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"Experts" wrong again......


Allan31

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It really pays to do your own research. 

 

Years ago, many years, I did a "super build" on the old Revell 1/32 109. I found several articles decrying the fact the fuselage was about 14-20 scale inches too short.

I did my math and to me, it seemed fine so I built my model without adding the required fuselage plug in front of the vertical stabilizer. Years later when Hasegawa came out with their wonderful kit I got one and just for S&G's, I put the Hasegawa up next to the old Revell,....... they were exactly the same in length...

 

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Fast forward decades, I find the particular rabbit hole I'm in at the moment is re-building some of the classic kits from my yoot with my adult building skills. To that end I have the old Revell 1/28  scale WW1 trio in the stash. I wasn't going to bother with the DVII because it was issued much later and I read is was terrible.

I found one complete in sealed bag at a tag sale for 3dollars and home it went with me.

 

Yes, the kit has some issues. Why they did the upper wing the way did is beyond me but is stupid easy to fix. But one of the other "fatal flaws" is the depth of the fuselage that "must" be corrected or you just can't build a proper Fokker DVII.....

 

Well, yet again, Revell got it exactly right..... I know it's not a "perfect" side view but the length and height will not be different than seen below.

 

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I'm glad I did my own fact checking, I feel badly for all those people that hacked out 3/16" or more to move the entire bottom fuselage up.

 

Just a heads-up.........

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Sorry I can see the discrepancy. It's obvious the kit is unbuildable. Throw it in the bin. 🤣 Sorry garbage, you being American. 🇺🇲

 

Joking aside. You've proved once again as you say 'it pays to do your own research'. 

 

I found it myself recently when I researched a well known subject. Everyone got it wrong. I even came across a reference from the seventies which was wrong which made me wonder how far back in time the error originated. 

 

Well done. 

 

Edit: Also well done with the photos. They really illustrate it exactly. 

Edited by noelh
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A very good lesson here for many 'experts' and not just in aircraft.

 

In AFV world a myth about the Churchill tank hull width changing dramatically was comprehensively debunked by three of us over a few hours online. I've found that many of the old classics are a better fit than some modern kits and often much more accurate than people say. Excellent work investigating and doing image magic to demonstrate it.

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Interesting. From your photo/kit juxtaposition, are you not bothered that the (real) pilot's head is stuck on the fuselage behind the kit cockpit opening? Something odd going on there. I'm off to check the kit against dimensions from a real aeroplane.

 

Paul.

Edited by Paul Thompson
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The view is not pure side on, therefore the fuselage will appear deeper in proportion to the length.  Whether this will result in the difference quoted I don't know (nor care, particularly, not an era of great personal interest) but using a measurement based on this photo will result in a fuselage that is too deep on the model.

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Sorry Graham. If this A/C were to be photographed slightly more aimed to the right with this lens from this distance, "yawed" to the right if you will, the length of the fuselage would change the height would not.

The major axis is vertical, (almost exactly at the cockpit) the minor would be horizontal from rudder to engine.

 

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You see it all the time looking at roundels.

Edited by Allan31
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Paul !!! .....if indeed you do have access to a real, known to be accurate and authentic A/C, some critical dimensions would be interesting to get with a tape measure.

A. The distance from the rear most cockpit combing to the front most edge of the horizontal stabilizer on top of fuselage.

B. The vertical dimension at rear from bottom of fuselage to bottom of horizontal stabilizer at rudder.

C. Vertical dimension on the side from bottom of fuselage to center edge of cockpit combing.

D. The horizontal dimension along fuselage from line "B" to line "C" from above.

 

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Any chance we can get these dimensions in inches?

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Not personally unfortunately, but I recall more than one article where various real D.VIIs were measured and hope I can find them. Might take a day or two, there's a lot of junk on my shelves and no filing system. One source I think was an American on the World War One Mailing List, so he'll probably have used inches.

 

Paul.

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Is this not a classical case of requiring people to state their sources and methods which led them to their conclusions? I strongly object to the modern trend of anti-intellectualism whereby everyone thinks their opinions are valid. That neither means that anyone is not able to carry out research, nor does it mean that there is no such thing as a subject matter expert.

 

I'm frequently disagreed with on certain subjects, but often it's because someone thinks something is a reasonable argument because they only possess some reference material I have to hand. Had they already been aware of all of the circumstantial facts then they'd have arrived at a different conclusion. I've learned that no matter how much reference material we gather, there is always something we don't have and there will always be someone comes along who has it. It can be embarrassing to be corrected, especially in public, but it's ok to acknowledge that we weren't previously aware of something and have now revised our views. Often though, people choose to be aggressive about it.

 

Basically though, if people want to make statements about stuff, then the burden of proof is upon them to construct a robust argument which will argue their point for them. We should not listen to someone simply because they make a statement. We should listen to them if their evidence is compelling. Often contradicting arguments are both based on evidence, but usually some of the evidence holds more gravitas than the other evidence does. I'd trust a primary source reference such as an engineering document with the manufacturer's stamp on it before I trusted a 3-view drawing on airwar.ru for example. I'd trust an official contemporary military publication over a modern book.

 

Like Graham I don't know or particularly care what may or may not be wrong with this kit, but I do know what compelling evidence looks and feels like. Kit parts laid over a skewed photograph is pretty much bottom-drawer evidence. Even ignoring parallax errors digital photographs are just too easily resized in height or width altering their aspect ratios so unless it was definitely my own photo I wouldn't trust it much. That said, depending on who said "experts" were and what they based their claims on, it might either be better evidence or fail The Laugh TestTM spectacularly depending on whether this evidence was eyeballing and un-referenced opinion or factory drawings or measuring a fullsize original example.

