Roden 1/32nd Albatros D.III By Thomas Solinski

Introduction

This is a full build review of Roden kit # 606 the Albatros D.III in 1:32 scale. For an in box review of this kit, please have a look at the November 2006 IM.

And as is my standard, except for rigging (proof that anyone can rig a biplane!), this will be a complete OOB build so that you may see exactly what you’ll get from the kit.

The Kit

First, the next statement is not a condemnation of this kit! Buy it! Enjoy it! It is a well-done new kit in a nice big scale. It’s just that this kit is a little more difficult than I expected. BUT…I’m going to have to apologize to Roden and retract a statement in that in-box review. At first glance I said this kit was up to Tamigawa quality, sadly much like my first review of the Sop. 1.B1 back in December of 2004. Roden’s parts are a beautiful set of moldings on the sprue. However, when you start assembling them, sometimes it is as if they had great intentions of the two parts fitting together, but no one tested if it really worked! This is compounded by the appearance that the instruction writer didn’t really sit down with the mold maker and discuss which parts were meant to go where. Again, this is no reason for you not to buy this kit, just expect to spend some time getting everything to fit.

I started off with a night of airbrushing the basic colors that are found in the interior of this kit. Testors Model Master Wood, Military Brown and Steel were sprayed on the appropriate parts. The instructions call for what I think is a backward assembly of the engine, place all the detail parts on the two halves of the engine, then glue these two detailed assemblies together. I opted for the older tried and true method, glue the crankcase together, trapping the prop shaft (which is one of the parts overlooked by the assembly instructions) up front, and then add the details. Note that you might have to clean out the hole for the magneto drive attachment at the back of the engine before you glue the cases together.

While this was drying, I became interested in the ship-like framework that formed the motor mount. The instructions imply that you can just assemble these parts free hand. You’ll have much better results if you use one of the fuselage sides as a guide for proper placement and angles for each of these pieces. My best guess at this process lead me to put the parts in front of the alignment pins in the fuselage sides; this resulted in a part that fit quite well.

Back to the engine. Seams were cleaned up; Testors Model Master Gunmetal was sprayed on the cylinder cooling jackets and other parts on the upper half of the engine. An attempt to replicate the spark plug wires from the magnetos was made by first drilling a small hole in each of the wire leads.

I later learned that these wires come out of the side of each of these attachment points. Then, since all of this wiring was going to be hid by the engine cowling, I abandoned the effort all together. Great shots of one of these engines may be found on the WW1 Modeling site (scroll down to find the D.IIIs). Now I hit my first problem. The engine just doesn’t drop into place on the engine mounts, be prepared for some trimming and firm pushing to get it to sit where it is supposed to be

Moving backwards in the fuselage, I next attempted the fuel tank, the frame it’s mounted on, and the ammo cans. First big shock in this particular kit was that one half of the fuel tank was a short shot, missing the upper section. At first I was trying to have this done be the end of November so I thought I didn’t have time to wait for a replacement, so I just pressed on with assembly. The ammo cans have a component glued to the back face, and this part fit well.

With that drying I moved onto the cockpit area. I tackled the framing here in the same manner used in the engine compartment. I used slow curing glue and used the alignment pins on the fuselage sides to hold the frames in the proper location till the glue set. No problems in this area.

While all of these were drying I cleaned up the wings and tails and glued the ailerons in position. Then came back to joining the two halves of the fuselage. Since the fuselage lacks the usually alignment pins this can get messy in a hurry. I took it in simple steps. First gluing the engine assembly and cockpit assembly in the correct locations in the right half of the fuselage. Then, using the cockpit frame as guides I lined up the left half of the fuselage at the aft edge of the wing opening, cockpit opening and tail, taping them in place, this was followed by gluing the seam from the outside with liquid cement. With the aft half of the fuselage dry I taped the front half together and worked the fuel tank/ammo can frame into place through the wing opening. Last step glued the bottom front of the fuselage together followed by firming up the joints between the interior frames and the left side.

At this point I chose to finish all the exterior painting. All metallic surfaces were given a coat of WW-II vintage RLM 02 Gray. The fuselage received a base coat of Testors Model Master “wood” enamel, followed by a slight dry brushing with Model Master acrylic “wood” that had been darkened slightly with a touch of black. The wings were airbrushed with MM gloss blue green and tan. These matched the colors given in the instructions.

Second problem; mounting the machine guns. Installing the machine guns in my previous Roden 1:32 Fokkers was a walk in the park. In this model it appears that Roden is planning to mount the guns in a very scale manner. It would easily accommodate a couple of holes drilled through the guns and the “U” shaped mounts in the frames in the airplane, and then use small pieces of wire to replicate the bolts used on the 1:1 scale airplane. As it is, the aft machine gun mount will accept being glued quite well; however, the front mount, without the pin has nothing to rest on or be glued to. I ended up resting the guns on whatever structure would hold them on the front end, this ended up being the belt feed chutes on the right side of the guns.

