Jack Gartner's Central Powers Models

I've built 3 kits by Toko and have several more. Their Hansa-Brandenburg W29 is by far the BEST of their kits that I have worked with! It was a completely straightforward build, fit and detail of the parts was excellent and the end result impressive (at least to me). All at a very reasonable kit cost (I think I paid about $10US for the kit). This is another OOB build, except that I replaced the control horns with brass and used nylon sewing thread for control lines. The wooden pontoons and beaching dolly were hand painted with artists acrylics. I chose the early 1918 German Navy version from the box art because I thought the hex lozenge and giant crosses looked striking! The Toko hex decals were way off in color, so I replaced them. The Germans used two different hex sizes on these planes, small and large. As luck would have it, the Copper States Models 1/48th scale Kriegsmarine hex decals were perfect in both size and color registry and so that's what I used.


This is my build of the Toko 1/72nd scale Siemens-Shuckert as the DIV version. Except for replacing the poorly molded elevator control horns with brass sheet and rigging with nylon sewing thread, the build was straight out of the box. The only problems I had with the kit were that the mating of the lower wing to the fuselage was poor, as the fuselage seems to have been designed to fit the DIII wing. Also, the placement holes for the undercarriage attachment to the fuselage were slightly off in alignment to each other, and the cabane strut holes were WAY off on botht the wings and especially the fuselage! I recommend puttying the holes in and making your own. I used Superscale lozenge for the upper surfaces and the Toko lozenge for the undersurfaces. When the surface is prime coated with white, with the exception of the light blue, the Toko lozenge colors are a perfect match for undersurface colors that are shown on the Smithsonian Albatros DV, so I figured it was close enough! Ialso used Aeromaster blue and pink rib tapes, cut in 1/2 from the 1/48th scale sheet, a time cosnuming task! Altogether, there are about 230 separate decals on this plane! The markings are those of Oberleutnant Alfred Lerner.


This is one of 3 Toko 1/72nd scale kits I've built thus far, their Pfalz DXII. I built this as a review kit for the IPMS Journal (Vol. 11#2, January/February 1999), so I won'trepeat all my comments here. The markings I used seem to be one of the more popular choices for this aircraft, those of Lt. Max Kammerer of Jasta 35. I know some folks will squawk that the yellow marking behind the letter K is actually an I or a 1 and shouldnot go over the fuselage, but my reference source was the Aircraft in Profile article and that's what I followed (the I would actually have been much easier to apply!).



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