Projekt Eindecker: WnW Fok. E.I (Early)

[NigelR]

Lovely work here Dutch, I really like the weathering. The interior is looking fantastic. Pity Schrodinger has his grasping claws ready for it.....

[AngryJazz]

Amazing work Dutch! You really captured the look of the cockpit. Colors, dirt and grime all look spot on 

[PrzemoL]

Great work on the cockpit!

[Dutch522]

Thank you all, “she’s a gettin’ there” as my grandfather used to say.

Nigel, thanks to you I’m thinking of sponsoring a Schrödinger Trophy here on the forum for the Best Detail Nobody Will Ever See. The actual award will be a big cardboard box and a bag of cat food.

Ben, I’m having such fun getting things grungy that I may end up overdoing it. But there again Eindeckers were filthy little beasts…

And Prze, thanks. I’m constantly referring to your build of Wintgens’s machine!

Dutch

[Mike Norris (UK)]

Thank you all, “she’s a gettin’ there” as my grandfather used to say.

Nigel, thanks to you I’m thinking of sponsoring a Schrödinger Trophy here on the forum for the Best Detail Nobody Will Ever See. The actual award will be a big cardboard box and a bag of cat food.

Ben, I’m having such fun getting things grungy that I may end up overdoing it. But there again Eindeckers were filthy little beasts…

And Prze, thanks. I’m constantly referring to your build of Wintgens’s machine!

Dutch

Hi Dutch,
Just send an empty box as the prize.
After all, no-one will be able to see what's inside it, once it's closed up  ,

Mike

[NigelR]

Nigel, thanks to you I’m thinking of sponsoring a Schrödinger Trophy here on the forum for the Best Detail Nobody Will Ever See. The actual award will be a big cardboard box and a bag of cat food.

Excellent! I'm sure I will win it. Yet at the same time, I also won't win it..........

[Dutch522]

Good point, Mike, this quantum modeling is a difficult thing to wrap your head around...

And Nigel, having just seen your Strutter cockpit there’s no question that the prestigious Trophy—or rather the potentiality of the Trophy—will simultaneously be appearing/not appearing in your mailbox soon.

Dutch

[KiwiZac]

Goodness, I spend a few days away from the forum and everyone gets all philosophical 

The cockpit is looking terrific! Having seen three Engels E.III reproductions in person - one flying (photos of that airframe by Jamo here, one running - (and asking the pilots to autograph the kit box), and with the recent inundation of stunning large-scale builds of the family, I'm itching to get started on the little Airfix Eindecker.

[Mike Norris (UK)]

Hi Dutch,
Zac posted some shots of the Eindecker in the 'Aircraft' page of the forum.
One shows something most modelers of the Eindecker's miss.
The flying/landing wire turnbuckles for the wings are colour coded as per the original aircraft.
Red on the starboard (right) wing and Green/Blue on the left.

Mike

[PrzemoL]

Hi Dutch,
Zac posted some shots of the Eindecker in the 'Aircraft' page of the forum.
One shows something most modelers of the Eindecker's miss.
The flying/landing wire turnbuckles for the wings are colour coded as per the original aircraft.
Red on the starboard (right) wing and Green/Blue on the left.

Mike

That is an interesting thing about the coloured turnbuckles. Thank you, Mike! I will have to amend my E.I with this. But before I do, I would just prefer to make sure, why did not they follow the pattern of the position lamps of ships (or modern aircraft) with red-left and green-right...

[Dutch522]

Mike, many thanks for clearing up a mystery that’s been puzzling me for some time now! I’ve been trying to figure out the meaning of the “colour-coded turnbuckle" inscriptions on the wingtips of the E-series a/c that are occasionally visible: “Rote Spannscholßer nicht öffnen” and “Blaue Spannschloßer öffnen”. You can clearly see them in the photo on pg. 70 of Herris & Scott’s Fokker Aircraft of WWI, Vol. II... I totally missed them in Zac’s photos and in your E.IV build log.

And Zac, that’s the kind of silliness that’s only to be expected when you and Dave and Brad and Lance’s backs are turned

All best,

Dutch

[gedmundson]

Finally, my son Curt was at the local Barnes & Nobel a couple of weeks ago and, seeing that the then-current issue of Model Airplane International featured a build of the WnW E.II, bought it for me. I finally got around to reading the article the other day; my first thought was "Wow! What a fantastic build!" Then I glanced at the author's name, and burst out laughing, it was our own Gary Edmundson... whose build log of this very model I have bookmarked, and which, along with Prze's E.I and Tim Mixon's double-build of the Navy E.IIIs, pretty much inspired this whole epic project. Grab the issue if you still can!



