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.

The DVII had a heating problem.  In the summer, the heat from the engine would sometimes ignite the plane's ammunition, and this wasn't popular with the pilots.  So oftentimes they would remove the cowling around the engine.  And since I had scratch built this lovely dummy engine which I didn't have the heart to cover, it gave me the perfect excuse to cut away that part of the nose section and show it.  As for the side panels, they are made from solid brass, holes cut in the side with my Dremel tool and the vents glued over the holes, so if you look through the backs of the vents, you see clear through.  I spent about 2 days on them, smearing and airbrushing until they had the right battered look.  In fact, I ended up building the whole plane around those side panels.

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.

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.