Roden 1/48th Fokker D-VII Alb (early) By Tom Solinski

Construction

For history on the plane see the inbox review from last months IM.

First a short apology, I’ve been trying, with much difficulty, to use my old Sony Mavica camera for these reviews. I’m suffering middle-age syndrome in that some of the stuff I thought was new, is old and bordering on obsolete. So I apologize for the dark grainy shots in this article taken with the old Sony, and I apologize for the detailed out of focus pictures taken with my new 5 megapixel Nikon. Maybe by the next article I’ll have learned how to properly use the new camera!

The subject of this review is Roden’s kit number 421, a 1/48 rendition of the Fokker D-VII Alb (early). This follows on the heels of kit #415 the Fokker D-VII, early version, #417 the Fokker D-VIIf, and #420 the Fokker D-VII OAW (early). Still in the works at Roden are kit #418 the Fokker D-VII OAW (mid) and kit #424 the Fokker D-VII Alb (late).

Decals are provided for four relatively colorful aircraft, complete with upper and lower lozenge and lavender rib tapes. The four aircraft are Ltn August Hartmann’s OD and yellow aircraft with a Witch riding a broom on the sides; a red and white striped aircraft from Jasta 43; Ltn, RF Jakobs, green black and white aircraft with a ¼ moon on the side, and the box art black and aircraft of Ltn. Carl Degelow, featuring a large white stag on the sides. I’ve chosen to do an OOB build of the aircraft on the box cover.

Just for the record, I try to build all reviews straight from the box. No aftermarket decals or parts. I want you to see what the basic kit provides; however on this kit I wanted to try something new. On the full scale aircraft the dyes or coloring in lozenge fabric did not fully penetrate the fabric. So the inside of a lozenge covered airplane has a little of the white fabric showing, and the pattern is reversed from the outside. To replicate this on this plane I used Americal/Gryphon #109 Four-color Lozenge, Top, Interior/Reversed. It is a little darker than the lozenge that came with the kit. But because the exterior of the plane will be painted black, it makes sense that this will work. However, if you want to stick to the OOB plan, there is enough of the Roden upper lozenge to finish the inside with the kit decals, if you are so inclined. Here’s a shot of the Roden decals above and below, and the Americal decals cut to fit the interior.

On to building: wait for it…NO! I DID NOT start construction with the interior!!! In this case I started with the wings and decaling. There are lots of lozenge sections followed by rib tapes to do on this airplane and I wanted the decals good and dry when I needed to handle the wings. And, as stated above, I also wanted to do the inside of the fuselage with interior lozenge.

To aid in getting the lozenge decals to lie down, I first gave the upper and lower wings and the interior of the fuselage several coats of rattle can clear gloss lacquer, enough to put down a good shine, not mirror-like, but enough to give the decals something to stick to. I tried to use Micro Sol decal solvent because it is readily available, and for the flat areas with little detail, it was adequate to pull down the Roden decals. In trouble areas with tall or sharp bumps I resorted to a very "hot" decal setting solution called CHAMP decal setting solution. You can see its effect in this shot of the finished wing showing an errant pet hair outlined under the decal!

The next step in decaling this was to first see if the lower wings could be covered with one piece of lozenge, and as you can see by the picture, this is doable.

Now, because the Roden decal material is wide enough for the lower wing it’s not wide enough for the top. A splice was called for so I decided to try for a scale-like application. So the lower and upper lozenge for the upper wing were cut into strips on a 45-degree bias to replicate the full-scale installation. The decal material was cut and applied oversize. After it began to set the front and rear edges were cut off with a new, sharp #11 blade.

This was followed by the kit-supplied rib tapes, and lastly, the national marking decals were applied and allowed to dry for several days. WARNING! The Roden-supplied rib tapes are not individual. They are a bunch of stripes on one big decal. I took the time to cut through the decal carrier between each of the stripes before they got their first water dip. I guess you don’t have to ask how I figured this out. Just be aware that Roden kindly supplies more than enough rib tapes.

While waiting on the clear paint and decals, work commenced on the little bits and cleaning the stumps off of the flight controls after they were removed from the sprues. I didn’t spend a lot of time on these items which I later found out was a mistake. As I found out a couple of months ago while building a Sopwith 1-1/2 Strutter, Roden parts look great on the sprue but occasionally they don’t quite match up were they belong. In this case, it takes a couple of minutes of work to get the ailerons to fit on the hinge points. Also the horizontal stabilizer and the elevator have significant mismatch at the elevator balances. So take your time in the beginning, before you paint, to get all of these items sanded or filed to fit.

The engine is a jewel unto itself, just a few parts and very little flash. There are two tall ejector towers on the back of the cylinders that need attention, and the front of the valve assembly is molded into the RH side of the engine, it and the top of the LH side of the engine that fits below it both need a little trimming to allow both parts to line up properly. Once that is done, you can glue the case and cylinders together. An additional potential stumbling block is at the back end of the engine. On my example, the backsides of the magnetos had a quite a bit of flash on them. This made them look as if they touched back-to-back on the centerline. When I attempted to install part # 7V, the cam drive and machine gun interrupter housing, I found this was not the case. A quick search of the photo references on the WW-I modeling page clearly showed the gap between the magnetos and part #7V fitting in this gap. So trim away this flash if it is on your engine.

