All finished – but it was a challenge getting there!
By definition, warplanes favor function over form. In World War I, in aviation’s early years, that was particularly true; heavily-braced wings, slab-sided fuselages and unconventional layouts (like in the DH.2 and Caproni’s series of multi-engine bombers) were state-of-the-art at the time. That’s why the Albatros series of fighters stood out, culminating in the D.V – in my mind, it’s the most attractive aircraft of the Great War.
Distinguished from its peers by their semi-monocoque plywood fuselages, the D.V boasted a streamlined fuselage with a dish-like propeller spinner (or, as the 1919 edition of Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War I put it, “a revolving pot is attached to the propeller”). It also replaced the true biplane configuration of the D.III with a sesquiplane design that recalled the Nieuport 10/17/24/27 (early engagements confused British and French pilots at first, who described them as “Nieuport-type fighters”). The chief benefit of that thinner-chord lower wing was a helpful increase in downward visibility.
The D.V did not get a big performance gain over the more slab-sided D.III, boosting top speed from 102 to 105mph (and 112mph in the D.Va variant). This didn’t give the German Air Service a performance edge over its enemies; the chief benefit of the Albatros D.V for the Luftstreitkrafte (Imperial German Air Service) was that it could be manufactured in numbers great enough to give the Germans a numerical advantage.
The Albatros D.V still boasted some standard features of WWI aviation. It had extensive wire bracing, and the cockpit was poorly laid out. The radiator on the upper wing was vulnerable to enemy fire. Perhaps most worrying for pilots, it had a tendency to break up in high-speed dives. On the positive side of the ledger, it boasted the reliable Mercedes D.III engine and two LMG 08/15 machine guns, giving it a firepower advantage over many British and French fighters of the time.
Even so, in air combat the man is as important as the machine, and the Germans had a cadre of experienced pilots well versed in air combat by May, 1917 when the Albatros D.V arrived, including most of the big names of German fighter aviation in WWI. Albatros pilots earned 29 Pour le Merites, and their numbers included Ernst Udet, Rudolph Berthold, Werner Voss, Hermann Goering and both brothers von Richtofen.
I had other WWI fighters on my to-do list ahead of Eduard’s Albatros D.V, but a challenge for a 45-day build issued by the Barracuda Studios “Ready Room” Facebook page proved too enticing. I had a “Profipack” version of the kit, meaning it had extra photoetched details, and a test fit showed the kit had a reasonably good fit. However, this was a 20-year old kit, and I would be surprised by how much major detail the kit omitted from the interior.
I initially wanted to highlight the bare plywood seen on many Albatros D.Vs, and I wanted to feature the green-and-mauve camouflage on the wings in lieu of the lozenge pattern. The plywood aspirations went away as soon as I ran across decals for a rather busy scheme for an aircraft wrapped nearly entirely with the blue-diamond pattern of Bavaria, flown by Lt. Wolf in July, 1917 with Jasta 5, the third-highest scoring unit of the war. Research suggests this pilot’s first name may have been Walter. He transferred into the unit from Jasta 15 with a victory to his credit. On the morning of July 27, Wolf shot down an F.2b over Esquerchin; its crew crash-landed safely and became POWs. His career lasted until August 8, 1917, when he left Jasta 5 for the hospital; he may have died on August 28. No reason for his injury or further record of this otherwise anonymous flyer could be located. The airplane is better remembered than the man himself.
To commemorate Lt. Wolf, I broke out the kit and my first step was to – go to the internet. I downloaded the instruction sheets from WingNut Wings’ kits of the Albatros D.V and D.Va, which are still on the web even though the company has ceased operations. These instruction sheets are invaluable for those of us building in smaller scales, since they have color detail photos, isometric drawings that point out areas of incomplete detail, and contemporary photos that show differences between planes and some of the odd features of individual planes. I also pulled the Osprey title Albatros Aces of World War I off my shelf of Osprey books.
The interior of the Albatross reflected the plane’s plywood construction. The floor, rear bulkhead, and sides of the aircraft were bare varnished plywood, so I applied my now-standard approach to painting wood. First, I applied a coat of Testors acrylic wood to the photo-etched floor/rear bulkhead, the interior of the fuselage, and the plywood engine mount. I also painted the area at the middle of the lower wing – it would be slightly visible beneath the machine guns on the finished model.
