This is the 1/32 Nieuport 16 by Special Hobby which I couldn’t resist turning into an Aviatik 30.40.
One of my favourite things to do is customise model kits into aeroplanes that you just can’t buy. The Nieuport fuselage wasn’t a perfect match but it was pretty close – and certainly good enough for me.
I used a bit of poxy to sculpt the turtledeck behind the cockpit, made the wing from styrene sheet and strips, and the struts and undercarriage are brass rods and tubes. The beautiful wheels are from Gaspatch, the cowling is a spare from Lukgraph’s Ansaldo Baby plus some styrene sheet I warped to shape around the jar my ADHD medicine comes in. I filled in the breather holes on the front of the cowling with more poxy but didn’t like the ones on the actual 30.40 so left them out (we’ll just say this must have been a water-cooled rotary). And speaking of the engine, this is a nine-cylinder spare - probably from an old Fokker Triplane kit - but the real 30.40 had an eleven cylinder engine.
Maybe when Aviattic releases their new Pfalz I’ll retrofit one of their engines into this kit.
I’ve got a few more Nieuports, one of which I’ll turn into a Hanriot HD1 at some stage.
