Introduction
Not so long ago, Matt Bittner wrote an in-box review of this double-kit. catalog #1141. You can find it on this site. Then he sent all that plastic over to me. This is the result.
History of the machines and what you get in the box are covered very well in Matt's review, along with better photos than I can make, so I refer you there. Suffice to say that as he said, there's a plethora of very nice parts in various media, and a pair of decal sheets. I'll get straight to the build.
Construction
The idea of this review is to find any pitfalls for anyone who goes out and gets one of these boxings. I found two, and best to mention them at the beginning because they affect the whole build, which would otherwise be quite straightforward.
i), What Matt didn't notice is that both sets of plastic suffer significant mould misalignment, and by that I mean a lot more than I'd expect from someone with Eduard's technology. It's about 1 mm, which isn't much but as with the Roden SSW D.III I reviewed last time it makes for a lot of clean up trying to restore tubular items to round cross section. Particularly annoying are the fuselage internal frames and the cooling fins on the engines. The latter I never really cleared up well enough. This problem is also present in the E.III boxing I have, which has the same plastic. On the other hand, reliable sources tell me that this kit has been built with no problems by WWI kit novices, so this may be a case of my natural incompetence working in hand in hand with a bit of bad luck.
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The shorter version of the above would read 'depending on your luck, you may need to spend a lot of time on parts clean up'. There's also a lot of flash on the lower lips of the cowling and cheeks, plus several of the undercarriage struts had severe bends in places due to being pressured in the box. Bear in mind though that this box has been across the Atlantic Ocean twice. Also bear in mind that if this wasn't Eduard I wouldn't complain so much about the mould alignment. It's just that I know they can and usually do better . The walkways on the top wings have an identical defect in both sets which looks to me like it's caused by a hair in the mould.
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ii). 5 decal options, all well known pioneers with the Eindekker in it's early days, and the 2 best known (Boelke and Immelmann) are also supplied as figurines, so I guess you could be expected to want to do them. Now, it's a sad fact that E.I and II marking variations are not spectacular. All the markings in this kit look much the same except Immelmann's which has a fuselage sash in black and white. The external variations in airframe are down to type of cheek fairing, presence or otherwise of head support, and engine type. Or apparantly so think Eduard. Unfortunately, the markings they give for Immelmann are for a machine with short metal panelling pieces cladding the forward fuselage. These should stop just past the cheek fairings. Unfortunately the kit mouldings don't allow for this, the panels carrying on to the level of the windscreen. So if you want to do this aircraft you need to begin by sanding off both the outer and inner detail, then adding a card panel (no thicker than 10 thou) either side for the metal bits. Not a show stopper, but you need to know at the beginning of course.
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Naturally, I realised this too late. I built the aircraft of Immelmann E.13/15 and Ernst Freiherr von Althaus. Both are Fokker E.Is.
The instructions are pretty clear about what alternative parts to use, and you should sort out the versions you want at the beginning, so you can prepare the correct bits. This includes starboard cheek fairings and wing, fuselage panel with filler cap or not, and the engines. I've heard that the filler cap should be offset, but it's not on the Datafile plans. I don't know. I left it as is anyway.
Fuselage
Following the instructions won't hurt. The interior is based on the British Science Museum's stripped E.III, and I pressume the detail photos in the Windsock E.I E.II Datafile. These show the distinctive sworling pattern to be present on most of the interior metal bits, so to begin with I painted this, then the CDL parts, finally going over the moulded bracing wires with a pencil. I recommend either sanding them off and using HSP or wire, or just leaving but still covering them with sprue or wire. It will be much more realistic.
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All the internal bits were painted up and added. On the one kit I used the nice PE throttle, the other got the plastic alternative part that is rather an odd looking thing. Most of the parts fitted fine and the instructions were adequate, if a bit vague with placement. A few points to be wary of. If you have the mould step problem, you'll need to savagely trim the tubular framework at the bottom and both ends, or some parts later will just not fit. Eduard say paint all metal bits RLM 02. Well, I did because I had some Xtracrllic handy and it dries fast, but I think any light grey would do. There are several bits that span the cockpit and poke into the framework on the other side, so a lot of care is needed to make sure it will all fit in. To be honest, when the fuselage is closed you see nothing of the interior behind the panel after the seat except a bit of the fuel tank, so waste little time on it. The same applies to the engine mounting and paraphernalia. It's easy for it to foul the rudder bar and forward framework, and although they're nicely detailed, they're just invisible. I left them out of the second one.