After a coat of acrylic beige…
When the acrylic wood was dry, I used a fine brush to apply small drops of Minwax walnut wood stain. Then, while it was still wet, I lightly drew a cotton swab across the part, streaking the stain to create a convincing grain. Once the stain hard dried – about an hour – I applied a coat of Tamiya clear orange. The result was a convincing small-scale plywood interior.
…And after the application of Minwax wood stain “grain.”
(Just to be honest: although I’ve used this technique on four models, this time for my first step I used Testors enamel wood. Just as I was applying the oil-based stain, I realized what a mess I was about to create and wiped the stain off, taking a bit of paint with it. A coat of Future sealed the enamel wood, and the stain-graining proceeded without further problems).
The kit seat was painted a dark reddish-brown to match photos. My first coat was too red, so I added raw umber to the mix and, by airbrushing carefully, toned the color down and added some subtle weathering. The seat rests on an H-shaped frame which is provided as a photoetched part; this joins in four points to the folded floor-rear bulkhead section. This was painted a blue-gray color. The seat belts came next; I carefully painted the belts a pale beige color and added them as the instructions suggested.
Do you like small, fiddly, flimsy photoetch? This cockpit’s for you, then!
The control column was detailed with firing triggers and painted a combination of blue-gray and black, with brown grips. The column was a bit tall, so I cut down its mounting pegs to get a slightly better sit. The floor-mounted compass came as a photoetched part, which I painted, applied a decal to, and gave a drop of Future to as the lens before launching the part into oblivion with my tweezers and robbing a similar part from a photoetched set for the Fokker D.VII. My second version was carefully added to the cockpit floor.
The photoetched kit parts for the cockpit were added where appropriate, but there were still a lot of details to be added. The fuel hand pumps were made from styrene and bits or brass for the handles; the clock on the right side of the cockpit was made by adding .035 styrene rod into a bit of brass tubing, with some dial “detail” added with a .005 Rapidograph pen.
The scratch-built pumps and wiring details crowding the right side of the cockpit, and the tachometer/machine gun mount across its top.
The most egregious omission was the bar across the front of the cockpit which held the machine gun mounts and the tachometer. I made one using the WingNut Wings instruction’s photos from styrene rod and strip, topped with a tachometer made from brass tubing and styrene rod. This was a most vunerable component, so I added the photoetched floor and rear bulkhead to one half of the fuselage and set it aside for safety’s sake while I worked on the engine.
Another view of the right side of the cockpit.
The kit engine includes the cylinders, the overhead cam and the intake manifold. The lower part of the engine is hidden beneath the plywood engine bearer, so it’s not present in the kit. The distributor at the back of the cam is included, but the pipe it rests on is absent. I started by painting the cylinders black mixed with a tiny bit of silver. When that was dry, the pipes down the sides that carries the leads from the magnetos to the spark plugs were painted red-brown. Then, using .03mm lead wire, I carefully bent 12 spark plug wires to shape and CA-glued them in place on the engine, a genuinely tedious task. The cams were added to the top of the engine, followed by the intake manifold; the lack of locating pins makes the addition of the manifold very tricky and it’s likely to need repair at some point during construction.
Wired plugs in place, along with the cam shaft across the top of the engine.
The engine assembly was added to the engine bearer, and I made a new distributor by turning a piece of styrene rod to shape on my motor tool. A hole for the mounting pipe was drilled in the distributor, and a bit of .035 styrene rod was inserted. A hole for the rod was drilled into a square of styrene and the rod was cut off so the distributor was lined up properly. The distributor was dressed up with a spare photoetched part, a slice of .030 rod and a fine metal rod handle that was painted brown to replicate the wooden handle used to adjust the engine’s timing.
The timing lever and distributor were made from styrene rod and tube, a spare photoetched part and a bit of metal rod.
The propeller came next. I always enjoy painting plastic propellers to resemble laminated wood. First, I paint the base color, a light wood shade. Then, out come three important things: masking tape, a new No. 11 blade, and, most importantly, photos of real versions of the propeller. The WingNut Wings instructions had nice color photos of a restored Albatros, including a nose-on shot showing the propeller. With that as my guide, I cut strips of Tamiya tape to simulate the laminated layers of lighter wood, taking care to make the bands symmetric from blade to blade. I masked the front first, then the back, taking care to line up the tape so the bands of dark and light wood lined up. The trickiest area is the hub, where the laminated layers come together and appear as narrow lines. When the tape was on, I shot a darker shade of brown and removed the tape, revealing alternating bands of color. To provide the look of varnish, the painted prop was given a coat of Tamiya clear orange. Having built a series of Fokker aircraft, I next looked on the photoetched fret for the propeller hub. I spent a couple of minutes looking at the sheet and instructions before it occurred to me that the Albatros had a spinner – there was no need for a photoetched prop hub, or for the work I did on the laminations on the hub for that matter!
