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DFW t.28 Floh, perhaps the wierdest WWI fighter plane of all.


Marklo

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I have far too many WIP threads on at the moment, bu t this is so wierd/Cute/straightforward that I couldn't leave it to languish in my stash so this will be a fairly quick (dare I say it) mojo restorer,, so without further ado.

 

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Not a lot to the kit, one sprue, a PE fret an instrument panel film and some decals.

 

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Interior PE folded, glued and painted a nice woody brown. And there we have it for the moment.

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One of my favourites, I will be following with interest. 

Are you using any references for interior? I found them to be non existent and I wonder how they decided what the cockpit looked like.

 

I have the drawing of this already printed in 1/144 scale for scratch building, which will be a hilariously small 4cm span. 

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1 hour ago, Tomoshenko said:

Can't beat a bit of offbeat stuff. To be honest when I first saw it I thought it was one of those Hasegawa Egg Planes. Truth that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction!

It would be interesting to see what this would look like if Hasegawa did it as an Egg Plane.

 

A good start and as a completely barking mad subject, I clearly have a duty to add my support to your endeavours Marklo.

 

Dutiful of Mars 👽

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I’m in!

I was only looking at one of these with my figure hovering over the “Buy it Now!!” button the other day.

 

I didn’t, as I’m rather pink lint, so this build is perfectly timed. Did they use many of these in action during the war?

 

A wonderfully unusual design. Thanks for sharing here. Great stuff 👍 

 

Best regards

TonyT

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2 hours ago, TonyTiger66 said:

Did they use many of these in action during the war?

No, it never went into service and only existed as a prototype AFAIK.

 

AW

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Quote

Are you using any references for interior? I found them to be non existent and I wonder how they decided what the cockpit looked like.

Zero so far. I will go for plausible and use the likes of Albatros and Roland interiors to ground it.

 

Quote

Did they use many of these in action during the war?

As far as my (limited ) research goes there were two prototypes built, both were flown but never armed. They were fast but difficult to fly and land due to the very poor forward visibility.

 

Quote

It would be interesting to see what this would look like if Hasegawa did it as an Egg Plane.

If this looks like an egg plane of a Roland/Albatross then an egg plane of this should look like this (hmm far too many this's in that sentence) :-

32061885567_8302cfb93f_z.jpg

I see no flaws in my logic (ahem)

 

Edited by Marklo
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I can't comment as I haven't seen the logic.

Probably for the best. 

 

I'm working purely from the basis of a mathematical transformation such as  P(X) =Y  where P is a transformation to an egg kit, X is the initial state  and Y the final one. so

 

          P(Xfloh) =YFloh

 

and 

 

      P(XAlbatros) =YAlbatross

 

now since the initial state of the Floh looks like and egg kit we can say the

 

      XFloh= YAlbatros

 

making the end state of the albatross interchangeable with the initial state of the Flow thus 

 

      XAlbatross =YFlow

 

And thus

 

  P(XFloh)=XAlbatross  QED

 

Simple eh.  also works for the Roland.  This kind of thing keeps me sane (I think) 

 

Edited by Marklo
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  • 1 month later...

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Progress. Almost built now, just the wheels, prop and a few photo etch bits as well as the rigging (all holes drilled)

 

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This is it next to my FW190 (same scale btw)  for comparison, staggering to think that just over 20 years of aircraft development separate the two, I always find the pace of technology development in the 20th and 21st century amazing.

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Hi all,

The DFW T.28 'Floh' (Flea) was designed as a high speed fighter, which proved to be the case during test flights of the prototypes, as its speed was better than most at that time.

A single machine gun was to be installed inside the forward fuselage.

A second prototype was made with a redesigned elevator. However pilot visibility was bad and a test flight ended up with the aircraft undercarriage being damaged, it was dropped and never made it into operational service. 

 

I built the resin 1:32nd scale model from 'Planet Models', with a few modifications.

Photos and PDF build log are at:

 

Mikes WW1 aircraft models

 

 

page.jpg 

Edited by Sandbagger
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You have the disadvantage of working in a smaller scale, but you are making a great job out of the kit.

I'm looking forward to the final reveal,

 

Thank you. I have noticed that my undercarriage is a bit eccentric (like it's builder) , so may need some surgery this evening and  I'm in the process of scortchbriting off the grey paint that went on extremely patchily and with extra hairs from a new brush (grrrr) so so far so good. 

 

Actually I'm in the process of making my default scale 1/48 from 1/72 (only two complete builds so far and one of them  (my scratchbuilt Pup) is back on the bench owing to act of Cat) so it seems (comparatively) huge to me. I'm saving 1/32 and 1/24 scale for my latter years.

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40546830003_00622c9263_z.jpg

 

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Paint started. After much deliberation I ended up using AK interactive RFC Battleship grey as it has a nice blue hue to it ant is relatively pale, and is the closest (i think, possibly a l;ittl e dark, but it looks nice) to the required colour without  making up a mix, I did also consider Testors Light ghost grey and Compucolour RLM 74 Hellgrau, but neither really did it for me.   The AK paint is a bit funny, It's nice to brush paint, but it  took about 4 coats to get  a good finish, now I didn't exactly help myself here because I was using a new bristle brush at first and it kept shedding, so lots of scraping and scotchbrite was needed between coats to remove blemishes and drips. I changed to a decently large synthetic brush for the later coats and it made things much easier.

 

I also started lining out the black wing edges. Using a cunning tool made from some sheet and a polythene tube and a paint marker. The inner line is good the outer one messy so that's ok, once I've filled in the lines and done the corners.  All told shaping up well. Once the lining is finished I, just need to rig it and do the decals and it's just about done.

Edited by Marklo
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