'Model Aircrafts' balsawood kit : Zero

Boxed balsawood kit of a Zero fighter. Box obverse is illustrated in three colours with a diving aircraft against a city background, with the legend 'MODEL AIRCRAFT / 16" FLYING MODEL'; the sides with 'A Model Aircrafts quality product / Model Aircrafts Sydney'. Reverse is printed in red and blue and features the kit instructions, with the serial 'TYPE F.A.', and a listing of the other 'Airflow' Construction kits available. Contents consist of two thin printed balsa sheets, a large quantity of balsa stringers and a single cube of balsa, wrapped in thin brown paper.

Little is known of Model Aircrafts Ltd. A Sydney-based company established in 1928 and operating from premises at 1 Bond St, Sydney, they manufactured a series of boxed balsawood aircraft, truck and ship kits. The evidence of their production is based on their wartime output, which is imaginative and extensive – and includes contemporary subjects such as the Mitsubishi Zero and the Hawker Hurricane – but extremely basic and evidently restricted by Australia’s wartime austerity drive and materials rationing. Thus, wartime contents for aircraft frequently provide merely a simple block of balsa and a 2.5 cm square of sandpaper with instructions to ‘shape fuselage according to the illustration’. Wartime plans are often signed ‘J Mercer’.