The
SPAD S.XIII was a French biplane fighter
aircraft from World
War I, developed by Société
Pour L'Aviation et ses Dérivés (SPAD) from the earlier highly successful SPAD
S.VII. It was one of the most capable fighters of the war, and one of the
most-produced, with 8,472 built and orders for around 10,000 more cancelled at
the Armistice.
The
project is the Spad XIII C flown by Lt Reed Chambers and is 100% scratchbuilt for a
group build in a Portuguese fórum called “Modelismo na net”, and I have to
thank all the guys in there who helped me.
What
started has a 1/48 scale plane quickly turned out in a 1/35 plane.
I worked
my way through some 3D plans I had for the plane structure, so I built it and
covered it with slim plastic then applied some putty and melted sprue so I could
get the shape of the Spad.
After
that I levelled it with some putty and sanded it till it got a smooth surface so
I could apply some cable wires to look like the structure after the fabric
applied.
Then
I glued everything I had made and added all the bits you can see in the photos
below.
Click on
images below to see larger images
It's
a multimedia kit because I used everything I could get my hands on, plastic,
wires, wood, beer cans, plastic cups and dishes, speaker meshes, everything I had in my house that
I thought would look ok, even the vickers are made from
barbecue sticks and needles. The rigging was done with nylon monofilament.
All
the markings are painted through masks drawn by hand, it was not an easy job but
in the end looked more real then aftermarket decals and I wanted to do it all in
scratch.
The
weathering was accomplished with oil paint over future and then wiped away.
The
all project took 3 months to finish, because it was a learning
process, after all it was my first scratchbuilt work.
The
photos speak for themselves.
Ricardo
Click on
images below to see larger images
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