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Champlin Project Fokker Dr.1 Replica

By Tim Nelson

History

The Fokker Dr.1 is an icon of World War 1 aviation.  Everyone knows what it looks like, and almost everyone thinks it should be red.  Well, a couple of 'em were mostly red.

The Dr.1's reputation stems mainly from the fact that some top German aces scored a fair number of victories in the type during its short operational career from late 1917 to mid 1918.  Skilled pilots were able to put the Dr. 1's superior maneuverability and high rate of climb to great use.  Low time pilots had to concentrate more on staying alive with its early structural problems, slow top speed, and less than stellar altitude capability.  At any rate, legendaries such as Manfred von Richthofen, Werner Voss (in the prototype F.1), Ernst Udet, Josef Jacobs, and others helped build the Dr.1's aura.

Translations of Japanese instruction sheet information are almost always insightful and profound.  DML/Dragon's historical summary lauds the Dr.1's "...dog fight aerobatic quality..." as one of the reasons the type "was passioned by many ace pilots."

Of course, the subject of this article is the Fokker Dr.1 replica of the Champlin Fighter Collection.  This collection, currently in Mesa, AZ, has been acquired by the Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA.  MOF plans to build a new wing to house this collection in the coming years, and in the interim, has commissioned members of the Northwest Scale Modelers and IPMS-Seattle to reproduce the aircraft in 1/48 scale for promotional purposes.

According to MOF's web site:

"Dentist Richard Coughlin of New York began construction on the Champlin Collection's aircraft during 1958. It was completed during 1972. Following an accident wherein the Dr.I was seriously damaged, Doug Champlin acquired the wreckage and during 1978 had it completely rebuilt. During 1990, the Warner Scarab radial that had been used by Coughlin was replaced with an authentic Le Rhone rotary. It is interesting to note that there are no known surviving original Fokker Dr.Is. The last original aircraft was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid on Berlin during World War II."

Let the modeling begin...

The Model

I signed up for the Dr.1 in the Champlin project because a) I had the DML/Dragon 1/48 scale kit in my possession, b) it was a departure from my "normal" modeling of the past few years, and c) for a WW1 subject, it had minimal rigging.  Reason "c" loomed large.

The DML/Dragon kit dates from c. 1992 and is part of their popular 1/48 scale "Knights of the Sky" series.  The parts were molded in light gray styrene with very little flash, with reasonable detail throughout.  Two photoetched sheets were included; one with various "detail" parts such as cooling jackets for the guns, and another (much stouter) with items such as landing gear struts and cabane struts.  Two segments of fine steel wire were provided for rigging and control surface cables.  Decals for the German ace Fritz Kempf's well known "Kennscht mi' noch?" Dr.1 were included.

The Build

The Champlin replica was built to fly and therefore made several sensible concessions to modernity: several additional cockpit instruments, a Warner Scarab engine with an extended nose section to accommodate it, and a castering tail wheel rather than a skid.  The exterior markings, although similar to several known Dr.1 schemes, appears to be a fictional composite.  These modifications would make the project a little more challenging than it originally appeared.

The cockpit was built out of the box as much as possible.  I used the kit floor, seat & belts, aft bulkhead, and some detail side wall parts.  The cross-bar for the kit's single instrument was retained, but I added several scratch-built instruments to look similar to (note avoidance of the term "match") the Champlin replica.  These instruments ended up being a little bit over-sized for the scale, and to make matters worse, the cross-bar later bowed slightly under the subsequent rigors of fuselage join, seam-filling, and sanding.  But, I've committed bigger sins as a modeler.  I painted the fuselage interior a light gray based on photos from Mesa.  I created the "EXPERIMENTAL" placard seen in the Champlin Dr.1's cockpit, and installed it forward of the instruments and under where the guns will later be mounted.

The fuselage consisted of two left-right halves, and the fit was disappointingly uneven.  I biased the positions so that the upper, more visible seam would require less work.  That, of course, left even more work on the bottom side.  I have developed a preference to fill all but the most massive seams with gap-filling super glue, and used liberal quantities on the underside seam.  After several iterations, I finally got it smooth.  The cockpit was masked off at this point.

