I started this in 2006 for the 90th anniversary of the Somme battle. I finished it for the 100th anniversary in 2016. The Gavia kit is not too good. The fuselage sides are flat, the center part of the upper wing,
the engine and propeller are wrong just to mention some of the main faults. I started the project with the original Gavia kit. I managed to fix the fuselage sides and the upper wing somehow, but that was how far I could get.
Later on I found the Special Hobby version of the same kit with reasonable price. The SH boxing has some good resin parts
for the cockpit included and my Eduard Fokker E.I project left me a good engine and propeller as spare parts so I decited to continue with the build. The last drawback with the build were the 1/48 GasPach turnbuckles I used for the rigging. Most of them appeared to have no proper loop to get fishing line,
EZ line or even very thin copper wire through, so I had to invend many different methods to glue the riggin material on the turnbuckles. The results are not too convincing. In 1/32 the GasPach turnbuckles are fine, but in 1/48 I might have done better without them.
Eduard's new Fokker Eindecker kit in 1/48 is quite nice. The rib tape detail is ok, but the same kind of detail on the fuselage is - of course - too much and you'd better sand it away. As a matter fact you should sand them away from the rudder and elevator, too, tho I did not do that. The parts represending the steel tubes of the fuselage frame are too thick, too, I think, but you don't most of them after you have glued the fuselage halves together, so they do not matter that much. The kit contains an engine for Fokker E.I, but not the shorter 11 rib wings and slickly shorter fuselage that were typical to most of the E.Is. Immelman's 13/15 certainly had 11 rib wings, so I have to cut the wings shorter and I also detailed the early type triangle footboards on the root of the wings. I did not do very well with the swirl effect on the nose metal parts. My first rigging with elastic thread was quite bad so I did the job again with monofilament fishing line and GasPach 1/32 turnbuckles (Those have a loop to put the line through. The 1/48 turnbuckles too often don't have one!).
I build this old Eduard kit just to test the Old Propeller 'faded' 4 colour lozenge decal and rehearse with lozenge decal in general. For the rib tapes I used Aviattic 'faded' on white base, since Old Propeller does not have such a product. All their lozenges are transparent and thus no good for rib tapes. They offer only blue and pink tapes. I cut rib tapes for the first time and seem to have made them way too wide. Well, you live and you learn...
A model of Jasta 11 ace Werner Steinhauser's later machine, 564/17, in April 1918. The yellow band with red crosses around the fuselage is painted since the kit decal sheet offers the band in reversed colours. A red band with yellow crosses was painted on the fuselage of Steinhausers earlier triplane. It might be that the yellow eyes on the engine cowling were also only found on the earlier plane. I painted the striped camo with artistic oil colours on acrylic basecolour
More about these builds in Pienoismalli (www.pienoismalli.com) magazine vol. 5, 2009. OOPS! I really messed up the striped camo on the wings of Manfred's 152/17!
A very good kit also, thought it did take more putty and sanding than the other DML Dragon Fokker kits. The plastic struts connected to the fuselage were badly twisted an I had to rebuild them partly. The fin and the rudder were seemingly too small and wrong shape, so I scratched new ones. I also sanded the tips of the ailerons to more accurate shape and added a compass on the cockpit floor. Since most references suggest that Udet's 'candy-stripe-Du-doch-nicht' machine was an early Fokker or OAW built DVII, I had to rebuild the right side of the nose. Thought the construction sheet tells you to build a late Fokker style machine, there are, however, a pair of extra side plates for the nose included in the kit. A pair that is more like the side plates used in the earliest Fokker and OAW built machines. You just cut away a pair of oddly placed cooling holes and they're perfect! The upper right side of the nose and the early style exhaust pipes you have to do yourself. Ernst Udet's candy striped Fokker is one of the most famous planes of the Great War. Still nobody knows what it exactly looked like! My source for this version is Jay Thompson's beautiful piece of computer art (http://www.wwi-models.org/Images/Thompson_J/Fokker/index.html), which is based on Dan San Abbot's latest research on the subject. The version looked nice to me, so I did it. Heaven knows if it's more 'accurate' than any of the others!
Not quite as good as Fokker EV/DVIII from the same manufacturer, but excellent Fokker Triplane anyway. I built this OOB, thought there are some details not quite accurate. The tail's a bit too pointy and the undersurfaces of the wings are peculiar. I used Aeromaster decals rather than the kit's own. The later are mostly identical to those of Aeromaster, but the kit's own had gone yellow. Taping them on a sunny window will bring the white back, but the Dragon decals still have the tendency of being too transparent, so I preferred the Aeromaster sheet, which I got as a part of the bargain, since I bought the kit as a second hand item. The decals for the wing struts I took from the kit's own sheet, however, since the Aeromaster sheet offers two pairs of the markings for the left struts! (I reckon that OL and UL stand for 'Ober Links' and 'Under Links' respectively. The 'Rechts' i.e. the right struts should be OR and UR). This one won the 1st prize in Aeroplanes Out of Box series at Model Expo, Helsinki, 2003!
DML Dragon Fokkers have an excellent reputation and they fully deserve it! This was definitely the best designed and molded kit I've ever built. No putty and very little sanding were needed. OOB thinking at its best. Even a piece of steel wire is suplied for the rigging (a bit thick thought). Many people have criticized the lozenge decals of this model. I believe that there was variability in the coulours depending on the manufacturer and the lot. I think the colours of these decals are just about possible. This is a model of a machine flown by Hans Goerth, Feld Marine Jasta 3 in October. For statue fans the kit has also a resin bust of the pilot included.