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A few last bits before closing the interior - it's fairly complete as far as I can tell, except for wiring up the controls. Unless you're going to bend the wings, you'd better leave the control stick central, although you can nip a bit off the front of the mount and shove it forwards since most photos show the elevators in the drooped position. I added a firing cable to the trigger. The rudder bar is the tubular bit on a tripoddy affair. Don't go thinking the part between it and the stick is the rudder - that's the suspension system. The corrugated PE bits that go over it represent the bungees.
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I had a lot of trouble getting the top rear of the fuselage to line up when closing it. For the second one I massacered the rear bulkhead panel and it fitted much better. As you can see, to ensure I didn't knock off the various bits stuck to the forward tank and ammo container, I stuck the forward decking on before joining the fuselage halves. By the time I did the second one I'd decided it wasn't necessary to do that way, you can just add it after the halves are closed, but with a lot of care, there not being much clearance. Unless you want both machines to sport identical maps of the front, I'd only use the PE map bit on one kit.
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With all the fuselage plastic attached, I sanded off all the strange rib tapes Eduard have moulded in the positions of the fuselage frames. Also the edge tapes. Some photos show structure on well weathered aircraft, but even in closeup you won't see anything like these tapes. Anyway, by the time you've obliterated the top seam you'll have removed it anyway, so may as well do the sides too. I did them one side at a time, transferring the framework positions to the freshly sanded bits with a permanant black marker and a ruler as I went, later to be nearly wiped out by paint. There's a metal panel under the fuselage that was too damaged by filling the joint, which I replaced in both cases with a rectangle of 5 thou plastic card.
What you'll probably break off are the two tiny stubs projecting from the firewall. These are spacers for the cheek fairings, so take care or be prepared to replace with scrap.
The underside stitching and location point for the tailskid supports are supplied as PE. I found that all the PE was very easy to cut from the fret, and needed no annealing before use (even the cowling band and gun jacket). I stuck them on with Johnson's Klear (Future), and later reinforced with some very thin CA, dribbled on from a wire, the excess being immediately wiped off with a damp cotton bud (Q-tip). If you brush paint you can get away without the CA, which I did with the second one. I left off the exit grommets for the control wires. Can't see them clearly on photos anyway. I did drill out the locations (taken from the Datafile plans).
Engine and Cowling Assembly and Painting
After a lot of quality time with a scalpel, the engines were declared fit and painted with various metal colours and washed with Tamiya Smoke. The pushrods and sparkplugs + leads come as 2 PE spiders, and actually work rather well. Be careful folding up the end bits on the pushrods. The Datafile has clear photos taken from the side showing how these are meant to look - the instructions aren't clear enough here. I prepainted all the cowling, cheek and metal fuselage panels with Humbrol aluminium, H56. This is almost a medium grey colour. I then drew the squiggly bits on with a silver gel pen, including the firewall. This stuff stays on well enough that you don't need a sealing coat, but I must confess disappointment with the final result. I've done them about scale size, but they're too small to stand out enough. I needed a brighter gel pen. Needless to say, the most succesful parts are on the underside where you can't easily see them.
Nearly forgot, unless you're happy with the PE band sticking out too far, there's a raised ridge at the rear of the cowling that needs sanding off.
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The engine fits well once the mounting peg is sanded a tad thinner, then you can add the cowling and the chosen cheek fairings. The cowling goes on easily enough (plenty of clearance for the 7-cylinder engines which I used) but it's easy to get it misaligned when seen in profile, which would give a poor joint with the front of the cheeks. I used a mixture of CA spots and poly cement, and added the cheeks as soon as the glue started to go off. The port curved cheek fits fine, but the starboard, squarer one isn't so good. The spreader stubs don't work too positively either, but it all juggles into place well enough if you don't panic. You may need to bend the plastic a bit. If you are using the squarer cheek piece, take care here that the slot in it is perfectly aligned with the hole in the fuselage because this will determine how square the starboard wing fits.
When dry, the cowling band was added in small stages with thin CA. It fits well. The other PE bit that butts up to the rounded cheek piece is slightly too long but also fits well.
Paint
Both paint schemes were identical. I think the undersides of the wings can show dark rib positions sometimes so I drew these on with the old permanant marker and some Dymo tape as a guide (but not where the white cross fields go as these seem quite opaque). Both wings and fuselage one were then sprayed with Humbrol Satin Oak until I could live with the amount of showthrough. By the time I got to the second fuselage I'd decided to brush paint it but used the same colour. Did I say I masked off the metalwork? Well, I did. I also drilled out all the rigging holes. The second machine I decided to weather and did so heavily with oil pastels, watercolour pencils and Tamiya Smoke. The tailplanes were done at the same time and the rudders painted white with black bottoms.
