As many of you already know I recently bought a Flair Puppeteer to have as a down the road project after finishing up my Flair Legionare and my scratch-build of the Nieuport 11. My first impression upon opening up the box and looking at the instructions is that this kit is rather more refined than the Legionaire. The Legionaire's funky typed instructions have been replaced with several large sheets of plan drawings and severel smaller sheets that serve as construction diagrams.

But what really struck me is that the Puppeteer looks to my eyes to be a bit more generic than the Legionaire which is a pretty good copy of the Nieuport 17. The Puppeteer which is intened to be a sports scale version of the Sopwith Pup -- looks a bit more like the mother (Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter) than the whelp! And given that over 10,000 Puppeteers have been built (according to the Flair website) I figured I might as well do something a little different and try kit bashing it into the Strutter. The diagram below shows the side view of the Strutter superimposed on the side view of the Puppeteer.

The length of the fuse from cowl to rudder post is very close. Even the position of the wings and the location of the UC axle are nearly identical. It should be a small matter to relocated the gear attachment points, add the two-seater cockpits, and maybe reconfigure the rear turtle deck a bit. The wing span is a more Pup-like but I can live with that.

I'll do up a scale-shaped rudder (maybe with a 10% enlargement) but I'll basically use the kit wings and stab as is, with only some modifications to the tip shapes. Other possible alteration include the use of more scale side fairings on the forward fuse, the addition of the famous W struts (of course) and the addition of the scale air brakes of the original on the inboard edge of the lower wing. No matter what I do, it'll still end up as a sport scale model but perhaps one with a bit more jazz!

I'm thinkig of using the color scheme seen in this excellent painting by Brian Knight on the cover of the datafile (#34).