Third problem, cockpit / engine compartment cover. I was hoping that, due to the huge amount of detail in the fuselage of this model, that the cover panels (Part number) would just neatly lie down allowing it to be removed and show some detail once the wing was on. This was enforced when I noticed that the wing cabane strut attachments were below this cover so it did not need to be in place to install the struts. But… this was not the case. Since I glued the guns in place in the last step, some of this upper cover has to be cut away to clear the guns. Things were still looking good with a nice fit back at the aft end of the cockpit, however, several of the frames for the cockpit and engine interfere with the bottom of the cover, and the angle of the front half of the cover does not match the slope of the front half of the rest of the fuselage. Since this part was being glued down firmly, my solution was to cut liberal amounts off the tops of each of the fuselage frames. This did allow the top to fit relatively well. I think with a little more time and patience one could shave “just enough” off each of the frames to maintain the appearance of being the correct shape, yet allow the top to be removed. Other form of more masochistic modeling would be to cut small grooves in the underside of the top, thus allowing the frames, as molded, to stick up into the thick plastic.

With the glitch of the top fuselage fixed final assembly of the major components went along smoothly.

Took a pause from assembling to drill the 48 or so #80 sized holes needed to accomplish all the needed rigging on the kit.

With all the tiny holes drilled I moved on to the landing gear frames, followed by the upper wing. My first attempt in some of the photos you see has the axle simply glued to the strut. This did not hold up well and I resorted to binding the landing gear with brown stained fishing line, wrapped around the struts and axles to simulate bungee cord. It added a lot of strength in this area.

The wing mounts fairly easily if you take your time and grab a handful of patience. First step is to glue the “V” struts to the lower side of the upper outer wing. Allow both of these to dry thoroughly hanging perpendicular to the upper wing. Next using slow curing glue, tack the cabane struts to either the upper wing or the fuselage, whichever you find easier to work with. Glue the bottom ends of the V struts to the lower wing, then quickly set the remaining cabane attach points where needed and set them all up with quick setting solvent glue. Allow all of this to dry for several days.

My first intention was to rig using 0.008-inch diameter Guitar High “E” string wire. This worked well in my previous 1:32 Fokker builds, and it worked well for the shorter runs on this aircraft; i.e. the flight control pull-pull wires and the landing gear cross bracing. I recommend you start your rigging with the landing gear cross bracing. The gear is just strong enough to put up with the handling needed to finish the kit, but just so. The cross bracing wires add considerable strength to the assembly. However, when I tried to run this wire from the fuselage out to the wing struts, I ended up with an unacceptable amount of droop, and or very funny bends where the wire aligned itself with the drilled holes. Since I already knew that my standard 0.005-inch diameter “invisible” sewing thread looked too small in this scale. (When in reality it scales out closest to 1/8-inch diameter cable.) And I had some 6 pound test fishing monofilament that also didn’t bend sharp enough to look like wire cable. It was off to the sporting goods store to try something new. Friends on the WW-I modeling page bulletin board have frequently mentioned a fishing line product called “spyderwire”, so I went off hunting trainable spiders. After about 10 minutes of hunting the various brands, I ended up with an economy priced roll of 0.008-inch diameter, 4-pound test monofilament. I also found some outrageously expensive braided wire about this same size that, if I ever win a lottery, I’d try just because the braiding would look even more scale-like. Back at home; I tested both Prismacolor and Sharpie brand paint pens. Note these are not standard alcohol based markers but actual paint pens. Both brands adhered well to the fishing line. Now that I had a suitable replacement for the guitar string, a quiet MLK holiday afternoon was spent pulling the 10 major rigging lines on the wings of this kit.

With the bird all rigged out I moved on to the decals. Lots of folks have griped over the supposedly varying quality of Roden decals. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with them, in fact I’ve been very impressed with the performance of their lozenge decals, especially in 1:32 scale, and that positive results worked well on this kit too. I did have one slight scare. I left the second of the two under wing crosses in the water a touch too long and the decal had started to float off the paper and two of the points on the cross had folded over on themselves. Fortunately, once the decal was on the wing, a little extra water floated the folded edge back over to its normal position. The markings on the wings were applied to a gloss finish, and they drew down quite well showing all of the aileron hinge detail. (sorry couldn’t get a good picture.) The markings on the fuselage were applied directly to a flat to semi-gloss finish. As you can see, even with this challenge, there is little evidence of silvering. So properly applied over a gloss coat will provide satisfactory results.

Colors and Painting

I used the color name in the Roden instructions to match a particular color in the Testors Model Master line. In this case the upper green was US Matt Dark Green or FS 34079, MM# 1710; the tan was US Matt Tan, FS 30219 MM 1742 and the lower surface blue or Matt Pale Blue, FS 35622, MM#1722. My only disappointment was that the tan on the fabric almost matched the tan of the MM wood color.

Conclusion

We have a great kit of the Albatros D.III in 1:32. Roden needs to do some tweaking to get it perfect, and I’m sure in future editions we’ll have a beautiful shake and bake rendering of this historically significant airplane in this under modeled scale.

Thanks to Roden and to Matt Bittner for the chance to do this review.