Hawker Hart (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:
As I’ve said before, 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.
In keeping with the two-part theme, this build is also a two-parter… or maybe a 2.5-parter if you include an elephant… that covers the Tintin “escape from Arabia” sequence from the album.
Part 1 – After avoiding a firing squad, Tintin is smuggled to safety by Thompson and Thomson. However, when the safehouse is discovered by the authorities, Tintin makes a mad dash to the airfield, seizes a DH Puss Moth and takes off into the wild blue yonder.
Part 2 – A pair of Hawker Harts quickly fly off in pursuit and, after opening fire, report back that the Puss Moth has been shot down. Unbeknownst to them, Tintin has instead hidden in the thick cloud cover and flies off to India… only to run out of fuel and crash into the jungle.
Part 3 – Tintin encounters Professor Sophocles Sarcophagus – already driven mad by Rajaijah juice – and makes his way back to civilization on the back of a friendly elephant.
It’s quite satisfying to be able to bring this trilogy (two-point-five-ogy?) to a successful close.
The build:
The first thing you may notice about this project is that, despite the fact that I keep calling it a Hawker Hart, the kit itself is actually the Airfix Hawker Demon. It’s not quite right, and even though the Scale Modellers Guide to Aircraft From The Adventures of Tintin , published by Blue Rider, refers to the airplane as a “Hawker Hart derivative” it’s titled as “Hawker two-seater fighter”, so I feel like there’s some wiggle room. Given the relative ease in finding this kit versus a more accurate Hawker Hart – I’m good with that.
And, given the overall age of this kit… wiggle room was definitely needed. For a kit that was a new tool in 1968, I knew that putty and sanding were going to be a big part of the build – and it didn’t disappoint. Besides the putty needed to close the gaps along the length of the fuselage seam, there were large ejection marks on the underside of all the major wing/tail surfaces. Eventually, with a bit of elbow grease, some Tamiya standard grey putty and a bit of Tamiya white liquid surface primer, they all got sorted well enough for me.
However, what was more difficult to deal with was the flimsy fuselage support struts. While the main wing struts were relatively robust, all four of the struts that attach the fuselage to the upper wing broke while still on the sprue. I did try to glue them back together and install them, but the giant locating holes on both the side of the fuselage and the underwing area meant that a) they really didn’t sit properly, and b) it put stress on the repaired area that made them lose their proper shape.
Instead, I decided to go with some relatively strong wire. Given how big the holes were, I was able to use some of that wiggle rom to get them placed properly, and then I cheated a bit by using some plastic tubing to make a few connector points that covered (more or less) the gap around the wire ends.
After that, I used a 2:1 ratio of Tamiya Buff (XF-57) and Khaki (XF-49) to match the paint job pretty closely and then used the Blue Rider decal sheet to finish the job.
Check out the project below and tell me what you think:
