Small scale (1/12th & below)
| Camel (Guillow) | Fokker DVII | Fokker DR1 | SE5 (Guillow) | Spad13 | Albatros CIII | |
| Gotha V (Arizona) | ||||||
1/6th scale
| Spad13 (Arizona) |
1/10th scale
| Fokker DVII (AirdromeRC) |
And some artwork . . .
As a kid, I was into plastic kits of all sorts, and comic books. A big favorite was Star-Spangled War where soldiers in the Pacific in subs and planes and tanks found themselves shooting it out with giant vicious dinosaurs. But then I grew up. Still, I sometimes got this urge to do something with my hands, and started doing models again. The wood and tissue kind. Time to be a kid again.
But there's a darker side here. The world is flat. By that, I mean that we can travel across the world by internet in seconds. The global village is no longer a fetish of babblers. But the world is also very shallow. We are cut off from history. Do most high school students even know who the major players were in WWI? For that matter, do their teachers? Cut off from history, we are vulnerable to manipulation, 1984 is long upon us, the lies in today's newspapers immediately supersede the lies in yesterday's newspapers. We lack the anchors that both restrained us and at the same time stabilized our collective moral compass.
The Great War (as it was called before they started numbering them) was a disaster for humanity. The representatives of the working class of England, France, Germany and Russia all swore they would never vote for war. Worker must not kill worker. But when the shooting broke out in 1914, they all voted to support their respective national imperial ambitions, and it ended with 21 million killed for the War to End All Wars. And the next one took over 60 million.
At least part of the fascination with the air war in WWI was that it brought glory and glamour to the killing business. It was good PR. It also brought honor, courage and innovation. That was real. It was in fact an amazing human endeavor. That's part of my fascination, and another part is my love of the craft, but I must admit that part of my fascination has that darker side, the fascination one has with a deadly reptile, the beauty of the killing machine. But the killing business of the Great War is long forgotten amidst the horrors of today. Today, my hope is that my planes provide a connection to that forgotten past, in the hope that it will do, well, something ...
... and part of it is still the joy of the little kid I still am.
(click picture for full version)
It's a beast. Took over a year to build at 1/12th scale. So it gets its own page.
The Albatros from Arizona Models (www.arizonamodels.com) was an adventure. I opened the box circa 2002 and found nothing but a pile of sticks, wing ribs and a set of blueprints. I mean, I was horrified. I called Jaime of Arizona Models to tell him he had left out the instruction manual. What do you mean, there's no manual? Eek. Five-foot wingspan. The Mercedes engine, Spandau machine guns and wheels were kits all by themselves. That engine took weeks all by itself. This is where I got serious. But Jaime graciously walked me through the hard parts over the phone. He's a believer in keeping WWI modeling alive, and a tremendous resource worldwide. He has a fantastic selection if you are looking for something a little out of the ordinary and, uh, big.
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While I was cruising the internet, my wife Rose spotted this color scheme (Jasta 18) and was quite smitten. Me too. Someone asked me if I planned to fly it. Ha! I recall reading the lament of one poor guy who spent a year building a plane, then crashed it on its maiden flight the morning of his wedding (I hope his marriage turned out better). Note the rips in the wings. I hadn't yet learned to work with fabric coverage, covered the whole thing with tissue. And I had excessive faith in epoxy glue. The result is that one day I heard a crash in the living room and found the Albatros on the floor with cracks in the fuselage and rips in the wings. I had a choice. I could either try to fix everything, or I could take my exacto knife and cut out more tissue, turning the rips into battle damage. I went for the battle damage.
I didn't know much about photography at the time, had my first digital camera, so the pictures weren't the best. :>) Since I've learned about things like lighting, and since I had a decent large background picture of an airfield that I had just used for the Gotha above, I reshot the main pictures. Hope you like!
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Note the picture below of the three dorky pieces of wood. They get lodged in the fuselage and provide the upper placement for the lower wing. I note them because figuring out how to place that lower wing was where I made the leap from building easy kits to the world of scratch-building. I was pretty damn proud of those three sticks. Still am.
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Every airplane has a "face." A personality. But really, wings are wings, and tails are tails, so it's the nose with grills, engines, props and guns that gives most planes their distinctive look. The DVII is a weird one, combining dorky box-like structure, smooth elegance, and a particularly mean looking face, mean but fascinating. Sort of looking at the deadly face of a cobra or a gaboon viper. In the DVII, you can almost see the future: the fuselage frame of metal tubing instead of wood, the thick wings and radiator in front of the engine, defying the streamlining generally thought necessary, the strength of the cabane struts that in the DVIII would allow the lower wings to be discarded completely, and that nasty, nasty face. So I really wanted to capture that with this 36" wingspan kit, my latest effort. I also wanted to try to get the look of the old black-and-white photos, not the nice clean museum ones, but the battered crates just back from a fight.
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When I got my lozenge covering from Arizona Models (www.arizonamodels.com), I freaked out. The colors weren't sharp and distinct like most of the pictures of WWI models you see. But Arizona Jaime explained that this was closer to what the real fabric would have looked like. So I stared and stared at it, and kept looking at the old photos, and I realized he was absolutely right. When you look at the photos, on many of them you can hardly tell that there's any camouflage pattern at all. Here I was trying to get that weathered look, and it was staring me in the face, all it needed was a very light black airbrushing.
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As for the AerodromeRC kit, it was a very easy build. The hard part was the scaling, but the kit never got in my way. I'll be doing more of them.
Albatros CIII — Arizona Models
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I had to have a 2-seater, I love their sheer awkwardness, and that the engine is so exposed. Since my ceiling was seriously filling up, it had to be 1/12th scale, and at the time Arizona Models
was having a clearance sale, so ... It's a very nice kit (38" wingspan), though not easy to work with. At 1/12th scale, the wing ribs are very thin and tended to break a lot, so I ended up having to reinforce many of them. And due to the unusual construction of the cabane struts, bending the wires just so was a real bear. The engine cowling was also a challenge. I tried aluminum, carving wood, none of them quite worked worth a damn. Then I tried cutouts from a manila folder, stiffened with CA glue, bent and laminated with another layer of manila. It's surprisingly strong once finished, yet quite flexible before the CA is added. Once those hurdles were jumped, it was very straight-forward. |
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One feature I really like is that -- rather than stressing out on the paint job -- I was able to simply add a couple of coats of varnish to the fuselage plywood and use the cream colored wing covering au natural, producing a nicely natural weathered look. As usual, I ended up doing a composite design scheme. There are too many "dragodiles" out there, and I couldn't find pictures of one I liked that showed both sides of the plane. I hope I captured the spirit.
I was especially proud of this one. Having made a 12th scale Spad, I knew the tricky parts and could plan the construction better than I've usually done. I wanted to do a plane from the 93rd Aero Squadron because their insignia is so cool. But I couldn't find good pictures from enough angles to do a true match, except for the infamous number 1, whose pilot defected to the Germans. So I did a mostly standard 5-color scheme, took a bunch of very rough insignia and did a trace-over in Corel Draw, then roughed it up in Corel PhotoPaint and arbitrarily chose number 12. If some erudite scholar digs up the fact that number 12 was flown by Eric Von Fink, who spent his Sunday afternoons strafing French convents and orphanages, I'd rather not know, thank you.
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One nice thing about the larger scale is that I could do a better job on the rigging. And a particularly nice feature of this kit is that it came with a full set of metal fittings to place the struts and anchor the rigging. In fact, the only thing holding the top wing on at all is the rigging!
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A note on aesthetics. I like to make my planes look weathered, but I am really lousy at it. And I like to work a little big on my detailing, a mild caricaturing, you might call it, which brings out features that would otherwise be lost. So what I do is work a little rough, don't aim at factury smoothness. The result, I think, is a kind of natural weathering, where my own deficiencies actually add to the final result. For the paneling, I used very thin playwood. For the rivets, small brass screws, which I left shiny brass. Looks a little like a number 20 Spad in some museum shots.
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It dawned on me that more people are going to see pictures of my planes than are going to see the planes themselves. So I went back and reshot some of my older planes, particularly the Guillows, having learned something about lighting and backgrounds and such. The Nieuport 11 (1/12th scale) was the first plane I did serious detailing on beyond the kit. At this stage, I still used music wire for rigging (not sure it's not the best way to do the smaller planes in any event), and the covering is doped tissue instead of iron-on fabric. Have to be careful not to poke a finger through the wing. Better camera work shows the plane better, but it also shows the flaws better. That's okay. I'm still proud of this Nieuport. You may notice I usually don't do pilots. A crappy pilot looks worse than none, and anyway, my planes are flown by ghosts. But Carrie-Ann Moss from the Matrix movies seemed to fit just right.