Painted to look like laminated wood, the kit prop awaits its spinner.
The location for the engine and its plywood bearer was somewhat indistinct. I used photos to line it up properly so the two banks of pipes of the intake manifold lined up with the cut-outs in the left fuselage half and so the top of the engine projected the appropriate amount. When that was done, it was time to join the fuselage halves; the fit was good, but I did need a bit of filler top and bottom, followed by re-scribing of the plywood panels.
The lower wing was a little tricky to fit – I eyeballed it the first time and the kit happily allowed me to place it about 1/8-inch off on one side. I carefully removed the wing, measured the center of the wing and added tick marks, and then lined the marks up with the fuselage seam. A bunch of sanding was needed to blend it in; I used masking tape to protect the raised detail on the wing’s center section as I made the join seamless.
The wing successfully added after a second attempt.
The tail came next. The horizontal stabilizer came as a single piece with a V-shaped notch that fit over the rear fuselage. The fit was fairly good, but it was very easy to get this piece misaligned and I spent a lot of time lining it up with the lower wing before going to the glue. Time spent eradicating the seam paid off, and the vertical rudder went on with no struggle at all.
The model gets its tail – which makes a nice handle while building the model, by the way.
For the machine guns, I used two Mini World LG 15/08 “Spandaus,” which are little kits on their own. Each has a receiver/barrel, a photoetched cooling jacket, and a photoetched gunsight. I mixed up a dark gunmetal color for the guns, which was followed by a dry-brushing with a dark metallic shade of paint. The tiny, fragile guns were then set aside for safekeeping.
For fat-fingered models like me, these tiny Mini World Spandaus give new meaning to the term “gun control.”
At this point, I was ready for painting and decals. My only problem was that the decals hadn’t arrived, some 20 days after they were ordered! Thanks to the internet, I could find photos of at least five other builds of this scheme, which allowed me to map out some of the colors. I reasoned that the Bavarian diamonds would have to go over some paint, and it had might as well be white, since I was unsure whether the decal had white backing or just the blue diamonds on a clear background. I also wanted a nice white undercoat to give the red nose and spinner more vibrance, so I mixed up a batch of ModelMaster flat white and sprayed the fuselage and spinner. This was a good exercise, as it revealed some panel lines that needed to be deepened and hairline seams at the lower wing joints. These were filled with tiny applications of CA glue. A second white spray verified that the seams were eliminated.
Color one of many applied…
The nose was carefully masked and the spinner and the front of the fuselage was airbrushed a mix of Chrysler engine red with a drop or two of black to tone it down. Next, the red area was masked, along with the rest of the fuselage, and I painted the nose panels around the engine a gray mixed from Aeromaster RLM02 and a bit of ModelMaster gunship gray to dirty it up. The same color was applied to the wheels and the wheel wing. The fuselage band was masked off and sprayed with another mix of grays, making it slightly more green than the nose. These colors came from the WingNuts Wings instruction sheet for their Albatros D.Va kit featuring Jasta 5 aircraft.
After the white, red and gray were applied there were only four more colors to be masked and painted…!
The fuselage was now painted except for the tail. I found the tail was an excellent handle, so I masked off the fuselage sides and painted the wings instead. The green was made from a lightened mix of ModelMaster dunkelgrun, while the mauve was mixed using ModelMaster Napoleonic violet and insignia blue and applied freehand. Contemporary accounts state that the Albatros factory applied this camouflage using a newfangled technology purchased from the deVilbiss Company of Ohio called a spray gun. The radiators were masked off and painted aluminum, and a misguided attempt at a wash left the upper radiator a perfect oxidized-looking color even as it threatened to wreck the paint. The accident worked out rather well.
With all the colors on, including the wing camouflage (the one thing that was free-handed in the entire scheme).
The fuselage was kept in its masking and the lower wings were sprayed with AeroMaster light blue. At this point, the tail was finally masked off and shot with a mixture of Testors square bottle gloss green and ModelMaster forest green. Thus, my antique warbird was painted with out-of-production paints, which seems somehow appropriate.
The machine guns and the kit’s photoetched parts around the ammunition chutes were added next and painted once they were in place. It was a little crowded in front of the pilot (and I imagine visibility was not great) but I was able to align the guns and get them secured in place with CA glue.
The decals were of a newer vintage, from Print Scale. I’ve worked with them before – they are unusually thick, but they lay down well and the colors behave even under the most aggressive setting solutions. I knew I’d be bringing out the decaling big guns, since I’d have to force the Bavarian pattern onto a fuselage with complex compound curves. The model was given a couple of coats of Future to make it very glossy, and I dove in.
Print Scale offers the markings for Lt. Wolf’s plane on a sheet of Albatros D.Vs, but the Bavarian pattern is provided on a sheet of its own. It’s totally generic – there are no provisions for the curves of the Albatros. For the first decals, I applied the German crosses to the top wing. This went remarkably well – the decals are thick, but once in place the snuggled right down and conformed to every detail. With my outlook buoyed, I turned to the Bavarian pattern.
I discovered the best approach was to cut even strips of the blue-and-white parallelograms and apply them like wallpaper, carefully matching the corners of the blue markings. This gave me the ability to fudge a little around the nose, and especially the tail. The going was slow, and sometimes I had to use a single check of one color or another to fudge the pattern. The nose eventually looked good, so I attacked the tail. After each session, the model was inspected, any areas where decals were misbehaving or wrinkled were cut with a sharp blade, and decal solution was applied. Solvaset, straight from the bottle, did the trick and did not affect the inks in the decals, and in three evenings the application of the Bavarian pattern was part of my checkered past.
The checkers in place – the best approach is to apply them in vertical strips to deal with the compound curves of the fuselage.
The other decals came next: the lions and crests in the gray bands on the fuselage, the crosses and oversized “W’s” on the lower wing, and the fuselage crosses, which crinkled up and needed hot compresses and Solvaset to get with the program. The yellow border on the fuselage band is provided as two very fine decals on the Print Scale sheet; the largest of the two is too small to go around the fuselage. Instead, I fished a Microscale railroad sheet for Missabe locomotives, which had a few yellow stripes, and cut one stripe into a thin strip using a straight edge and a brand-new No. 11 blade. This worked perfectly for the task.
The wing decals behaved beautifully…
Jasta 5’s unit marking was a green tail trimmed with a red surround around the edges of the top and bottom horizontal and both sides of the vertical tail. Print Scale offers you this trim as decals, printed to shape but with no carrier beyond the color. Applying them is an exercise in torture as you try to get them off the sheet without twisting them and then attempt to coax them into place with a wet brush and a toothpick or tweezers. One wrong move and you pull the section you’ve been working on out of place. Patience is mandatory. I still needed to paint the very edges red, but the agony of applying the decal pays off in a nice, even edge to the red all the way around the tail.
The border on the tail is a decal – or rather, four decals that have to be battled into place. Insignia red paint hit the edges.
Next, I added the landing gear. As is often the case with 1:72 WWI kits, the location of where the gear attaches to the fuselage is left to the builder’s imagination and references. Also, the kit wheels are too small. Luckily, I had a set of Cooper Details corrected wheels in my stash (this is now available from Barracuda Studios). I painted the tires a dark gray – not black, because German tires usually lacked black coloring due to a shortage of lampblack late in WWI – then airbrushed the hubs through a circle template. The struts were added to the wheel wing in a frustrating exercise – they have hole that fits into pegs on the wheel wing, but using it will guarantee the struts don’t fit the fuselage. Instead, you must establish the angles by trial and error. I also added the bungee cords wrapped around the axles from lead wire painted black; I knocked the struts off during this process and had to do everything again. Once the gear was aligned, the wheels were slipped on and aligned, and the gear was attached to the fuselage with CA glue.
The Wingnuts Wings instructions revealed another detail that the Eduard kit overlooked: the windscreen. Albatros D.Vs used three different styles of windscreens; I picked the simplest one for my build, and cut a small square from some high-quality clear styrene (in this case, the packaging for an X-Acto knife set). The windscreen was cut to rough shape, then worked with files to get the correct shape, both across the top and the bottom, where it would join to the fuselage. Instead of trying to paint the frame of the windscreen, I carefully ran it along the point of a black Sharpie pen. When the ink dried (in about 10 seconds), I added the windscreen to the fuselage using white glue.
If you look very carefully, you can see the windscreen just ahead of the cockpit.
