Choroszy Modelbud 1/72 Phönix D.III By Grzegorz Mazurowski

The Plane

Last of the popular line of Austro-Hungarian Phönix fighters, the Phönix D.III was designed and produced too late to be used in WWI. However some production airframes left the factory shortly before the Armistice, and were marked and camouflaged both as Army and Naval planes, so for the modeller this airplane can be counted as a legitimate WWI fighter.

After the war Austria was forbidden to posses the military airplanes, so the Phönix D.III was sold to Sweden, with the license to build more of them. Similar to the earlier D.I and D.II Phönix scouts, the D.III wasa strong looking "sesquiplane", powered with Hiero 230 h.p. six-cylinder inline engine, with wooden, slab sided fuselage. The D.III had modernized wings with different tips and ailerons on lower and upper wings. Armament was moved from the engine sides to the front area of pilot's cockpit, similar to the majority of the German fighters (Austrians before 1918 preferred location of the guns inside of the fuselage).

The Kit

All the kit parts are flawlessly moulded in ivory-coloured resin of very good quality. Even the main parts like wings and fuselage are designed very finely, with very sharp trailing edges and extremely thin fuselage walls - similar to the vacuformed kits, but detailed even better than modern injected plastic kits of the best manufacturers. That finesse doesn't mean that the kit is fragile - resin is strong enough, even if in some areas is almost translucent!

Smaller parts are no worse: level of detail is very high. Undercarriage legs are provided with imitation of rubber chords, and Hiero engine has even the spark plugs wiring. Very impressive!

Impressive is also number of marking options provided - taking into consideration that it is resin, not "normal" long-run kit - decal sheet allows you to make four different airplanes in three camouflages: two grey Austro-Hungarian Naval "birds" (J.31 and J.41), AH Army scout in two-colour camouflage (222.126) and finally post-war silver Swedish "935" plane marked with red scorpion.

Kit is provided with complete instruction 12-pages booklet in English, explaining the building process, showing the painting schemes and good four-view scale drawings of the airplane.

Conclusion

Very high quality and excellently detailed model of interesting airplane, with very good decals. As a resin kit not recommended for absolute beginner, but fit is very good, so building won't be much more difficult than average mainstream kit, except the need to use cyanoacrylic glue.

Thanks to producer Choroszy Modelbud for review kit.