Assembly
The U shaped leather coaming was added. On the first one I had to cut off half of the inside and mess with the fuselage structure to get a not-very-good fit, with it still sitting too high. Having savaged the framework more on the second one I only had to sand it a little.
I stuck the wings on, one at a time, then when dry added the undercarriage. The filler caps and a metal panel were added to the front fuselage, then the wings were decalled. The decals work very, very well, with just a touch of Micro Sol. On the first model I also added the tailplane at this point but nearly knocked it off far too often while rigging, so left it off the second one until the wings were finished.
The undercarriage was assembled with slow-setting gel superglue, and fitted well. Getting the PE bits in place was failrly painless.
Rigging
Do the bottom first. In both cases I used EZline, split in half, for the wires to the rear PE rocker horns for the warping control, and a bit of sprue for the one from the bottom of the control column (a PE bit). Then you can add 4 bits of cross bracing to the undercarriage. I used rolled copper wire on the first one, EZLine on the second. Please note, I thought the clip-on fairings supplied in the kit for the main legs were grossly overscale, so didn't use them.
Next, the rear wing toundercarriage warping wires, then the front ones. The kit instructions are of some use but you should have a good look at photos of the Science museum E.III for the details. I realised in time for the second kit that the rearmost horn does not mount right on the end where I put it, but lower down. Thw WWI Modelling page has good shots in it's photos Archive page which will explain better than words.
Now you can put the thing the right way up, add the Spandau, associated bits, windscreen and pylon. There's a couple of paint masks for both sides of the windscreen and they work well. The rear pulley folds up and fits nicely. Then you can rig this little lot. I found front first then back worked nicely.
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At this point, having used rolled copper wire on the first kit, I realised that while the wings were nice and stable, the undercarriage and pylon flexed so much that most of the wires had bent somewhat. I could have redone it all, but wanted to finish this year so only repositioned the worst offenders. But I decided then that I'd use EZLine throughout for the second one. This is dark grey and looks a bit thicker, but I'd put up with that for the peace of mind. So with that in mind, I sawed a slot for a PE attachment piece in the top front of the pylon, and stuck steel painted kit PE turnbuckles to attach the lines at the wing ends. This all went painlessly enough, but the problem you'll clearly see in the finished product is that, since the holes in the PE bits are too small to thread the wires through, they're slightly out of alignment with the wires. You could thicken them with glue or paint so they look straight, but personally I think they're already far too over-scale. It's hard to do, but what you should really do is insert the wires without any PE bits and just simulate the turnbuckle with paint.
The control horns had already been painted and added to the tailplanes and (pre-decalled) rudders, so once the tailplanes were on and rigged, the same happened to the rudders. The latter are bl**dy hard to both align and get to stick. A thin wire after drilling both rudder and the tailplane cross piece is something I kick myself for not thinking of in time.
Finals
The remaining decals were added, and a bit of extra weathering on the very long-suffering Immelmann's crate. The wheels were made up and added - the centre sections needed a lot of sanding before they'd fit the tyres, which is one of the things that had put me off using the wire spoked version. I chose the airscrews according to the photos I had, although in a fit of brainfade added the (one sort of) kit logos to both props. Slightly silly since they're different types. That on Von Althaus' machine has no visible laminations, so I just drybrushed some wood texture and overcoated the base coat with Tamiya Smoke and orange. The other one was given some laminations using (gasp) masking tape and acrylic dark brown before clear orange. The bosses are kit PE, having sanded off the moulded detail. Von Althaus had a headrest on his aircraft which was supplied as PE. This was very fiddly, and the legs need adjusting for length, but the result is delicate enough and looks the part.
And that, folks, was that.
Conclusions
Pity about the fit problems and innapropriate decals, but the former may be the exception rather than the rule. The quality of the production apart from those two lapses can't be faulted. I'm not a PE fan, but most of the stuff in this set was easy to work with, despite sometimes being too tiny for my aging peepers. As regards the extras in the box, well, the resin figures are nicely done, but the little Iron Cross badge and the two figure portraits leave me a bit cold. I'd happily have traded them for a couple of extra fuselage halves with the shorter front panel, since quite a few Fokkers had them. A bit more detail on the machine guns would also not have gone amiss.
Overal, a very enjoyable build, and my thanks to Matt Bittner for sending it my way (and to
Eduard for supplying the kit). I haven't done the figures yet because I'd like to do them justice. That might take some time and I'll submit them here at a later date if I manage something presentable.
References
