Czech Masters Resin 1/72nd AGO C.IV By Pedro Nuno Soares

Introduction

There comes a time when you get the urge for a “quickie”. Either because, as usual, you’re way behind achieving last new year’s modelling objectives, the subject matter is unusual and inviting or the obscure parts of desire fit so well and easy that you just want to get on with it.

CMR’s AGO C.IV was a mix of the 3 for me: 9 months into 2007 and I’ve just finished 3 models so far; tapered wings and uneven count of interplane struts are not the norm in things that fly and the Milliput sticks only had to come out of the box for the lower side of the fuselage joint.

That said, and building on the as usual well informed and useful review by Jim Schubert, here’s what it took me to add a finished model of the AGO CIV to my ever growing collection of WW1 types.

Construction

After a good rinse of all the parts in dish washing detergent, I cleaned up the matting surfaces of the fuselage halves into which, as usual, I added a fictional sidewall “wooden” frame made out of evergreen profile stock. The bracing wires were replicated with fine copper wire painted black. Apart from that I only added a rear “fabric” bulkhead made out of .20 plastic, and a pair of tin foil seat belts. That and the kit’s own detail bits – instrument panel, seats, floor, control wheel, rudder bar – made up for acceptably busy “battle stations”, and careful painting of the area – CDL for the sidewalls and rear bulkhead, wood for the floor and side structure, black and leather for the control column and whatever you fancy for the seat cushions – lent a plausible aspect to the “human” component of the craft.

The fuselage halves were brought together with epoxy glue and the entire subassembly was left to rest for 24 hours for the glue to cure.

Lower wing would come next, but on closer inspection my example showed a bit of a warp that needed fixing. A couple of dips into near boiling water followed by cooling over the cool kitchen granite board was all that was needed to eliminate the warp, and the wing was eventually and uneventfully glued into the corresponding slot in the lower fuselage.

After cleaning and filling the fuselage joints (the call for Milliput being only heard for evening out the lower fuselage surface) the one piece tailplane and the fin were glued into place. Epoxy glue was used throughout the build with CA being left for the real detail work like rigging.

By now the model had reached the “ready for paint” status, so referring to the guidance provided in the instruction sheets the undersides of the fuselage and wings as well as the struts were spayed light blue (Xtracolour WW1 Blue) while the uppersurfaces were given an overall coat of Extracolour WW1 German green. Since I wanted to replicate a sprayed on camouflage I cut typing paper masks that were fixed onto the model surfaces by means of tiny blobs of blue tack. This, in theory, would create a soft mask that would allow some paint spray to land into the area under the edge of the mask, thus creating a gradual transition between colours when applying the purple camouflage coat. The result wasn’t perfect but wasn’t that bad either and I was perfectly happy with it. Incidentally Xtracolour German WW1 Purple was meant to be used as the second topside colour but upon opening the tin I found out the paint had gone bad. After some searching into the paint drawer I found a Molak purple tin that seemed suitable enough for the job and that’s what I ended up using.

After the paint had dried, rib stations were lightly accentuated for contrast with watercolour pencils, the lines thus produced being then buffed with a Q-tip to blend the pencil pigment into the base paint coat.

And so all was ready for the most respected step of any multi wing modelling exercise: dropping the top wing into place.

I chose to glue the cabanes first onto the fuselage, providing a base for the top wing to sit on, but when I checked, the rear cabane was much higher than the front one. If this was left unattended it would impart a strange forward slant aspect to the top wing. So with judicious use of a file I lowered the height of the apex of the rear cabane. This was not enough to eliminate the slant though, so I inserted a tiny plastic shim under the forward locating hole of the top wing to level it all off. In the end I managed to have a perfect wing-to-cabane strut join, both straight and level.

The wing to cabane joint was left to dry for a full day, everything being kept in place by a complex state of the art jig of Lego blocks and clothes’s pins.

The perfectly fitting interplane struts were - one at the time - dropped into their locating holes into which a tiny drop of CA was applied. 6 struts latter (well 8, if you consider the aileron connecting rods) I had the wing assembly done, square and tight.

The perfectly registered and opaque decals were applied as felt timely (this meaning that when the top wing was mounted the fuselage decals were already on) and rigging was done as usual by means of smoke coloured invisible thread monofilament nylon, passed through pre-drilled .3mm holes in the pertinent locations.

The final touch was the uneventful addition of the prepainted undercarriage parts, exhaust stack and propeller.

The only replacement parts I used were copper wire for the radiator pipes, plus a Parabellum MG from the spares box, since the kit part is a bit chunky.

A couple coats of rattle-can matt varnish evened out the finish of the model and, to put it simply, that was it.

Conclusion

Lately I’ve done a few CMR WW1 kits and this one just goes on to build on the impression I’ve had since the first: if you are interested in the subject matter and if familiar with the idiosyncrasies of multi wing models, then there’s nothing in this kit that make them harder to build than the regular injected plastic from the bigger manufacturers.