We finally move on to the interior by gluing the fuel tank together followed by the cockpit components. This is where I found the only actual error in the kit instructions. The fuel tank filler tubes part #6C and #11B are cross-labeled. #6C is the tall one and #11B is the short one, opposite of what is shown on step 2.

The floor and instrument board first getting a coat of wood brown paint. The seat was painted all aluminum, with a black leather seat. All other controls and interior metal parts were painted with WW-II vintage RLM 02 gray. Note that there are holes in the base of the rudder pedal assembly #31B and the joystick #32B. Open these holes to allow the aileron torque tube #15B to pass through both components. On my kit I also cut the locating pin off the bottom of the control stick, as it did not line up with the hole in the floorboard once the stick was on the torque tube. Also note that my carpet gnomes in my shop stole the auxiliary throttle levers, part #23B right off my tweezers as I was attempting to install it.

Fuselage assembly offers a bit of a challenge in that there are no locator pins. This chore is compounded by the need to line up the floor, the aft cockpit close out panel, and seat with the other side. My solution was to install the close out panel on one side and take my best shot at getting it perpendicular to the fuselage seam. Then I glued the bottom edge of the fuselage together. This allowed enough give in the fuselage top to slide all of the interior components down into place. This also revealed that the molded pins on the fuselage side, which are supposed to support the seat, are too short. The seat will neatly and cleanly fall right between them. I added a strip of plastic rod just above them and glued the seat to this.

After this, I finished up the rest of the interior details and parts and moved on to that fiddly engine and cowling. Read all of the other Roden D-VII reviews you can find on the web, and most of our fellow modelers have commented on the fit of the cowling in this kit. They insist that it is far too big. I personally believe that is because they tried to install too many parts. I looked at my earlier releases of this kit and if you just follow the instructions for guidance as most of us do, the instructions imply that step 9 and 10 are sequential, when in actuality - they are options. Step 9 guides you through building an uncowled engine. This results in having the cowling mounting frames, two parts #12C, installed last. These are what you would see if the cowling panels were off of the airframe. Step 10 guides you through building the front end with the cowling panels on. In this step what would be parts #12C are molded into the side panels parts #1H and #2H. I think other reviewers may have built through step 9 then added the cowling as shown in step 10, not noticing that you have to leave some parts off to make things work that way. In my case, I followed just step 10; the cowling turned out almost the right width, just a touch too wide, but not as drastic as others have reported. However, that doesn’t mean that this was a completely smooth assembly either. I used the following sequence, I glued the left side panel on to the lower pan, making sure they were perpendicular to each other. This was followed by the left engine mount part #26B.

The instructions lack clear guidance as to exactly where this part should go. I ended up moving it as far forward as the lower pan would allow. This allowed the upper mounting point of part #26B to line up with the corresponding point on the side cowling. I then added the right cowling and engine mount also attaching to the bottom pan. Then I verified that the engine was going to fit. And it did. Now in the most radical departure, I glued these parts to the front of the fuselage at the firewall.

The cowling didn’t match up perfectly to the rest of the fuselage but it was acceptable, and the wing fit with a little work. Once this dried thoroughly, the engine was glued in place, followed by the radiator. Again, a significant amount of trimming and scraping was needed to make the radiator fit. Lastly, the straight exhaust was fitted through the cowling.

In a rush to meet IM’s publishing deadline last month, I decided to leave the top cowling parts off because it appeared they’d fit just fine and I’d get them later. After getting a month’s reprieve, I went back to a completely cowled model. As the following two pictures show, the upper cowling in this kit has a considerable warp.

I tried to resolve the warp in three steps. First I firmly glued the aft end of both top cowlings to the fuselage, then carefully matched and glued the curved sections down to the middle cowling, Lastly I was a little enthusiastic on applying TENAX to make the warped front end stay attached to the cowl. The melted plastic ooze made a little mess on the side of the radiator!

One last note, if you want to build this airplane with the cowling off, you still need to do some surgery. If you’ll look at one of the side cowlings note that it is two sections; a "D" shaped panel in front and a triangle - shaped panel in back. On this early batch of Albatros produced airplanes, the aft triangular panel was fabric covered, and remained on the airplane at all times. Only the "D" - shaped panel was removable. So to properly do an open cowl on this bird, you’ll have to follow step 9 to install the open engine, then cut the triangular sections off of the side cowls, sand the details off the inside of the triangles then attach them to the fuselage at the firewall.

