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Kit: Kitbash (1:48)
Attached are two pics of my 1/48 N25 made from bits and parts.
Kit: Roden (1:48)
Many have this kit, unbuilt, in their ‘stash’, or on the infamous “shelf of doom”. I started this one over 2 years ago, and finally got around to finishing it, and was reasonably happy with the result. As I started this before the Part PE set was available I used what I had, the old Eduard PE set for the Monogram kit. I also used Eduard and Part ‘generic’ PE, the Part control horns set, the Eduard British WWI seatbelts set, and the Eduard prepainted WWI instruments set. The Kit is a handful, not that anything fits poorly, very little seam filler is needed (except for the fuselage bottom). The tricky part is getting the ‘in scale’, (and therefore fragile) cabane and interplane struts in and mounted correctly. The mountings for the cabane struts are more mystery than not, and with four individual parts, a matter of some patience, sweating and swearing. The interplane strut connections are also not very ‘positive’ and not very deep, either, I had to reglue two of them, during final assembly. Smaller disasters, with the cockpit ‘skylight’ dropping out, and tweezer launch of the tiny kit control horns, made for some not fun moments. But the end result is very nice, indeed, a faithful 1/48 replica of this important WWI fighter. The three things I did do to improve the kit were, adding stretched sprue brace wires to the cockpit inside, gouging out the pulley inspection panels, and using the British section of the Eduard prepainted WWI instruments set. The ‘woodgrain’ effect is my usual, oil paints over light colored acrylic paint. The only truly awful part of the kit, in my opinion, are the control pulley inspection ports, on the inner surfaces of the main planes. Roden gives you decals to cover them, but they just look fake, so I decided to fix them. I gouged them out, added a ‘pulley’ (a slice of styrene tube) and wire (black nylon thread), and covered them with triangles cut from the cellophane bag the instructions and decals come in. Markings are for Mick Mannock, the top scoring British ace.