Rigging an Airfix Eindecker/BE2c

[beetcleaner]

Although my scale is 1/48 I am tempted to build the new Airfix Eindecker and BE2c.

 

Saw them in my LMS the other day and one of the paint schemes for the BE2c is for a machine based at East Fortune in December 2016. I live not too far away from East Fortune and have visited the Museum of Flight on many occasions so a centenary build would be nice to do. Tom Grigat's build of the Eindecker on the Airfix website has also got me in the mood.

 

Can someone tell me the best way to go about rigging these two models as i have never attempted it before and it makes such a difference to the finished model. One other point is how to paint the very small landing wheels that come with these kits as they don,t have separate centers to the wheels. Is it a case of cutting paper masks or using thinned paint and capillary action to run the paint around the rims?

 

Thankyou for any advice.

[Black Knight]

For the wheels I slap the centre colour on then use a fine brush to paint the tyre, very carefully.

 

For the Eindecker rigging I used a length of stretched sprue, very fine fishing line would do the job as well.

 

For the wings I did the undercart frame first then the forward wing wires; I started at the undercarriage frame; glued an end on, fed the line up through the first wing hole, [nearest the fuselage]  over the top A frame, down through the other wing's hole, to the u/c frame, attached to one of the members, across the u/c frame then up through the outermost wing hole, over the top A frame, down through the outermost hole in the other wing and finished back at the u/c frame

The aft wing wires were done in the same way.

For something for the wires to attach to on the top A frame I drilled through the apex with a 0.3mm drill and put a bit of fine wire through from front to back. This was trimmed off neat when all was done.

 

I haven't done the BE2 yet.

For my regular bipes I drill holes right through the wings or into the fuselage and glue lengths of very fine fishing line in place. I hold them under tension whilst glue dries.