I had started this one a few weeks ago as I had finally decided I wanted to start on one if my Wingnut Wings kits. I have had about a dozen of them for a while, but my skills were not ready. Specifically, around all that rigging…. It threatens to send me into therapy just typing it. Since Wingnut had announced a couple of DR1’s, and I was keen to get those, I thought this would be a great practice kit. So, off I went. Then about half-way through, the whole end of Wingnut Wings thing hits. That changed my plan a bit as I now think that this may be the only DR 1 I get to do.
This kit caused me several sessions of bad thoughts and the utterance of equally bad words. The fit is OK, BUT it is very fiddly in places. There are several pieces that are to be glued together with no locator pins, the instructions are poor in many areas showing the fit of the parts, and there are incorrectly numbered parts on the instructions. I kept saying; “learning experience”. There was filler needed along the fuselage halves and the wingtip attachment points at each wing. The instructions have you attaching the wrong tips to the wrong wing. Ask me how I know…. Tear those two off and start over. After that, I dry fit everything. All of course except the engine to the cowling. The engine looks OK albeit pretty stark. But in reality, these old engines didn’t have much detail anyway.
Time to put the engine inside the cowl and of course it is now too wide. After some pushing and shoving I got it in, but it was off center. When I tried to take it back out, I broke off a piece. So I decided to just cur off wherever I needed and glue it in place.
There were some more items that didn’t go well:
The fuel tank inside the fuselage wouldn’t line up with the fuselage tubing, so I just got the filler neck to go through the hole in the top and just jammed some CA in there to keep it in place as nothing will be seen. This caused the braces behind the firewall to bind, so I just snipped them off. The post behind the engine was just glued to the firewall anyway, so those braces aren’t needed.
The cabane struts have nice detail, but you have to slide each strut through the middle wing and then glue the top and bottom wing to each end. No big deal except the struts had to be sanded down to make them thin enough to slide through the slots in the middle wing. It is worth noting that part of this could be me as the wings are two pieces glued together. If memory serves there are only two alignment pins and they are on the front edges, so the training edges (with the scallops) can get easily misaligned and that can cause the slots to be off a bit for the cabane strut to slide through. I wanted to paint the strut first as I thought after it is all together it would get awfully tight in there.
There are a couple of cross pieces of the cockpit tubing and they are to be glued to pins on each side of the fuselage. Very small and once the cockpit is together, it was a real fiddly effort to get things to line up. When you place the middle wing section over it, you don’t see much anyway. See the photo below with the white circles noting the pins where the cross piece is to be attached. The pitfalls of WW1 aircraft I think in Roden’s defense. There are also no seat belts included which I thought would look too obvious, so I hacked out my own. This was before I got the news about Wingnut, so I could have done better with that.
The cowling at the opening was a little “short”. I had to pry each edge of the opening to widen it enough to sit on the ridge of the firewall. CA made it stay and it looks OK. Perhaps that was messing with my engine issues? Since I had already made my changes there, I won’t ever know.
For the paint scheme I chose Von Richtofen’s bird. I started by using Mission Models white primer over everything. I then used a coat of Mission Models regular white, and then a caot of Mission Models radome tan over that. That result gave me a really nice looking doped linen finish. I then used some Vallejo Model Air Olive Green and with a small fan brush I hand painted on the green color. The Model Air is pretty thin to start with and it allowed the linen color to show through. I then went over with a second coat and tried to get what I thought was a good look. The undersides were Mission Models Medium Sea Grey. For the red I used Vallejo Model Color flat red. The pink sections on the upper wing were a 60/40 mix of Vallejo Model Color white and the flat red.
As I mentioned, the rigging is what has been keeping me from these planes. I did some research and the folks at Wingnut have a hints and tips page and they recommend using the EZ Line only and painting the ends to simulate the turnbuckles. Well, I tried to make a couple of turnbuckles and it just wouldn’t work for me. The eyelets at the ends seemed to always be larger than the tube I was putting them into and that didn’t look right in the scale of the kit. So I compromised and just used the tube and the EZ Line and no hooks/eyelets/etc.
I cut a long piece of the line and then slid two of the tube sections I cut over it. Each tube section was about 3mm. I then used CA glue and glued a tube section to each end. I did my best to have the section of line from one end of the tube to the other to be about a quarter to half an inch shorter than the length I wanted. I then CA glued one tube end to the one point for the turnbuckle and then stretched the line and attached the other tube end to that point. Seemed to come out OK. I think I am ready for a Wingnut kit…
For the very short lines on the ailerons and the rudder and elevators, I had planned to use just short pieces of music wire. It is very rigid and easy to glue.
After putting it on the ailerons, I realized that even .015 diameter looked to big, so for the rudder and elevator sections, I used EZ line but without any tube sections. For all of these I used a small hand drill and drilled out a small hole. There are marks on the kit pieces to help with alignment. The underside of the upper wing had two holes already there. No such luck for the others on the wings though.
The under carriage legs are just to be glued to the fuselage under the engine and into two large holes under the wing where it mates to the fuselage. This looks correct based on some photos I reviewed, but there were no holes/slots or other help here. Just put it up in the hole and then glue it and make it straight and level. The final kit is actually quite hefty and the under carriage is a little shaky, so care is needed when moving it around.
The propeller was painted with Vallejo Wood and then transparent wood grain. I tried to tape off and do the layers that were laminated together, but it is such a small thing that it got ugly, so I tried to strip it all off and then I just made it look like one piece. I then added the two decals and sprayed a light coat of transparent orange over it for the varnished look.
Lastly, the decals. These were a mixed bag. The blacks and whites were somewhat translucent which surprised me. So I painted the white sections on the fuselage sides and then using some masks, painted the crosses on the fuselage and the tail. This allowed me to get a nice white and black contrast and of course the painted-on look as they were. The wing crosses had a very small section of white, so I just went ahead with them and they were OK. Once they settled and dried, the white was OK, but not as nice as the paint. Now, they were all very brittle. I could slide them around with my finger, but if I tried to nudge them at a corner, they cracked. I had two or three times that I had to push things together to make one piece again. The stencils were actually quite good in contrast. They went on with no issues. The black lines that are attached on each side of the fuselage were of two sections. I longer section aft of an exhaust and a smaller section forward. The two longer pieces were fine, but both shorter sections broke into several pieces, so I just left them off.
I have no idea if they used a flat paint, or a gloss, or any kind of finish on it. Since I don’t have any color photos, and over a hundred years have gone by, I haven’t decided how to weather it yet. I may just spray a satin finish on it and do some dust on the wheels and the skid and call it a day.
The kit is straight. My camera tripod was not...
So after all of this, would I recommend it? Surprisingly, yes. It builds into a nice looking kit and with minimal rigging and some careful planning, I think it looks very nice on the shelf. I would definitely say to get some experience under your belt first though.