Puss Moth (Cigars of the Pharaoh)

Cigars of the Pharaoh (French: Les Cigares du Pharaon) is the fourth 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 December 1932 to February 1934 before being published in a collected volume by Casterman in 1934. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, who are travelling in Egypt when they discover a pharaoh’s tomb filled with dead Egyptologists and boxes of cigars. Pursuing the mystery of these cigars, they travel across Arabia and India, and reveal the secrets of an international drug smuggling enterprise.

 

– courtesy of Wikipedia

The finished model:

THE VIDEO:

The story:

I’ve spoken before of how much I like Cigars of the Pharaoh, both because it’s essentially a two-part adventure with my favourite Tintin album, The Blue Lotus, but also because I’m generally a sucker for any story that explores tombs in Egypt.

The more time I spend exploring this album, both just be re-reading it, but also adding to my build tally inspired by it, the more I appreciate it. Even in it’s raw form, it’s still quite a step up from the albums that preceded it. Unlike the earlier adventures, Tintin doesn’t just spend time wandering around in the Soviet Union, the Belgian Congo, or the United States of America. In Cigars of the Pharaoh, Tintin takes a winding path that begins in Egypt, and lands him on the Arabian peninsula before he escapes and makes his way to the heart of India. That’s almost three adventures for the price of one!

Obviously it also ranks quite high on my Tintin modelling project list… and it certainly doesn’t hurt that there are several great vehicles to choose from.

Besides the “partner project” with this build, the pale khaki Hawker Hart that pursues him through the skies above Arabia, I’ve already been able to build projects inspired by the Arabian Dhow that rescues Tintin from the sea, the cherry red Alfa Romeo P3 that Tintin commandeers for the climatic mountain chase scene, and even the marching elephant that delivers Tintin and the Rajaijah juice-stricken Professor Sophocles Sarcophagus back to civilization on the Indian sub-continent.

Planes, boats, elephants and automobiles. This album has a lot to give.

The build:

This build was not easy. I purchased the Omega models resin kit several years ago with this project in mind, but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

These kinds of short-run resin kits are definitely not for the faint of heart. The fit and the overall quality of parts is… suspect… to say the least. And, of course, by the time I finally worked up the courage to tackle what looked to be a difficult project, there was another, better option on the market – the AVI “Puss Moth over Europe” kit.

So, if any of you out there feel like following in my footsteps, I’d advise you to find a path to that kit instead. It’s likely to cause you a lot less grief than this one did for me.

Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that it’s made out of a few solid blocks of resin. The first challenge was carving out the back end of the cockpit area, without just destroying the whole fuselage in the process. It was hard enough, and awkward enough, to make the gouging hard going. Luckily, I had plans for the roof of the canopy, so I wasn’t as constrained as I might’ve been, but there still wasn’t a lot of room to get thick fingers into. It also meant I had to take pilot Tintin off at the knees to get him to fit, once I added a sub-floor to even things out a bit.

The cockpit canopy also gave me quite a few headaches. Originally I was just planning on drilling holes and inserting horizontal cross bars that would have doubled as wing spars to support the heavy wings and keep them from pulling away from the fuselage. It probably would have worked out alright if I could have managed to count to 5. It seems I only got as far as 4 before I lost the plot. As everyone can see from the reference images. There should be five. Getting the wire cross bars in to support the wings, and then squeezing in the clear plastic “windows” ended up with a bit of scratching and bit of CA glue overflow.

One thing I DID like about this project was it was the first time I’ve used the Tamiya clear base to change the Tamiya X-6 Orange from gloss to matte. I’m much happier with the result than I would’ve been and will try that one again in the future.

Speaking of Future, I used a bit of my precious dwindling supply to seal the pain job and help the Blue Rider decals (The Aircraft of Tintin – Part 2) stick. I’ve found from experience that you REALLY need to give these a good long soak before you attempt to remove them from the backing. They’re not overly complex as decals go (literally “AB”), but they came in handy and would recommend them to any Tintin model building fan.

Check out the project below and tell me what you think: