Oh my Gotha [Fiddlers Green Kit Review, pic heavy]
With the advent of Flight of the Giants, I thought I'd get ahead of the game by making Fiddler's Green's Gotha G.V. I purchased the complete aircraft CD a few years ago. As far as I can tell, the version is unchanged.
The kit is labelled as a G.V, but it has a wing-mounted fuel tank, which would actually make it a G.IV. The rest of the model conforms more to the appearance of the IV, so I suspect this may be an accidental mislabelling.
The kit parts come as a 4 page PDF, you have a choice of night or day versions. I selected the day version, as I quite like the lozenge camouflage pattern. Like all Fiddlers green products, the model is printed with fairly heavy fold lines and somewhat cartoonish appearance outside of the kit itself. In practice, the lines are less visible on 1/144 scale models so I was unconcerned. As with all the kits, there is no indicated scale, but instead a "WSAM" %, which indicates the print percentage to make a 1/60 scale model.
After printing the model out to a nominal 1/144 scale and cutting out a few parts, I was concerned about the size of the model. Breaking out a ruler and a calculator, I discovered that the scale information was incorrect. A few quick calculations with the (hopefully) accurate 3 view plan from the kit and the ruler function in Acrobat showed me the kit was approximately 1/46 or so. Because of measurement inaccuracy, I then assumed the original designer would have designed to a standard scale (1/48) and I worked from there. To save you the effort of calculation, print the model out at 1/3 size (33.33%)
Like most of their kits, the basic structure is a one piece fuselage with folded over wings and tail. Even without instructions, the gist is clear. Gist, however, is not good enough. The exploded view and plans were inadequate. It wasn't particularly clear how the engine should look when assembled. Mention of the firing tunnel is found only on their website, which is a shocking oversight. There are no sections of the fuselage, but as far as I could determine the fuselage is primarily rectangular.
The model fuselage and wings do have nicely designed geometry; they go together correctly. In order to make a decent looking model, all the tabs need to be removed and replaced with lighter-weight paper glued behind the seam. At this scale, the thickness of the cardstock equals approximately 10 cm, so butting the cardstock edge to edge is desirable.
There were no details as to how the lower wing was to be attached, but it seemed obvious that the central piece was to be inserted completely through the fuselage. This made the final fuselage assembly tricky, as ideally you need to glue the wing in place after the entire fuselage is complete to avoid accidental warping or bulging, and the central wing area must be completely straight so that the lower wings attach correctly.
The lower wings slid in easily with replacement tabs, but the upper wing required some work. There are two pieces for the centre of the wing; upper and lower. The upper piece weirdly has no camouflage on it, so the wing would have a blank spot in the centre. This offended my aesthetic sense, so I cut a corresponding shape out of the wings of a second printout.
The lower piece is significantly smaller than the upper. I'm assuming because of the curvature of the upper wing lower should theoretically be smaller. In practice (in this scale at least), they should be the same, or the lower should be very slightly larger because of the slight dihedral in the upper wing. Luckily I had a spare upper piece in the right colour because I cut a new camouflage upper.
The most challenging aspect of the model is mounting the wing. The kit only gives a template for the 26 struts that are required ("use toothpicks"). Normally, I would use paper for the struts (it's a paper model, after all), but scale struts would not be strong enough in paper, and to make it worse, cutting them out resulted in curved paper (like a ribbbon), so getting them all the same length would be impossibile.
A jig or some other method for struts is absolutely necessary, as even an error of 1/2 mm will yield bad results. I used the Chopper II from Northwest Short Line to make struts out of toothpicks. Because the toothpicks were grossly out of scale, I also used the chopper to split them lengthwise. They're still a bit large in parts, but as the model is to be used for gaming I erred on the side of strength.
Gluing the struts into place is a bit of a painstaking job, but possibly easier than gluing the upper wing. I found that I got the best result by first gluing the upper wing to the fuselage struts, then working inward from the edge of the wings on both sides, holding each group of struts in place with elastic bands while the glue dried. Assuming all the struts were cut accurately, the wing should fit together properly.
A curious oversight is the lack of a template for the landing gear axles. I measured the distance required with calipers and cut two axles to fit. I also had to make skid from paper, as it's inexplicably missing.
Normally Fiddler's Green kits don't come with pilots, but this kit does. Although they're flats, they do look quite good attached to the model. Flats do have an illustrious history in miniatures wargaming, so I think they're appropriate. They're not particularly easy to cut out, but the result is worth it.
The last step was attaching a ball bearing for the magnetic mount. Normally, I would just glue the bearing inside and leave it at that. However, because the model already has a large hole in the bottom from the firing tunnel, I decided to remove a small section of fuselage and insert a bearing. To make sure it stayed secure, I wrapped it in a piece of paper towel soaked in glue. This serves two functions: 1.It holds the bearing in place securely with no chance of slippage and 2. It can be painted easily.
There is a slight bulge on the underside of the completed model where the bearing is. After painting, it has an unfortunate anatomical appearance, but not many people are likely to examine the underside of my airplane.
On completion I measured the model and it was dead on in length as indicated in the plans but somewhat narrower in wingspan, so I will continue to go with 1/48 as the design scale, if only because it's harder to measure wingspan.
The Gotha took about three times as long to assemble as a smaller kit (like a DR I); I estimate it took about 6.5 hours in total (not counting glue drying time). The exploded view diagram and instructions are laughably incomplete. An incorrect scale and necessity to manufacture parts from scratch may (or should) be offputting to inexperienced paper modellers. However, despite the flaws, the end result is unquestionably an impressive addition to a Wings of War squadron.
Of course, this thread is useless without pics, so here they are.
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Originally Posted by Rum Demon
Oh my Gotha [Fiddlers Green Kit Review, pic heavy]
You did a great job on the article as well.
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