Gotha Model Images
by John Huggins

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Gotha G.III

This is the Roden kit. It was built mostly out of the box. The only problem areas I ran into were the engine nacelles and the struts. They give you 2 nice engines, but they don't fit into the nacelles at all well. I thinned out the insides so that they would fit, then discovered that after they were installed, they would not be visable anyway. The kit struts are very fragile, and after breaking several of them, I gave up and replaced them with strut stock. I tried something new this time for the rigging. Instead of drilling holes through the wings or struts to glue the rigging wires in, I made a bunch of small "eye rings" out of very fine wire. They were made by looping the wire around a piece of 28 guage tube and twisting until it was snug against the tube. I then drilled a bunch of #80 holes in all of the attachment points. After the model was painted and assembled, I was able to go back and tie off the wires using invisible thread. I used the same rings for the fairleads for the control cables that ran along the outside of the fuselege. I think the final result was easier to do than other methods I have used and looked more like what was on the real plane. I want to get some of the PART turnbuckles and see how they will look.

The wood grain areas (inside the fuselage and undersides are all done with decal paper. I used Gunze paints with a future overcoat and kit decals, except for the light green panels and the wheel disks, which were made by painting clear decal paper with the desired colors, then cutting out the needed parts.

The photos are not as good as I would like. They were taken with a first generation digital camera with a close up lens adaptor. I think I will be able to get better pics with the camera, I will have to play around with the settings.


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