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I did this Guillow (also 1/12th scale, 28" wingspan) 10+ years ago. My roommates at the time complained that my planes were too warlike (!), so I did some blue and pastel color scheme. They were happy, but, well, war planes are kind of warlike and it never felt right. After I did the Nieuport, though, I started to feel a little cocky. I ripped up the tissue covering on the wings, installed wire rigging and repainted the whole thing. For decals, I printed some on my computer and simply glued them on. Now I’m happy.
Okay, the British high command might not approve my color choice (they're almost as bad as my former roommates), which deviated from the official PC-10 brownish green. But I read how the pilots on low-altitude strafing missions, very vulnerable to attacks from above, preferred life to obedience and either did camouflage patters with stolen French paint, or just smeared the top wing with mud.
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Back when, having finished the Guillow line, I found this kit by Herr Engineering. I was just awakening to the notion of adding scale details that weren't part of the kit. With hindsight, I laugh at, for instance, the appallingly crude and inaccurate side panels I added. But it was a breakthrough at the time. It was a cosmic moment when I added the cross to the tail, then saw a picture of a DVII and saw that I had gotten it wrong! Then I looked at more pictures and saw the crosses weren't all the same. Not even close. An amazing revelation. Why do I have a German plane in front of an (altered) RAF recruiting poster? Not only did they share their honour and glory, they shared their death.
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A pretty straightforward piece of work, but it turned out very nice. Scholars may note that it has the Jasta 18 hawk on the side, but a red tail rather than an all-white tail. I was still learning. The triplane now nestles in the middle of a bunch of our dolls. One complaint — the Guillow WWII fighters are all the same scale, but the scale on their WWI line is all over the place. Their DR1 is 20", 1/16th scale.
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I think the SE5 is one of the coolest looking planes ever. But in this case (1/14th scale, 24" span), the pictures do it more than justice — I wasn't happy with my work. Someday I'll do an AerodromeRC SE5, since they have a 1/12th scale version. You might note the crappy propellor hub on this and the DR1 above. Now I put on little bolts and would cover that wire. Why don't I fix it? Because I have to keep moving forward. If I kept going back to fix things, it would turn into a bottomless pit.
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All this internet searching for color schemes was going to my head, as I was seeing some really spectacular planes. So I threw all caution to the wind and got this Flair SE5 with a 51” wingspan. My first 1/6th scale!
It didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, again rigging with music wire and covering with tissue rather than fabric, but I learned a lot — the difference between building a model representing a plane (1/12th scale) and building a small plane.
1/6th scale — I love it! Personally, I think the Camel is kind of dorky looking. But given its historic deadliness, that's part of what makes it so cool.
In looking up Camel pictures on the internet, I noticed great differences concerning the clip chutes (the one on the upper left of the "hump," for the clips that attach the cartridges to the ammo belt), the cartridge chutes (in the middle of each side panel), and the carburetor intakes. As in different sizes, shapes, or non-existence. The result of being produced by a dozen manufacturers, I guess. So I picked what I thought was the niftiest of each, and then designed it as a composite Camel. You may notice that I don't generally model my planes on a single historic plane. Rather, I study a lot of planes, look at the parts I think will look best together, and then build a plane that could have been. I was very happy with this one. Did the rigging with turnbuckles, covered it with fabric instead of tissue. My scaling was finally becoming competent.
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An Arizona Models 1/12th scale Spad 13, and a real bear to build. A Frank Luke model, with a few deviations. (I don't think Luke used an Aldis sight, but they're cool.) Had to do a fair amount of scratch-building on the nose and tail sections, but I now consider Spad 13's to be one of the coolest planes ever built. Next I did a 1/6th Arizona Spad, having learned the error of my ways.
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| After the Fall | Moonlight Stalker | Engine of War |
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| Devil Wings | Albatros Evolution |
Star-Spangled art done in Corel Photopaint. I find a special beauty in WW1 planes, their challenging the law of gravity with canvas and wood, and their creative awkwardness. By WW2, horsepower, steel and streamlining had conquered, and that also has a certain beauty, but back when it was all new ...
