Hello all,
I didn’t have to wait until installing the wings for having again a lot of troubles. When installing the engine, the two cowling halves didn’t make it to be fit upon the fuselage. There was a teriffic gap. So I had to cut a lot of parts from the engine and even then the two halves didn’t match properly. I had finally to fill them. But the engine axle was out-centered. Well….
The Roden decals which I used for the first time, as for my previous Roden builds I used Pheon and Super scale, went on rather decently. Until I had to decal the rudder. This was a most difficult work. But they are on. They are very fragile though.
As predicted, the wings installment was like going through hell. I first glued the interplane “V” struts to the upper wing and glued the upper wing on the cabane struts. That went quite well. When dryfitting the lower wings, the pins of the “V” struts didn’t match at all (in all directions), and that is even an understatement. I had some gaps on the joint of the lower wings to the fuselage where a Fokker could pass through. So I began (after deliberation with my partner Ernie) to fill them up with styrene. Little by little the dryfitting was looking better and I finally started glueing the business. That went totally wrong as when the right side was done, the front cabane struts were pointing to Germany. No way to bring them straight when glueing the other lower wing on.
The next photo almost induced me to transfer the build to the hall of shame models:
So I decided to do the rigging as good and as bad as I could. I must confess that I speeded to the finish so it could be done more carefully. The tail rigging wasn’t done (and wasn’t done either in the instructions). There are two tailplanes and two rudders in the kit, one of them was greyed out, so not supposed to be used. There was no decal for the second rudder too. But the tailplane to be used had no holes in it for the control cables to pass through and neighter holes for the fixing of the control horns. As I already had nothing but problems with the kit (in every department) I decided not to rig the tail.
As I said, I was (shame on me) speeding to the finish, so the rigging could have been done more carefully. The undercarriage could have been mounted better too. I wonder what some more experienced modeler with greater skills than I have can do with this kit. Because I don't think that for all the troubles I had, the kit is to be blamed. The problem is that I didn't learn too much of it, because I don't really know what I have done wrong. It's not a catastrophy because it didn't even take one and a half month of my life
(I started at the end of November)
Here are the photos of the finished model. Thank you for passing by and for all the good advice and kind encouragements I received.
Kind regards
Patrick
