Artist Doug Craner is back with this fantastic Albatros build! This piece is highly detailed and painted to resemble the actual fighter! Beautiful work by Doug!
Here are a few shots of the almost finished Manfred Von Richthofen’s Albatros DIII, Around April 1917 vintage. (control wires still to fit) I scratched new plumbing from fuse wire, the longer water pipe appears to have been partly clad, scratched spark plugs from brass tube, wire and PE nuts, new rocker springs..fuse wire wound round a pin, then pushed together and cut into desired lengths whilst on the pin. Extra plumbing on the Merc 160hp, including two new brass taps, with butterfly wings. I used the kit radiator, but removed the moulded wire and drilled through the rad to take a wire, which would be taped to the smaller water pipe. The “V” strutts were drilled at the base to take a steel pin,and I drilled right through the lower wing so this pin would hold the weight of the upper wing, along with the small water pipe. The bungee, is round elastic and covered in cotton, that came off a clothing label, which I dyed in black ink. The axel is brass, again for strength.. All metal panels, undercarriage “spreader” etc are PE parts.
The undercarriage on the original is not red!… very pale… It look’s like it could be a replacement so I’ve painted it in Albatros factory grey-green. Also the windscreen is very small, and looks like it could of come off a Fokker EIII… Hence it’s been painted black.
The red was sampled from a museum photo of some fabric from MVR’s Fokker DR1…Best Doug
In the photos is a close up of the red I sampled from the museum photo of the fabric taken from MvR’s crashed Fokker DR1 ( held in Australia)
I had to first paint the fuselage in enamels to represent the plywood skin of the original, then when this was fully dry I “mucked- up” the finish with this red acrylic, which was quite thin.( like tomato soup)
On close examination of the fabric photo, It became apparent that due to the thinness of the red, it would appear darker or lighter, depending on what was beneath. And this patchy look, along with the scratches helped to make it quite scruffy….Best Doug
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