Unlike Williams Taube, my build (thankfully) started quite smoothly. The first step was to piece together a set of scale plans using profiles from both the Windsock Datafile and Roland Aircraft of WW1 books, pictured here with the customary coin for scale. The plans pictured are actually for a late-production C.IIa which I hope to build when the C.II is finished.
The building started with the fuselage. I glued six layers of 0.5mm styrene together with the profile on top to guide the rough cutting. At the tail, the innermost layer is 0.25 styrene, rather than 0.5. This is because I wanted to leave a slot for the vertical stabilizer later on.
An hour or so had the starboard half roughly shaped
One the exterior was roughed in, I began gouging and carving out the interior and windows.
After a few hours of work, the halves were mostly complete. There is still a little shaping work left to be done around the nose, but I will wait to do that once the fuselage is glued together.
For the next Roland, I will definitely get either a solid block of styrene to carve or at least use thicker sheets to avoid splitting the layers apart during the carving stages.
