Hello,
I am starting my first steps in bigger scale modelling. I think an Albatros D I is going to be a good start.
The kit does not look bad at all. I love those Roden kits since I built several in 1/72 about ten years ago.
But now I got some MGs from Gaspatch, the PE fret from PART and I am waiting for some HGW bezels.
I found an older topic from mc65 about his Albatros D III build and decided to take it as a guide:
http://forum.ww1aircraftmodels.com/index.php?topic=1836.0Therefore me too adopted the "cancian style" and removed all the stringers from the inside of the fuselage and replaced them with evergreen strips.
Besides of the aforementioned topic and the WDFs there's the fantastic site of Koloman Mayrhofer :
http://www.craftlab.at/index.php?id=59
I prepared the woodparts with gunze random after some preshading. Then I used some wood decals from Alex (Uschi van der Rosten), added some oils and gave it a coat of clear orange and clear yellow respectively (my camera accentuates the difference, in reality it's much softer). There's been a large dispute some years ago about the proper wood tones of the Albatros fighters in particular. The reason was like so often the contemporary orthocromatic film that shows yellow colors much darker than they actually were. So many profiles and builts of Albatros fighters with dark brown fuselages were called to be wrong. I for myself love a warm honey-shade in my wooden tones. Yes, of course, I could have kept the wood tones a little lighter. But I took as inspiration the wonderful piece of art from Dave Douglass, Albatros Fighters of WWI. There are plenty of brilliantly done profiles of Albatros Fighters; for me nothing entirely new regarding the depicted shemes, but actually a great piece of art, well researched and just really appetizing to build an Albatros... right now... immediately...
I scratchbuilt a new seat. The well known pictures of a surviving D III seat and the pictures from the Koloman Mayrhofer site show, that the kit seat is wrongly shaped. The seat of the early Albatrosses was more ... ahem ... vintage style, looked more like granddads seat (I have no English words to precise that, just look for yourself
). Besides of that the pillow and the seat padding seem to be dark brown, not black, and seem to have different shades. So I decided to paint the Padding of the seat a lighte leather brown, the cushion is a black green. Leather, as wood, tends to darken over the years so this could have been similar to the original shade of the used leather. And I wanted a used look (and yes, you may ask why this seat looks that rotten after just some months of use, I'd answer "Well, the pilot was a messy guy.."
)
and I went on with other maior components of the interior. One question is: Did the tanks of the early Albatrosses different from the D III tanks? I'll do some more research, but to be honest I like the tank as it went so far and if I won't find any information that proves me wrong, I'll go on with it...
Borsos
