Well friends, we are summarizing the construction of the Breguet 14.
In this busy month, I only had an hour a night (sometimes less) to work on the model, we did some details in scratchbuiding, using colored paper in the pulp, the first was to create "shadow boxes" in the holes in the cockpit that help hide the even without details (I had thought about reducing the detailed cockpit of the 1/33 scale model edited by the Fitters but I felt lazy, so I decided to use this technique invented by Brent (very know modeller in Papermodelling Comunnity) in his biplane repaints. The "boxes" were formed and then the exceptions They were cut with castroviejo surgical scissors.
With the cockpits installed, we inserted a bar made from 400g cardboard that served as internal reinforcement for the lower wings . This helps with the bonding area between the fuselage and wing, which is very small and runs the risk of warping over time.
We also prepared the frames for the holes in the cockpits with colored paper.
One very interesting thing about the use of the Breguet 14 by the "Military Brigade of the State of Rio Grande do Sul" is that they were not actually armed. The BM-1 which was possibly a Breguet XVIA-2 had its machine guns removed as well as bomb hangers. The reason was simple: The 1923 conflict did not have a static front line like in World War I, on the contrary, the rebel and loyalist troops moved on horses in a type of regimental composition that was known in Rio Grande do Sul in the past as "Pickets", so these troops were highly mobile, attacking and moving quickly. The Breguet 14s were then used for reconnaissance. The modification we made to the back was made in the field, as it increased the area of the machine gunner for an observer and he eventually threw small locally manufactured bombs that had a moral effect and the objective was to scare the horses, which made life very difficult for the rebels. In addition to animals, men were also sometimes terrified because many, simple people, from working in the fields, had never seen an airplane and were not even aware that man could fly. Sometimes a simple blow to the column was enough to send the rebel soldiers into disarray.
Many of these missions were carried out on the western border of Rio Grande do Sul, which extended the flight of these fragile devices beyond their possibilities.
In this map of the time, you can see how the missions took off from Porto Alegre or Gravatai and headed west, covering more than 400 km, but we will tell you in detail in the next update.
