CLASSIC KITS SPECIAL

This month Shaun Garrity looks at prolifi c designer Phil Smith and his famous models kitted by Veron

- Shaun Garrity

It was an idea I had a few years ago and lock-down has focused the old grey matter. I decided to put pen to paper (actually fingers to keyboard) and do something about it.

Classic Kits - now this is obviously very subjective because my idea of what constitutes a classic kit may be a country mile from yours. I've previously mentioned in my column that Phil Smith, Chief Designer for Veron, was a dear friend of mine and I am unashamedly biased towards his creations. Back in the day Veron was one of the premier league kit manufacturers, selling many tens of thousands of aircraft and boat kits globally. So, I'm hoping I'm on the money with this article and there are many other Veron fans out there.

Almost all of their heyday R/C kits had a common theme and were ahead of the curve (when compared to many other manufacturers of the day), featuring die-cut ribs and ply parts, spindle moulded balsa coaming for the fuselage (to save carving and sanding), pre bent undercarriages, extensive hardware packs including nuts bolts and horns etc., with wheels and a spinner for power models. Excellent pictorial assembly diagrams showed the various stages of construction to make the build as simple as possible. And then there were the detailed plans, extensive construction notes and great box art, all drawn by Phil.

The only issue he had in the early days was that ‘the management’ insisted on supplying him with just a few standard sized boxes to fit his designs in. This caused a problem with larger models, such as necessitating joining fuselage side sheets as they were too long to fit in one piece. He resolved this later when a number of his creations featured glass fibre fuselages, so larger boxes had to be sourced; Designer 1 – Management 0.

140,000 KITS