Siemens Schukert D.III 1/32

[Ted]

This will be a fun project, I love the look of the dark plywood fuselage with lozenge wings. The lozenge decals come with the kit and I'll give them a try. The only things I'm adding are some leftover Spandau cooling jackets and a little WNW windshield. 

 

The plastic is very soft!! I tried trimming some flash with a sharp knife and took out a big slice of the wing root. It will make it easier to fix some of the kit design errors but I'll have to be careful.

 

 

 

 

 

Here are a couple things I'll fix, I have to thank Mike Sandbagger Norris for highlighting these deficiencies during his excellent build of this kit.

 

The lifting points are actually fuselage longerons and so should be aligned along the horizontal panel lines. I will cut these out, reposition them and thin the walls from the inside.

 

 

 

[Ted]

The mods are done for the lifting points and I got rid of the panel lines on the front part of the fuselage. I also added a vertical panel line that was missing from each side of the rear fuselage. The plywood seat needed some holes and a cushion.

 

 

 

 

 

[Ted]

The kit comes with lots of cockpit parts, not nearly complete but enough to look decent. Except that there's no bulkhead behind the seat. I made one out of plastic card because it seems necessary to close off the fuselage and provide mounting points for the pilot's harness.

 

I painted oils over acrylics to simulate plywood and when that eventually dries I'll add some instrument decals, cables, and some plumbing.

 

 

 

[Ted]

Got the fuselage closed up, the cockpit has some control cables added which will never be seen. I also added a harness for the pilot made out of masking tape and some extra photo etched buckles.

 

 

 

 

 

The decals are a bit of a beast. The big one went on easy enough, and dried without too many bubbles. Trimming the excess caused a lot of chipping and shattering along the edge. But the trickiest thing is the rib strips. You have to cut 1 mm wide strips from the decal sheet, easy enough in theory but the decal material is too fragile. The 1 mm strips fall off the backing paper before they even get put in water. So I cut a strip, put some setting solution on the wing, then carefully moving the decal strip to the wing, often in small pieces. It is hard to understand why they did not print the rib strips on the wing decals. 

 

Should I bin the rest and order Aviattic lozenge decal sheets? Maybe if things get worse but it's hard to justify spending $65 on decals for a $50 kit. Even if I buy Aviattic decals I will still have to cut 1 mm rib strips which could be a pain.

 

Whinging complete.

 

 

 

 

[Marklo]

Great build so far. I have the Eduard 1/48 kit in the stash, maybe next year  
 

I’d be very much inclined to paint up some third party decal strips or kabuki tape and  go down that road. I’ve never had any great success with Roden decals.

Edited March 13, 2022 by Marklo

[Ted]

41 minutes ago, Marklo said:

I’d be very much inclined to paint up some third party decal strips or kabuki tape and  go down that road. I’ve never had any great success with Roden decals.

 

Good idea Marklo, I'll think about painting mono-colour rib tape if I run into worse issues with these decals.

 

I sprayed some Humbrol 75 on the cowling, some tamiya acrylic on the fuselage, and then brushed Vandyke brown oil paint on the plywood panels. It took a while to rub it into all of the panel lines, I'm happy with how it turned out.

 

 

 

 

[AdrianMF]

Your wood effect looks very nice indeed.

 

Regards,

Adrian

 

 

[pheonix]

Only just found this. An interesting project but not surprised about the Roden transfers!

 

The wood effect on the fuselage is first class.

 

P