 

Again, I don't really care which is the case here - but the sentiment of "Experts" Wrong Again makes me a bit uncomfortable but that's perhaps me making a bigger societal link that wasn't intended, since nowadays every other person seems to think their opinion or Youtube Research confirmation biasing qualifies them to contradict, well, take your pick really - lawyer, economist, doctor, climatologist - the list of people who have dedicated their lives to a particular specialism being contradicted by folk who don't realise how much they don't know about it really is vast.

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13 minutes ago, Allan31 said:

Paul !!! .....if indeed you do have access to a real, known to be accurate and authentic A/C, some critical dimensions would be interesting to get with a tape measure.

A. The distance from the rear most cockpit combing to the front most edge of the horizontal stabilizer on top of fuselage.

B. The vertical dimension at rear from bottom of fuselage to bottom of horizontal stabilizer at rudder.

C. Vertical dimension on the side from bottom of fuselage to center edge of cockpit combing.

D. The horizontal dimension along fuselage from line "B" to line "C" from above.

 

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Any chance we can get these dimensions in inches?

 

Kermit Weeks has a D.VII. He's fairly interactive on Facebook and may facilitate getting you dimensions.

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6 minutes ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

Is this not a classical case of requiring people to state their sources and methods which led them to their conclusions? I strongly object to the modern trend of anti-intellectualism whereby everyone thinks their opinions are valid. That neither means that anyone is not able to carry out research but nor does it mean that there is no such thing as a subject matter expert.

 

Ietc.........................

..........with which I agree.  The original review I think Allan was referring to was by Ray Rimell (who usually knows what he's talking about) in Windsock vol 12, no 2, 1996. It goes into some depth, identifies what sources probably lead Revell to make their errors, and documents many of the erros identified with reference to period photos. I'm happy that all the errors pointed out are real except the fuselage depth - and I wouldn't have questioned that either because it is at least true when you use the 1/28th plans in the review. The plans may not be right, but I'd expect they'd have double checked. Rimell also refers to plans made in 1919 for the German publication Luftfahrt, which should be fairly reliable. The kit seems to have been based on Plans by Joseph Nieto from 1951.

 

By the way, for anyone really wanting to convert real life millimetres to inches in 1/28th scale, multiply by 0.03937 and divide by 28. That's in the review too.

 

Paul.

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I've done my own research and I'm happy with my results and that works for me.
If Revell got it wrong so many years ago, then the latest iteration that is so highly acclaimed and worshiped got it wrong as well.
Enjoy your hobby to the fullest, have fun.......

 

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All but one of those images shows the Revell fuselage to be deeper than the image below it. The only figures I've come up with are for the tailplane, which confirms what Rimell said about it being too large. I have several built D.VIIs in various scales, and the only one that looks odd compared to period pictures of the real thing is the Revell 1/28th kit (allowing for my first Roden 1/48th having too large a wing gap because I had yet to suss what needed messing with strut-wise). So having other things to do I'll bow out now.

 

Paul.

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Actually they are not deeper. I tried shooting to show the bottom edge but that screwed up the top. The plastic lines up almost perfectly with the WnW drawings.

It's the best I could do with my phone camera.

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7 hours ago, Allan31 said:

Sorry Graham. If this A/C were to be photographed slightly more aimed to the right with this lens from this distance, "yawed" to the right if you will, the length of the fuselage would change the height would not.

The major axis is vertical, (almost exactly at the cockpit) the minor would be horizontal from rudder to engine.

 

Screen_Shot_2021-07-29_at_6.41.20_AM.png

 

You see it all the time looking at roundels.

If I'm not mistaken, if you take a photo that is not taken dead-90° to the longitudinal axis and scale it to match the fuselage length, you will arrive at something the less accurate the bigger the deviation from 90° is. It's not just turning about the vertical axis, you effectively do a stretch on magnifying which will affect other dimensions as well.

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It's not just that, unless the photo is taken using a telephoto lens from a long way away, there are distortions due to parallax because parts of the aircraft are further away than others, and the lens increases this effect by converting a 3D view into a 2D one.    This depends upon the distanace of the camera from the subject, and the characteristics of the lens.   Photogrammetry is a much harder science than generally assumed.

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2 hours ago, Paul Thompson said:

and the only one that looks odd compared to period pictures of the real thing is the Revell 1/28th kit (allowing for my first Roden 1/48th having too large a wing gap because I had yet to suss what needed messing with strut-wise). So having other things to do I'll bow out now.

 

Can you recall any details of what needs to be done please? I have a stash resident that I'd like to be able to build...

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  • 2 weeks later...

This same nonsense appears on hyperscale. The OP's own evidence doesn't even back up the OP's assertion.

 

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In defense of experts I quote WWI aviation historian Greg Van Wyngarden's quote of Niels Bohr's quote "An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field."

Edited by wmcgill
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Gents can we stay away from calling people out and naming names like in this thread. 

 

Not what I have come to expect from this corner of the forum.

 

Thanks

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Cheers Julien 👍

Can I ask though; what was the Cross and Cockade volume that was mentioned, which dealt with the issue of the debunking of the incorrect WW1 colours?  It sounds like a fascinating article and I was hoping to purchase it over the weekend. 

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5 minutes ago, Putty Animal said:

what was the Cross and Cockade volume that was mentioned, which dealt with the issue of the debunking of the incorrect WW1 colours?  It sounds like a fascinating article and I was hoping to purchase it over the weekend. 

 

Volume 26 Number 3

https://www.crossandcockade.com/store/Product.asp?cat=33&id=144

 

HTH

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