22″ wingspan
Class: Sport flyer
Skill Level: Experienced / Easy
The Silver Lancer kit is based on Bill Barnes’ stories by George L. Easton published in the Air Trails magazines of the 1930’s and 1940’s. This kit is eligible for Flying Aces Club Fiction Fighter contest (2004 contest sponsored by Easy Built Models). This kit includes 8 vacuum-molded parts. Below is the Silver Lancer prototype featured on the cover of the 1936 Air Trails magazine. Use it as documentation for your model.
This free flight rubber powered kit includes a full-size rolled CAD drawn plan, laser cut balsa parts and hand-picked balsa strip wood, FAI rubber, vacuum-molded canopy, spinner, wheel pods, valve covers and scoops, Peck propeller, EBM thrust bearing, and Easy Built Lite silver tissue, and TissueCal™ markings. To build this model you will need a building board, hobby knife, fine sandpaper, and glue.
“Achtung! Vee haft captured the Barnes luftplane…”
Bud Overn, former officer of the Bill Barnes Air Adventurer Club sent us a copy of the 1936 Air Trails magazine cover showing the prototype of the Silver Lancer along with a description of the plane.
Dear Sir:
The 1936 Bill Barnes Silver Lancer originally had the following color scheme, as portrayed in the July, 1936 Air Trails cover.
All silver with red air scoops, red crescent tips on wings, stabilizer and rudder, red spinner. Red on the bottom of main and auxiliary floats and water rudder, red BB-1 on sides of aft fuselage.
The cover image shown is the prototype. Later model had longer engine covers, and the main float extended all the way forward on the fuselage. After so much damage from air combat, Martin, Bill’s head mechanic, simplified the color scheme to:
All silver with red spinner, red air scoops, red on the bottom of the floats, and red BB-1. The red tip crescents and red float rudder were abandoned. As much as Bill would have liked the military to buy his designs, they found them too advanced and complicated. The Lancer never had any military insignia; especially German. The Lancer was destroyed in 1938 by a thermal bomb device.
Overn’ Out
Bud Overn
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