SE5a Flight Build: Part 3 of 3

My wife has done a fair bit of pottery, and she can spend many, many hours on a piece...kneading the clay, making the form, trimming it, drying it, bisque firing and glazing...only to have it all ruined with the final firing (too hot, running glaze, exploding piece...whatever). I have shared that kind of anguish making models. You go through all the meticulous steps, only to have the finished plane ruined by a spray of the matt clear coat which, wrecks the decals, or mottles the finish or whatever. I thought I was headed into another one of those awful experiences as I was finishing off this flight of SE5as. As I spray coated the undersides, I was getting some staining...and I thought, crap...this Dullcoat is reactly badly with the Future floor wax on the models.

Happily, as it turned out, the mottling was minimal. All's well that ends well.

So, here were the final steps of the build...

I got all the decals on and sealed them with a generous coating of Future floor wax. Then I added the painted exhaust stacks...kind of rusty at the front end and darker metal towards the rear. Here is a shot of the planes just before the upper wings went on the the interplane struts were popped in.


I had previously sprayed the propellers with a deck wood paint color. Then I stained them with a sepia wash and when that dried I painted the tips light grey.


Here the SE5as have their wings on and struts in. At this point, they just need undercarriages, props, Lewis gun mounts and tailplanes. The Roden kit has no guide holes for the attachment of the landing gear, so I drilled these out as best I could.


And the result...five models in under 3 weeks. Much better than my normal build time.


I Dullcoated the models, glued magnets to the undersurface of each plane, and presto...they're ready for a game of Canvas Eagles.


Would I like to do more with these builds? Yes. They deserve a little representational rigging. I game with rigged and unrigged planes. Although there isn't much of a difference on the game table, rigged planes just look better overall. These guys will get some stretched sprue rigging at some point. Also, I have some pilot figures I'd like to paint up and pop them in as well.


Well, now that that build is done, I'd like to move on to a flight of Jasta 19 triplanes from April 1918. Here's a preview!


Happy gaming!