Okay engine’s on. Let’s close out the fuselage. Start by dropping the font fuselage top, complete with fuel tank and ammo magazines, on to the fuselage. Oops, the magazines hit the fuel pump. So way back at the top of this article, when we’re detailing out the interior, be sure to mount the fuel pump UNDER the locating pins on the RH fuselage side. This was followed by pre fitting the lower wing to the fuselage. Several other reviewers have heavily emphasized that the gap between the lower wings is too small or the fuselage is just too wide. So a slightly more – than - normal amount of time and work is needed to get the wing to just drop into position, to ensure you don’t build in anhedral when you go to finally glue things together. My last pre-painting, pre-assembly action was to drill out the flight control cable pass through with a #77 drill bit. Why the odd size? Because that was the size of the holes in the plastic.

Thanks to the nice simple paint scheme, painting went quickly and painlessly. Tail feathers and the back of the fuselage were shot with Model Master gloss white enamel. The fuselage and sub wing were masked off and then shot with Model Master gloss black.

We finally moved on to getting the parts to look like an airplane. The lower wing, stabilizer and elevators were attached. Now for the most frustrating part of all biplanes, getting all of the struts to line up. Fortunately, I’m going to plagiarize Tom Cleavers’ method from his online review of a build of an earlier Fokker D-VII. In this case, the "N" struts of the D-VII rise perpendicular to the lower wing. I simply glued the "N" struts to the lower wing and allowed them to dry overnight with the struts hanging down.

Once these "N" strut joints were thoroughly dry, the top wing was fitted and glued on. Propping the tail up slightly allowed the full weight of the fuselage and lower wing assemblies to get a good joint at upper attach points on the bottom of the top wing.

Take great care at this point because the wing is very fragile. Roden has done an EXCELLENT job of molding the ball-and-socket struts used by Fokker, and this makes some of the rest of the wing assembly a little easier. So the next step in getting the top wing firmly attached to rest of the plane is to fit the "V" - shaped struts, or cabane struts to the front spar. The front leg of this strut passes through the cowl and attaches to the engine mount. But if you are building a closed cowl, like I did, then this front leg is slightly too long. I wound up cutting about 1/16^th of an inch, in 1/64^th increments, off the portion that sticks into the cowling to get a good fit. This allowed the left - hand cabane to easily fit between the upper forward fuselage, the front spar of the top wing, and the hole in the cowling. On to the right side, GRRR, the engine exhaust stack interferes with the cabane strut. My solution was to cut the exhaust, make it shorter, and allow the strut to fit. With the two front cabanes now providing a bit more rigidity, I added the aft cabanes. These ended up too long, but they are just the right length if you cut off the little round end fittings and just use the strut itself. The final component in the wing rigging is the third brace that makes the front cabanes into Fokker’s signature triangular mount. On my model these units were just the right length and fit perfectly between the cabane and fuselage.

Last fiddly bit to mess with was the landing gear. I made the (false) assumption that the struts would fit into the sub-wing at the proper fore-and aft-angles, and that all I’d have to worry about was fitting the struts into the matching sockets on the bottom of the fuselage. The good news is that it is easy to get the struts attached to the fuselage; the bad news is the sub-wing ended up a little nose low. Next time I’m going to use glue that will allow me to adjust all six contact points before the glue sets.

The last of the detail parts were added, paint touched up where needed, and the little rigging on the aircraft was done, and pictures shot. If you’ve never rigged a biplane, I strongly suggest that you add the two little cross brace wires to the landing gear struts. It greatly improves the strength of this structure.

I had a lot of fun with this kit and learned how to deal with lozenge and rib tape decals. Hint - rib tapes, caffeine and alcohol do not mix. Do them only when you are awake and sober.

Conclusion

In summary, things to be prepared to do before you press on with this kit are:

• Make sure the ailerons, elevator and rudder are trimmed to fit the matching components.
• Clear out the holes in the rudder bar and joystick to allow the aileron torque tube to pass through.
• The bottom radiator flap mount will interfere with the engine, so you need to do some trimming and fitting if you want both to show.
• Make sure there’s a gap between the magnetos.
• Enlarge the engine exhaust pass - through hole in the cowling to the back of the panel and install the exhaust stack as far aft as it will go. This may let it clear the cabane strut.
• The fuselage and cowling are just a tad too wide to install the lower wings without having them develop anheadral. File or scrape the fuselage and wings until you get a free fit that doesn’t bend the wings downward.
• Attach the lower wing first, followed by the "N" struts, followed by the cabane struts.
• Use cross bracing on the landing gear.

Things I’d like to see Roden improve in this kit:

• They went through the effort to include propeller decals. The cockpit in this airplane is very open, and all of the gauges are very visible, it would be nice to have decals for the instrument faces. They’d be about the same size as the prop decals.
• Adding a comment that you have to cut the cowling to get a correct open engine would also be a nice touch.
• And the only actual error in the whole kit part #6C and #11B are cross-labeled. #11B is the short one.

I thank IM and Roden for this review kit, straight from the factory.

References

Flying Scale Models, Vol 7 No. 51, Fokker D-VII special

Albatros publications Fokker D-VII Anthologies 1,2 & 3