A Very Long Road to Top Gun
Gwyn Avenell’s Hawker Fury
With a one-way trip of 7,851 miles, Gwyn Avenell and his wife, Christina, have a very long journey to attend this year’s Top Gun Scale Invitational. When we chatted with Gwyn, he had just finished his flight testing and was starting to pack up his model for the long haul.
Competing in the Masters class, Gwyn will be flying his 1/4-scale Hawker that he has been building off and on for the past 12 years. The model is based on the only original Hawker Fury, located at Duxford in the United Kingdom, and has a 90-inch wingspan. Weighing about 29 pounds, the Fury is powered by a Laser 300V twin engine in keeping with its British theme. Gwyn uses a JR XG14E 14-channel radio and equipment. The model has a scale wing section, and the fuselage construction follows the same structure as that of the full-size biplane. The model is covered with traditional silk and tissue, and features “frayed tape” details on all the ribs.
After trying to achieve a polished aluminum finish with paint and foil, Gwyn decided to make the engine cowl with formed aluminum. A talented metalsmith lives near Gwyn, so he was able to use the professional’s workshop. The metalsmith also agreed to help him fix any mistakes along the way. The final results speak for themselves, and the cowl is the part of the model Gwyn is proudest of.
Gwyn comments, “The tricky bits of the model were obviously the metal work itself, but really, the most important issue with any tightly cowled engine is the cooling. My late friend Brian Borland designed a reverse cooling impeller that draws the air in from the scale radiator intake and feeds it over the back of the engine and exiting out through a gap between the cowl and the spinner backplate. I have flown the model in 90-degree temperatures with no ill effects, as the setup works on a similar principle as centrifugal industrial fans. I combined the spinner backplate and the fan blades in the same unit.”
Gwyn has been to Top Gun four times now—the first in 2011, when he topped the Masters static score with my Douglas SBD Dauntless. And this year’s event is special, being its 30th anniversary.
Gwyn comments, “Frank Tiano deserves all the plaudits for bringing this event to the modeling public for this period. It’s a great week in Lakeland, and we hope to see everyone there soon. As we live at ‘the bottom of the world,’ we’d like to also thank our national airlines, Air New Zealand, for their excellent protocol dealing with our National Model Association, which allowed our journey to happen.”