FokkerDVII background

QUOTE: Originally posted by nsclcctl Was wondering, why does the Fokker DVII have no wire supports between the wings. I thought all biplanes had the supports. What is the advantage of none and how do the wings remain stable.

Welcome to the wonderful world of WWI aviation! In a couple of weeks, I'll be starting a Roden 1/72 Fokker D.VII. Which kit are you building?

On to your question: Fokker used a much thicker wing on their later planes than most contemporary manufacturers. Compare a side profile of a D.VII to a Spad 13 and you'll see what I mean. The D.VII had a pretty thick wing spar and was braced internally (in the wing) rather than with rigging wires.

There's been a lot of discussion over the years about why early aircraft designers used thin wings and why fokker went with thicker ones, but the upshot is that thick wings were thought to cause too much drag and Fokker found that they didn't increase drag much at all. Furthermore, the thicker wing gave superior high angle of attack performance. This helped with give slower landing speeds and better dogfighting performance.

QUOTE: With that said, when I get a camel or pup that uses the supports, what do you use to replicate them and are there any tricks?

Here are three approaches to rigging. I've not done any of them yet, but the drilling holes and using monofilament method seems to be favored by a lot of folks.

Drilling holes and threading monofilament:
http://priswell.com/uggie/Uggie2.htm

Using fuse wire (other types of wire could be used):
http://www.wwimodeler.com/esc/rig.html

More on using monofilament:
http://www.wwi-models.org/misc/rigging.html

Some folks used stretched sprue. They measure the distance snip to that size and glue the stretched sprue in there. My only problem with that method is streching the sprue to an even thickness.

Regards,

*Bump*

Is anyone else working on a WWI plane? I know there are a few folks because of some of the threads I've seen.

I'm surprised this topic hasn't gotten more replies. The Fokker D.VII was one of the most influential planes of all time.

Regards,

I do not know why there is not a separate page for WWI. Either there is no one building these because they are tough or no one wants to talk about them. I think they are so incredibly cool looking. The only thing that kept me away was the kit selection. I do not like the revell versions and the sizes were also an issue. Now that I found Roden in 1:48, I am going forward. I am excited about these. Let me take that back, excited except for the rigging. I dread the rigging.

The Roden kits are good but a little tricky to assemble. The best 1/48 WWI aircraft are those offered by Eduard, just my opinion.

A separate page on WWI model kits would probably not be visited much. For a great forum on that topic go to the forum at http://www.theaerodrome.com. The whole site is about WWI aviation and there's a section of the forum dedicated to WWI model planes.

But I think it's great to talk about WWI planes here too -- especially since FSM has printed a number of excellent articles on the topic over the years. This month's article on the Dragon 1/48 Fokker D.7 will be helpful for me even though I'll be building a 1/72 scale Roden D.7.

I kind of like rigging. I made a 1/144 scale card model of a Morane-Saulnier Type N (Bullet). I downloaded it from Fiddlers Green, reduced it to size in Photoshop, glued it together, and rigged it with stretched sprue. It turned out pretty well! When I was younger, I rigged with sewing thread, and even that doesn't look too horrible.

Regards,