Unfortunately the entire article is flagged as a 1:48 build on the page headers, but I guess the editors missed that!

Dutch

Thanks for the kind words, Dutch! I never see these magazines and was unaware that my article had been mis-labelled as 1/48...must have a word with Brett Green about that 

[Mike Norris (UK)]

Hi Dutch,
Zac posted some shots of the Eindecker in the 'Aircraft' page of the forum.
One shows something most modelers of the Eindecker's miss.
The flying/landing wire turnbuckles for the wings are colour coded as per the original aircraft.
Red on the starboard (right) wing and Green/Blue on the left.

Mike

That is an interesting thing about the coloured turnbuckles. Thank you, Mike! I will have to amend my E.I with this. But before I do, I would just prefer to make sure, why did not they follow the pattern of the position lamps of ships (or modern aircraft) with red-left and green-right...

Yes, being ex-RAF, I also wondered why the colours were opposite.
Here's what an IMPS America review of an Eindecker said:

As you will see from some of the photos, the Eindeckers used a color-coded system for identifying which turnbuckles went where.
The aircraft were regularly transported on wagons which were pulled by various vehicles.
Their rigging was taken down and the wings secured alongside the fuselage for transport.
When reassembling the wings and rigging, it was evidently important that turnbuckles meant for the starboard wing were not used on the port wing, and vice versa.
Consequently, the turnbuckles were color-coded and instructions to this effect were stenciled on the wingtips for the mechanic’s edification – starboard red, port green, and the pylon turnbuckles were painted blue.'

Mike

[Dutch522]

Be advised this isn’t strictly modeling, but it is still on the red/blue theme and I thought some of you might find it interesting to get a glimpse into the decal-making end of Projekt Eindecker. I took a few hours last night and today to prepare the vector art for the stenciled lettering that’s going to go on the wings, fuselage, and inner wheel covers, and one of the elements I’ve really been looking forward to creating is the stenciling that appeared on the wingtips (which now makes sense, thanks to Mike Norris), Rote Spannlössen nicht öffnen and Blaue Spannlössen öffnen—“Don’t open the red turnbuckles” and “Open the blue turnbuckles”. I couldn’t find a decent picture of the actual lettering, so I started with a photo of one of the New Zealand E.IIIs from Jamo’s SmugMug page, which I imported into Photoshop:



… and then manipulated until it was kinda-sorta on a straight line:



After that it was a matter of laying out a couple of guides to establish the size of the letters, then using the Pen tool to “draw” each one… actually outlining them with a path made up of mathematical control points connected by combinations of straight lines and Bézier curves:



After doing outlines for all the letters and adjusting them for visual balance, I cut and pasted all the paths onto a vector mask over layers of solid black, red, and blue, and eventually ended up with this:



Some of it is guesswork on my part; as a graphic designer I based the “B” in “Blaue” on my knowledge of the type of Art Nouveau typefaces that were in common usage in 1915. Also, on the NZ E.III repro there’s only a single line of lettering in black, with the flag at the end, most likely because of the information they had to work with when it was built; the red letters showed up as black on orthochromatic film, while the blue washed out against the relatively light background of the doped linen and simply disappeared in most period photos. It’s only in a very few that the lettering shows clearly, as in this detail from the Aeronaut Press Fokker Aircraft of WWI, Vol. II:



To me it looks like the warnings were meant to be read by the riggers from the front of the aeroplane, as it looks like the “flagstaff” is parallel to the edge of the white field for the national insignia. At least that’s the way I interpreted it, if anyone has evidence to the contrary, please let me know.

Anyway, as I’m sure many of you know, the advantage of doing this stuff as vector art rather than just drawing it freehand or as a pixel-based “raster” file is that it becomes resolution-independent; for instance this Maximall logo I did for the fuel gauge can be shrunk down to 1:32, or blown up to fit on the side of the Goodyear blimp with no loss of detail (subject only to dpi capability of the printer or display system):



It’d kind of make a cool T-shirt, wouldn’t it?

Dutch

[hsmed]

Thank you for this 'mini-guide'. I am trying to make my own decals with no previous knowledge in graphic design or the use of drawing tools, so it was very interesting for me to read.