Fred will be reporting his progress here.

What will you be building Fred

Mine will be based on a real almost-was.

Early in 1940 when the Germans invaded Norway the RAF was sent to operate there. They had to operate from frozen lakes. There was a lack of suitable landing areas. Thought was given to adding floats to Hurricanes so they could operate from the fjords.
Fairey was tasked with sorting it out. They prepared a set of floats and Hawker prepared and delivered a Hurricane to them. But thats as far as it got. The two were never joined and the plan was shelved/forgotten as the allies had to withdraw from Norway.

Soooooo, I intend to finish the job. Putting a MkII Hurricane onto floats & painting it in the proposed grey/green/white finish.

This is another conversion I've wanted to do and this GB will be the kick in the bottom I've need to get it done.

Sounds interesting.  Looking forward to seeing the build.

That sounds like an interesting project.
Alex

One of those ideas I've always had kicking around in the back of my mind too.

Looking forward to seeing the outcome of this.

_________________
SPENCER! Bring me my Angry Trousers!
                        [b] 2012 2011 2010 2009 [/b]
HURRICANES:  154      9!     17     14     17      
SPITFIRES:      147       4      16     23     16      

I have the Hurricane handy. Now just awaiting the arrival of some floats from one of our fellow ATF members.
But I must go look out the magazine which has the details. I may just find it in time before the build starts.

The actual floats were the same ones tried on a Blackburn Roc, which were themselves Blackburn Shark floats.

_________________
Visit my blog Naval Air History at http://navalairhistory.com/

Ta for that.
The mags I have say the floats were adapted from a F. Fox, [?] but made larger.
I'll be using whatever I can get as long as they look similar.

The original plan was to use newly built Hurricane MkIIs but the prototype was to use a worn out Mk1.

Fairey Fox/Seafox perhaps.

_________________
SPENCER! Bring me my Angry Trousers!
                        [b] 2012 2011 2010 2009 [/b]
HURRICANES:  154      9!     17     14     17      
SPITFIRES:      147       4      16     23     16      

No, they were the Roc floats which were Shark floats with water rudders. The drawings show that the strut arrangement was exactly the same as on the Roc floatplane - it would make sense as the Roc float gear was designed to be demountable, so it could have been fitted straight onto any aircraft that had the right pick-ups.

I don't think Fairey had anything to do with the project and in any case I doubt Seafox floats would have been big enough. The Hawker Hurricane website says 'One airframe allocated and part modified. Modified Blackburn Roc floats delivered to Kingston [suggesting that Hawker was doing the conversion work]. Conceived during Norwegian campaign but abandoned in June 1940. Design max. speed 210 mph at 10,000 ft.'

That speed was barely faster than the Blackburn Skuas that could be taken there rather more simply on the back of an aircraft carrier.

One of my references has a photo of the pair of floats with mountings, taken from 3/4 front right. The copyright of the photo is to Fairey, and it is captioned [by them supposedly] it was taken at their works, and these were the floats for the Hurricane conversion.
The reference says that Fairey took delivery of a Hurricane I and were making the fittings for mounting the floats when the concept was cancelled, due to the fall of Norway.

Of course, in the wartime many factories did work on other manufacturers items. It could have been plausible that Fairey had spare design and development time and were given the task and sought out the most appropriate floats already available for the prototype.
Your mentioning the dismountable point fits with the reference. Apparently the Minisrtry gave no thought to this but Fairey did and were going to make them dismountable so the Hurricanes could be used on shore bases when they became available.
The point of the floats was there were not enough aircraft carriers to go around and a lack of suitable landing grounds in Norway.

Anyway..... I have a pair of suitable looking and size floats. I'll have to scratch build the mounting frame.

Interesting. What's the reference? Mason (p.116) shows a picture of a pair of floats and struts fitted to a Hurricane centre-section, and notes that they are Roc floats. The floats and struts in that image show clear similarities to the floats fitted to Roc L3059 shown on pp. 23-25 of my book on the Skua and Roc. There was only one Hurricane allocated for conversion (N2599) and this was at Kingston according to the references I've seen, so something's amiss here.

The point of the floats was to allow the RAF to operate fighters in overseas campaigns as they were supposed to - the Skua was intended for fleet defence and dive bombing, not doing the crabs' job for them which is what it ended up doing.

It's highly doubtful that Faireys had spare design and development time in 1940 - they were flat out on the Barracuda, which had needed numerous redesigns due to the Admiralty changing their requirements, and the cancellation of the Boreas engine, and they had only just finished the Fulmar and Albacore. They were also working on a Skua replacement (N.8/39) and Roc replacement (N.9/39), a heavy bomber to B.1/39 (which asked for a huge advance on current technology) and several engines including their hugely complex P.24 'Monarch' and the smaller 'Queen'.

_________________
Visit my blog Naval Air History at http://navalairhistory.com/

XN923 & I have been discussing the Floating Hurri. And it would appear he has better and more accurate reference of the proposed prototype than I have.
However: as I said at the start, this is based on the idea.
I'm not for building an accurate prototype Floatie Hurricane for that to me is not a WHIFF.
My Hurricane will be in the colours and markings of one of the squadrons which took [or could have taken] part in the Norwegian campaign as if these Hurricanes had been made and issued to squadrons.
Therefore, My Hurri will be a Mk IIA, on floats.

Fair point Fred - I keep forgetting this is the 'What If' GB after all! (Doesn't help that the thread is up at the same time as the 'Seaplanes' GB). I look forward to seeing your build progress in any case.

Do you know what markings you're going for yet? I confess it would be interesting to see a Malta floatplane...

Hi Fred have you got your parts for the build yet

Yup I have the bits but just lately I couldn't be bothered to do any modelling.
Anything I touched just seemed to go wrong. I got a building just about finished [made out of thin plaster walls]. Getting up from my desk my foot caught a wire - which was attached to a lamp next to the building, and which fell over launching said building to the floor. I can stick the bits together again tho.

And this weekend I have to get on with a load of my Christmas baking.

Now that you've reminded me of this build - let me say here a big thankyou to justplanecrazy who supplied a pair of suitable floats for this build.
Thankyou justplane crazy,

Ummm, as usual, goldfish brain me forgot I was doing something for this.
Last week I was building a couple of Hurricanes for my club and thought  'Aren't I supposed to be building another Hurri for something?'
So I dug one out of my special Hurristash and started it.

Oops - forgot to take a photo of it pre-work.
But not much done on it yet. I've discarded all the bits I won't need, like wheels.


On the left, a standard Airfix Hurricane radiator, on the right after I've replaced the front with one I cast up and got rid of those rivets.



And the floats



I'm toying with the idea of having an open cockpit. You know what pilots are like. They'd fear being trapped if the Hurricane sank and would prefer the open cockpit.

Very interesting build Fred Check out the link below for an open top Hurri

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/s ... hp?t=91036

I am going to have a go at converting a Hurri to this configuration some time soon

Regards

Chris

_________________
Regards
Chris
2011 - 31 built
2012 - 36 built    
2013 - 18 built...so far

I'm building one of those Russian jobs now. I have to put some stretched sprue in for the fuselage framing.
I've already done the Persian 2-seater IIC, with open cockpits [ in my 'portfolio']