Now came he really exciting part: mounting the top wing. This being only fourth biplane I’ve built in 30 years, I don’t have a jig for such an endeavor – I just use my eyeball, a small amount of CA applied in strategic places and a lot of hope. In this kit, the cabane struts and wing “V”-struts are separate pieces but must be added to the model in relation to each other – get the angle on the cabane struts too steep and the “V”-struts won’t connect to both wings. Get the angle to shallow, and the “V” struts won’t fit between the wings. I did considerable experimentation to get the cabane struts right. Once the angle looked right, I turned the model upside down and glued the wing to the cabane struts first, then was able to slip the “V”-struts into place. I paid especially close attention to the alignment of the wing leading edges – any slight twist was corrected and the struts were fixed in place with tiny amounts of CA glue applied with the end of a piece of copper wire.
At this late stage, I added the last details to the engine. That started with the intake and return pipes for the radiator in the wing. Eduard provides photoetched details for the radiator louver and their control lever and linkage, but no way for water to get from the radiator to the engine, which seems like an important missing step. I made the forward pipe from .022 solder, bent to shape carefully with a flattened section at the front to replicate its join to the front of the engine. That’s where I CA-glue it – the flexible solder then made it easy to bend it into position against the radiator for gluing. The other pipe was bent to shape and carefully worked into position in a nearly invisible place under the wing and connected to the engine.
Engine details: the exhaust, piping for the radiator and the air pump. Two of the three had to be scratch-built.
The air pump is noticeably absent from the front of the engine. I made my own by chucking a short piece of .035 styrene rod into my motor tool and turning it as if on a lathe. I then drilled a hole in the top, inserted some .010 metal rod and clipped it off. The air pump was cut from the rest of the rod, added to the engine and painted brass to match photos.
Next, I cleaned up the kit’s tail skid and added the reinforcing plate photoetched piece to the keel beneath the plane’s tail. The skid was painted wood, with gray bands and streaked white paint on the center part of the skid to replicate the linen wrapping often applied in the field. The skid was carefully added to the tail.
One thing about WWI biplane modeling is that the tension level increases exponentially as you complete steps near the end of the build. Such was the situation when it came time to add the rigging. Many people use flexible material like EZ-Line; my approach is the exact opposite. I use .1mm nickel-silver alloy “rod” from Albion Alloys. This is more like a stiff wire than a rod, which I prefer as it’s impervious to humidity and sagging. I carefully cut lengths, test-fit them using tweezers to place them against their intended locations, and then secure them with tiny drops of white glue. This is a process best done in multiple sessions, worked from the inside out: cabane strut-to-lower wings first, then cabane struts-to-base of the V-struts, then top of the V-struts-to-lower wings, and the outer wires and control wires on the outer wings toward the end. The last wires were the long ones extending from the base of the V-strut to the nose.
With the top wing in place and fully rigged, I added the spinner to the propeller and tried to fit it to the hole in the nose. The prop didn’t fit, so I took a round file to enlarge the hole. Then, catastrophe – the vibration of the file caused the CA joints in the struts to fail and the top wing fell off – along with some of the rigging. This was worse than had all the rigging come loose, because now the wing was semi-attached and getting it glued back to the struts was a real challenge. I removed most of the rigging, gained a good grip on the wing, re-attached it to the struts, and re-did the rigging, discarding any wires that had deformed during the mishap. I also had to re-attach the radiator pipes and the windscreen. As a younger modeler, I might have sent the Albatros on a one-way flight across the room. As an older one, I realize that nothing is really un-fixable with patience.
I made the propeller fit by modifying the propeller shaft – no more trying to enlarge the hole! I darkened the area behind the spinner with a black Sharpie to better replicate the pronounced shadow present in photographs. With the wings and propeller on, my last task was to add the control actuators on the tail. Instead of using the kit’s photoetched actuators, I cut pieces of .010 styrene to the same shape and added them with a bit of Dullcote as adhesive, since it doesn’t affect the underlying finish. I painted the actuators green, added bits of .1mm rod between their tops and the appropriate points on the tail, and that was that.
The dark border between the spinner and fuselage was enhanced with a Sharpie.
The Eduard Albatros is not a bad kit, but it has its challenges. Add to that a crazy paint scheme and the challenge of building a WWI-era plane in 1:72 and it makes for a bit of a challenge. Still, the final product was worth it. It’s a tribute to the many nameless men who flew and fought in WWI – not the aces, but the ordinary airmen who were much more typical of the first air war over a century ago.
Not bad for a build that took 45 days, 58 minutes! Thanks to Roy Sutherland and his Barracuda Studios 45-day challenge for getting me to tackle this subject.
Flat Spins and Milk Runs 