Legaoto 1/72 Hansa Brandenburg B.I By Michael Kendix

Background

An in-box review appeared in a previous edition of Internet Modeler so I will not go into detail about the aircraft itself or the box contents. The kit itself is decent and well molded: not up to Eduard’s high standard but as good as Roden in my view, and far away superior to any short-run kits. Some of the small pieces need cleaning up but the main components provide the means to build a really nice model.

Construction

As with most model aircraft, I began with the fuselage interior. The kit parts were good enough for me but I added a “Floor” to hide the seam that would have shown when you looked down through the large cockpit opening. I also seatbelts made from foil. Aside from that, I used all the kit’s parts, except for the firewall, which did not appear to fit. I also had to sand off some of the engine’s lower part to get that to fit into the fuselage. I gave the interior of the fuselage a faux wood appearance using Testors “Wood” as a base and then applying various shades of brown gouache watercolor paints with a Q-tip. I sealed the finish with Tamiya Clear Yellow and Future floor polish.

Once I glued the fuselage halves together, there was a fair amount of seam showing, which was eliminated by the usual filling and sanding process. Next, I sprayed the front of the fuselage with Alclad II aluminum and masked that off, ready to apply the wood finish. I used the same method fuselage for which as I had for the interior, except I highlighted a few of the panels in a slightly lightened shade of the base Wood paint. At this point, I have to acknowledge that I made a mistake – the metal part of the fuselage should extend further back – at least to the cockpit opening’s sides. Unfortunately, I recognized this too late and pictures from the Peter Grosz et al. confirmed my error.

Wings and Landing Gear

The wings are extremely well made and should have a slight sweep back: the kit is built to provide such, so don’t do what I did and try to straighten them out! The top wing is in two pieces and I enlarged the holes and put in new plastic pins to improve the join. The tail parts are also decent and went on without a hitch. As mentioned in the in-box review, the only version offered in the kit with the horizontal tail on top of the fuselage is 76.51: with all the others, you need to cut the horizontal tail and glue the resultant fins to the sides of the fuselage.

Mounting the top wing was not too difficult: slightly trickier than usual because the interplane struts are sloped inward, which gives these Austro-Hungarian two-seaters their unique appearance. I replaced the cabane struts with plastic rod and similarly the supports for the radiator that sits atop the engine. The radiator was a little tricky to position and I left that off until I had rigged the model.

Final Details

The landing gear went on without too much trouble after cleaning up the struts. The rigging was made from straight 0.005-inch wire purchased from Smallparts, Inc. and cut to size with wire cutters. The various pieces of photoetch, such as the plates and underside brakes, really help to give more detail and realism to the model. The clear part windshield supplied in the kit seemed absurdly large and I simply cut it down to a more appropriate size and glued it on with Elmers white glue.

In conclusion, this is a really nice model, though not straightforward and probably not ideal as a first biplane model. It is well designed and finely molded so I do recommend it. It is also the only injection-molded kit of a Hansa Brandenburg B.I around: only resin models are available. Legato are to be commended for this excellent product and I hope that they will consider a similar series of Hansa Brandenburg C.I’s.

Reference

Peter M. Grosz, George Haddow and Peter Schiemer. “Austro-Hungarian Army Aircraft of World War One.” Flying Machines Press, Mountain View, California, U.S.A. 1993.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Tom Plesha and Peter Plattner for help with references on this model. They actually helped me with reference material back in 2002 when I had started a resin kit of this subject. Tom passed away in 2005.