The fuselage would be complete at this point for a true Dr.1 model, but the Champlin replica had an extended nose to accommodate its original Scarab engine.  Being elated to discover that the Champlin airplane now sports a Le Rhone engine, I elected to simply displace the model's "firewall" forward based on estimates made from photos of the subject.  (Photos obtained near the end of the project showed that the Champlin Dr.1's firewall is actually at the same location as the original; at the body station where the forward cabane struts attach to the fuselage.  When the airplane's Scarab engine was replaced with a Le Rhone, it was mounted on a truss structure attached to the firewall, which holds it in the proper location relative to the engine cowl.  Oh, well.)  I was fortunate to have a wooden dowel of the exactly appropriate diameter on hand, used in the groove of our sliding deck door.  Under cloak of darkness, I excised about 1/4 inch off of it.  I did some rough shaping, primarily of the upsloping underside, prior to mating with the fuselage.  The remainder was done after joining as part of the seam filling exercise on the bottom and left/right sides.  The upsweep of the new extended nose required some minor surgery to the bottom of the engine cowl, to which it would eventually be attached.

Because of the need to fair into the new extended nose, I mounted the mid-wing assembly next.  The unmodified DML/Dragon kit has a fit problem between the center mid-wing deck and the engine cowl.  With the extended nose now installed, that problem transferred to the aft side of my nose dowel.  Here, more copious injections of gap-filling super glue and interminable sanding achieved a reasonable transition back to the proper diameter at the forward end.

The task of modeling the engine was greatly simplified with the knowledge that a French Le Rhone had been installed on the Champlin airplane, as sometimes occurred with real Dr.1's in the field.  The DML/Dragon kit parts are based on the German Oberursel rotary engine, which forms a fine basis for a Le Rhone.  I used the kit cylinder bank and forward and aft shafts, but excised the air intake plumbing and discarded the (flat) photoetch valve lifters.  The fine steel wire supplied with the kit worked well as substitute valve lifters, and some wire of the appropriate gauge that I had on hand was pressed into duty for the air intake tubes.  This gave me a chance to try the new Alclad copper to match the look of the Champlin engine; it worked great and held up to the later handling of installing on the cylinder bank.  (Yes, just using copper wire would have been simpler, but I couldn't find the correct gauge wire in anything but the stranded-wire variety.)  Enjoying a small victory here, I set the engine aside for a while (read "weeks and weeks").

For a little extra realism, I separated the elevator from the one-piece horizontal tail assembly, and reinstalled it in a trailing edge down position.  This would cause problems later come riggin'-time.  Prior to painting, I installed the little foot-stirrup on the left side of the fuselage and fashioned two ground-handling loops for installation on the aft part of the fuselage.

The strategy for painting, given the white "box" areas on the fuselage and wings, was to use white primer and complete the white coats first.  Then, I used the great Tamiya yellow tape to mask off the larger areas to remain white.  Some strips of Chart-pak tape worked well to mask the two circumferential stripes.  I applied Testors flat black, cut with about 20% flat white for scale effect, for the primary black color.  The biggest painting challenge was to achieve the white striping around the edges of the horizontal tail and, especially, the rounded edges of the elevator.  I sought advice from several local modelers and tried a few of the ideas before going with frisket film as the vehicle to mask those rounded edges.  It would have worked fine except for a little bleed-through of the black to the white; this led to a lengthy touch-up battle between black and white with a neat line of demarcation being the main casualty.  But, after lightly sanding all of the above painted surfaces and several coats of Duracryl clear, I was ready for decals.  Almost.

To achieve the look of the Champlin replica, I sought some local talent to create customized decals.  Chris Banyai-Riepl kindly agreed to help with graphic work.  I scanned some photos provided by some helpful soul in Mesa, AZ and provided those to Chris, who created the side-of-fuselage stencils and the "Iron Cross" insignia on the top of the horizontal tail.  Chris provided a file with these graphics, plus a set of Maltese Crosses to Norm Filer, who printed a fine set of decals (including white ink) on his ALPS printer.  These decals looked great, worked great, and had no problems with the Microset/Microsol treatment or subsequent Duracryl topcoats.  My final topcoat for the shiny looking Champlin Dr.1 was a semi-gloss coat of clear, a mixture of about 90% thinned Duracryl clear gloss and 10% thinned Testors Dullcote.

I had decided to defer installation of the lower wing until after painting, in order (I thought) to get good paint coverage on the upper part of the lower wing and the lower part of the mid-wing.  This was a tactical error, compounded by my failure to dry fit prior to painting.  The lower wing "spar" which is to reside in a slot in the fuselage bottom did not begin to fit.  The many coats of paint and Duracryl didn't help matters.  I had to devote a couple of hours of very careful spot scraping and sanding to get a decent fit.

I didn't spend a lot of time on the aesthetics of the lower wing/body interface because the Champlin Dr.1 has a natural metal underside forward of the pilot's foot stirrup, which extends up to the firewall.  Good photographs of real Dr.1 undersides are hard to come by, but I received a couple of revealing shots of the Champlin Dr.1 and decided it was too significant a feature to ignore.  I cut a sheet of very thin styrene to match the lower fuselage contours and shot it with SNJ metallizer.  This thin sheet offered the advantage of covering that lower wing spar/body join problem.

