Tintin in the red Chipmunk. In fact, I’m pretty sure I bought these kits at the same time. However, though the Chipmunk was one of the very first Tintin projects I began (after the Shark Submarine) in Fall 2016, one look at how nice a kit this is and I decided to wait “until I was good enough.” Of course, this is an updated (and upgraded) kit from Airfix, one that replaces a kit of even older (1957) vintage as the Chipmunk (1969). So the modern engineering really stands in sharp contrast – hence my reluctance to “screw it up.”

However, after putting in a lot of effort to make the Air India L-749 Constellation be my final completed kit of 2021, I decided I needed to start something new and fresh for 2022. So, I may or may not be good enough, but the DH Tiger Moth finally made it onto the modelling bench, regardless.

As expected, this kit is really a dream to build – which in someways almost became my undoing. I knew from the start that I’d be displaying this kit mid-loop, so I didn’t bother all that much with the cockpit. Which is good, because I managed to smudge around one of the control panel decals quite well somehow – so much for being “good enough!”

The fit is really tight, so it didn’t take much sanding or putty to nicely close up the seam. As for the wing struts, Airfix kindly leaves in an extra set of braces that really help with alignment. They are a bit flimsy though, so cutting and trimming them in place was a bit tricky and required a bit of re-attaching in the process.

To start the process, I painted the few bits that needed to be aluminium with Tamiya XF-16 – I usually start with that, because no matter how well I mask, there’s always a few stray shiny particles floating around. Then, as I usually do now, I gave the entire fuselage a coat of Tamiya X-17 Pink as an undercoat to the XF-3 Yellow. It always seems counterintuitive, but the results don’t lie. The yellow goes on in one coat and is much deeper and richer than it otherwise would be. Of course, wanting to “be good enough” for this kit meant that I ended up being a bit more upset about small imperfections than I usually am. So, long story short, my attempts to fix minor imperfections in the paint job, led to major imperfections, which led to me scrubbing the entire fuselage down to bare plastic and trying again. I really should’ve just learned to live with the minor mistakes, because all that extra work “roughed up” the kit more than was necessary and led to me having to re-glue 3/4 of the struts.

I should also mention that I was a bit disappointed in the Blue Rider decals I have for this project. The “protective” paper adhered to the decal film and made the application and clean up much more of a mess than I’d hoped for. Luckily I was able to salvage them, but the main “G-AIRJ” (“Hergé”, get it?) on the underside of the wing (the most visible one in the end) was a bit ravaged in the process. The same thing happened to my Bordurian Messerschmitt Bf-109 – so maybe I just got a bad batch, or they were in the bag too long in the humidity in Korea – who knows.

Anyway, I knew the hardest part of the kit would be the rigging. I do have some nice stretchy nylon thread which is arguably just the right size. However, my experience with rigging and CA glue has not been a good one. So, using a bit of very thin wire, I ended up making a bunch of “P” shaped loops and drilling and glueing them into the fuselage/wings. That way I really just needed to thread the eye of the needles and glue the thread back onto itself. Maybe a bit more work, and not arguably a better result – but less frustration on my end. So I’m calling that a win.

Feel free to tell me if you agree, though. 😉