Didier Mario's Central Powers Aircraft Models


Blue Max Junker D1 in 1/48

This is the old Blue Max kit with many corrections and scratchbuilt pieces. I began by thinning the interior sides of the fuselage to dress them with plastic strips glued with liquid cement to reproduce the corrugated inner surface, the frames, ammo boxes, instrument panel oil reservoir are scratchbuilt, the instrument gauges are CSM (I think the best on the market) while the seat belts, control column with its trigger and the throttle come from Tom's modelworks etched set with some change. The seat is from Eduard with its padding added by Milliput and the engine is the marvellous High Tech kit, (unfortunately now out of production) with some extra detail.

After having joined the fuselage halves I have found a great shotcoming of the moulds: the undersurfaces weren't plain, so I added a fairly amount of milliput, sanded it and rebuilt all the corrugated surface, the same for the upper fuselage (but only for a few ribs near the joint). The wings need refinement, some thinning of their trailing edges and some extra work to make the corrugations accettable while the radiator is so chunky that I have scratchbuilt one.

I chose a decoration quite standard for a Junkers D1, brown fuselage with mauve and green wings. Here a few words about it: the decoration I have chosen has been pictured in the Windsock datafile; the aircrafts found by allied army ar Eve`re and Hombeeck show a dark, uniformed fuselage colour (chocolate brown as stated by the official report drew back by the allied army) and camouflaged wings; it is possible to see two kinds of camouflage: the first mave with a green pattern sprayed over with soft edges and the second mauve with and green hand painted or spray painted with hard edges, this is the one I chose for my model. The wings and fuselage crosses have been airbrushed after having masked them with tape.

I wish to thank Dame Karen, Diego, Eric, Lance and all the members who helped me in this project with scale plans, pictures and suggestions and without whose help I would have never been able to complete this model.


Dragon Fokker D VIII in 1/48 - Built as E-V

This is the Dragon Fokker D VIII in 1/48 (my model depicts a Fokker EV) in the colours of Jasta 6, the interior has been completely scratchbuildt with a tubular structure fron rod, only the seat and the ammo case, revised, are from the box.

One of the biggest problems I have had to face was the lozenges fabric, when the dragon kit went on the market, only Americal Gryphon produced good four colours lozenges but, here in Italy, it was impossible to find them, so I decided to mask and paint the old and awful superscale decals and to copy them with a colours photocopier on decal paper, it has been a hard task but enabled me to produce custom decals even for the interior with a lighter shade of colours to represent the inner side of the fabric.


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