The finished horizontal tail assembly and rudder were attached at this point.

Now we come to the tail wheel.  The Champlin Dr.1 has a castering tail wheel that appears similar to that of a Piper Cub.  It is attached to the rudder via two cable linkages, and essentially is back-driven by the rudder.  The smart thing for me would have been to buy an old 1/48 Piper Cub model to swipe the tail wheel assembly.  Instead, I found the smallest spare wheel in my parts box (from a Hasegawa 1/72 Harrier outrigger gear), and scratchbuilt a tail wheel assembly.  This process was actually fun if a little tedious.  Some spare flat steel (from the "stout" photo-etch sheet mentioned above) made a nice strut for the wheel.  The control arms came from a 1/72 Panther tank photo-etch sheet.  The linkage cables again made use of the DML/Dragon kit's fine gauge steel wire.  I tightly wound two sections of softer wire into "springs" to slide onto the linkage cables to match the look of the Champlin Dr.1.  The whole tail wheel assembly looks good, but ended up being slightly over-scale (like the cockpit instruments), driven mostly by the size of the Harrier wheel and tire.  So sue me.

We are getting near the finish line now.  The DML/Dragon kit comes with two nice Dr.1 machine guns, made of plastic gun bodies with photo-etch jackets and cross hairs.  I replaced the plastic gun barrels with small diameter steel tubing, but grafted the kit barrel tips back on to get the "flared" barrel end look.  The kit comes with the "crash pads" that many Dr.1's had to provide something softer for a pilot's face to impact than the butt of a machine gun; the Champlin airplane does not appear to have these pads and I deleted them.  Installation of the guns was made a little tricky by the bowed instrument crossbar in the (now unmasked) canopy.  After some (gentle!) jiggling around, I got the two guns mounted.

The mounting of the upper wing on a World War 1 aircraft is something new to me, the thought of which made my blood run cold.  My solution was to mount the interplane struts on the mid-wing first, and making sure that they were absolutely vertical.  After waiting a day, and then test fitting, I attached the upper wing to these struts.  Waiting another day, I then attached the cabane struts, taking advantage of the small amount of flex afforded by the upper wing and the main struts.  This process worked, but it generated a couple of scratches on the lower part of the upper wing, which had to be touched up and re-coated with semi-gloss clear.

The kit's landing gear assembly was used out of the box with the exception of the support struts connecting the main landing gear struts to the aft end of the airfoil structure to which the wheels are attached.  These struts did not appear to be on the Champlin Dr.1 and in fact are not evident in photos of some real Dr.1's as well.

The fine steel wire provided in the kit was used on several side projects as discussed above.  However, a carefully measured segment was set aside early in construction for its actual purpose; rigging and control cables.  Although somewhat tedious, I managed not to damage the model with my ham-handed handling of the Dr.1's relatively simple rigging.  The biggest problem became apparent when attaching control cables for the elevator.  The horizontal tail has pass-through openings for the cables; my deflecting of the elevators to a trailing edge down position caused this cable run to no longer be a straight line through the opening.  A slight kink in the cables is thus evident in a profile view.  Tackling the tail wheel linkages completed the rigging chores.

We now have a Triplane sans propeller.  The kit comes with a decent prop, but a local modeler, Jack Matthews, kindly donated a hand-made prop which he created using an extremely clever process.  This is a topic deserving of an article in its own right, so I won't describe the method here.  Let's just say it results in a beautiful rendition of a laminated propeller that I could not begin to match with paint.  I took Jack's propeller, lightly sanded it, and gave it a coat of Duracryl gloss.  It looks hand-carved by some tiny (1/48 scale) Teutonic gnomes.  Jim Schubert was nice enough to let me have a couple of photo-etch prop bosses to add the final touch.

Conclusion

I'm pretty happy with the final result.  It has the look of the Champlin Dr.1 replica, and its tail wheel causes the same double takes as the real McCoy.  It made me stretch as a modeler, which, like broccoli, can be both unpleasant and good for you at the same time.  Thanks to Chris Banyai-Riepl, Norm Filer, Jack Matthews, and Jim Schubert for their friendly and helpful contributions to this funky little Triplane model.

This model, and the 23 others in the Champlin model project, can hopefully be viewed at the Museum of Flight by the second quarter of 2002.

References

Museum of Flight's Champlin Fighter Collection web site

Fokker Dr1 Aces of World War 1, Norman Franks and Greg VanWyngarden, Osprey Aircraft of the Aces #40

Fokker Dr.1 in Action, Heinz J. Nowarra, Squadron/Signal Publications