See Bill Michael's preview of the 1142 kit http://modelingmadness.com/reviews/w1/previews/eduard/1142.htm

I started off with the cockpit following the instructions. It is recommend that one follows the instructions or it will make the build more complicated. I have no problems with PE parts, but they do take a while to do right. Watch out for the PE seatbelt/harness as it is a delicate if not difficult assembly to deal with.

All aluminum interior parts were painted with a base coat of Tamiya Aluminum and Talon Aluminum.

The wooden interior was painted dry brushing MM Acryl burnt sienna all over the wood parts. Once it dried then I brush painted Clear Yellow to simulate the laminate. I don t use a tan base coat as the olive brown color looks tan under a clear yellow coat. At the same time, I painted the props in the same fashion (hubs hand painted with Mithril Silver.)

Be very patient with the cockpit tubing as it is rather fiddly, but a little bit of extra glue does the trick. Despite the complexity of the cockpit with all the PE, all three cockpits were done within a couple of days. Two of the three SPADs have the open engine grills so one needs to take your time with the exposed engine area as the parts require some attention so that it does not look out of place. I glued the closed engine grills in place for Rickenbacker s plane (they fit well so no issues.)

The fuselage halves go together fine. Thanks to the excellent parts engineering, there is only a single seam on the rear underside to deal with (filled with CA glue and sanded carefully so as not to ruin the fabric detail.) I then added the top and bottom portions. On the underside, I found there were some gaps that some Vallejo plastic putty to fill them in. The topside fuselage went on fine, but I noticed that it was a little large to the left and needed to be sanded down. I masked the detail with some tape and sanded the left so that it was the same size as the left.

I painted the engine grills with a base coat of Tamiya Aluminum and a top coat of Hawkeye Talon Aluminum. The cowls were a little more difficult to assemble as one has to make sure that the cooling chines are aligned in the vertical and horizontal. When the glue dried, I painted the cowlings in their respective colors (Red for Rickenbacker, Blue for Luke and the camo colors/Aluminum for Nungesser.) Once dry I test fitted the engine faces and cowls on the front. This is where I noticed that there was a slight gap between the cowling and the nose of the SPAD. I cut some 10 thou plastic card shims to seal up the gaps.

Once everything was dry, I carefully stuffed the cockpits and exposed engine areas with wet tissue paper to prevent overspray. 

Painting

The SPAD camo patterns are what make the kit interesting for me; aside from the tedium of making masks and applying them. I went for what I had available among my paints to emulate the not very common French WW1 paints. I chose to use Tamiya Hull Red (as it is close to the shades of what they call French Chestnut Brown I ve seen at the LHS), IJA Dark Green, US Interior Green (some folks use RLM 83, but I find it to be too, er, green and prefer a less intense green with more yellow in it) Tamiya Bluff and Tamiya NATO Black. The fabric underside was done in Gunze Sail Color and the metal/wood portions of the underside done based on Tom Cleaver s suggestion using Clear Yellow and Radome Tan for the Rickenbacker and Luke planes while I used Tamiya Sky Grey for the underside of Nunngesser s plane.

Each plane was preshaded in flat black and then each color had to be masked off and painted to prevent overspray. As you can imagine, this took quite some time as the patterns for each plane are different.

Fortunately, I did a decent job of masking so that I didn't need to do much work except deal with seams that I didn't do as good a job with of sanding down.

The wheels were done around the same time. The wheels for Rickenbacker and Luke were painted with the same cream color while Nungesser s wheels were painted IJA Green. Once dry, they were masked using the kit masks and painted with NATO Black.

Once the paint was dry, I sprayed on two thin layers of Tamiya Clear Gloss as a base for the decals.

Decals

The Eduard decals by Cartograph were well done and settled down using MicroSet. An oddity I noticed was that the blue used on the US SPADs was actually US Insignia blue and not the lighter French blue as seen in the color diagrams in the instructions. One issue that should be noted is that I had to cut the rudder decals where the control wires attach so as to get the decal to sit properly then when it was dry, I put some Solvaset around the area of the cut to get them to settle down properly. Another issue is that the white isn't entirely opaque.

When things were dry, I used RLM23 red and lightened French blue for Nungesser s plane/Insignia Blue for Frank Luke and Rickenbacker s to touch up the areas of the rudder that were not covered by the decal. I did additional touch up along the edge of the rudder matching the various colors of each rudder flash.

The tricolor triangle marking on Nungesser s proved to be a bit more difficult than I first thought, but I managed to get it to stick using an application of MicroSet and then with some Solvaset when the MicroSet dried. Same applies to the star markings on Rickenbacker s wheels.

Weathering

I limited the weathering on Frank Luke s plane to some dirt on the wheels, a little bit of exhaust stains and mud on the struts because of his limited (and intense) combat service.

Rickenbacker s and Nungesser s were weathered a bit more due to the fact that they flew more often, but I did not attempt to overdo them because they were both well known aces whose planes received more attention maintenance wise. I muddied up the wheels, wings and struts a bit. Both planes had more noticeable exhaust stains, but I avoided going WW2 South Pacific extreme.

I glued the guns and gun sights on first before doing the upper wing as it would be difficult otherwise.

The most tricky part of any WW1 plane assembly is dealing with the struts and landing gear as alignment can be rather elusive.

I began with the interplane struts on Rickenbacker s plane before adding the top wing. I glued all the unpainted (but sanded down and mold marks removed) struts into the holes then I had a hell of a time trying to align everything into the holes. It seemed each time I had a pair of struts in, another pair would pop out. It was literally the WW1 version of whack a mole which nearly turned into Smack A SPAD, but I wasn't going to act like a spaz and refrained from doing so. After an hour of grinding my teeth, I finally got everything in place. A couple of C clamps were gently placed on the wings to keep the alignment and it was set aside to dry.

I had some big problems with the tubing (parts D10 and D23) that comes down the middle of the wing to the fuselage. This was more problematic than the struts. I cheated a bit by gluing the plastic parts in and then trimming the bottom. I did not care about being exact as most of the detail is hidden by the wing (and as I do not build for contests, I could live with it.)

There is actually a better way which I did with Luke s and Nungesser s planes. I found that if you glue the interplane struts that attach the fuselage to the upper wing first and then you let the glue dry. When it is dry, you attach the wing to the fuselage and glue it in place. Once the glue is dry, you work outwards by attaching the H shaped middle strut in next and then finally the outer struts. This way you only worry about four pegs in each step not twelve. It takes longer to do, but it is less problematic and messy and easier on the sanity.

Once the struts were in, I very very very carefully hand painted them. There is a reason why I don t paint them before attaching them and that is because I d rather not worry about ruining the paint when I m gluing them (I know this from painful experience.) I painted them with burnt sienna first, clear yellow next and then painted the silver bands on each. There is no easy way to rush it and this is probably the most difficult part of painting the plane. I think this can be better solved using decals for the silver bands.

I found the struts that attach the fuselage to the horizontal stabilizers to be the fiddly. Don t trim the sprue gate tabs when one removes them because they re just a touch short. Also don t insert the alignment pin in too deep or the other end of the strut will not touch. This will take some patience to it right.

Next came the landing gear. I m not sure about the SPAD landing gear alignment, but I don t think I did a very good job of aligning it. I had to fidget with the landing gear till I got the plane to sit level. Even then it didn't look 100% to me. If you never built a WW1 model before, I should let you know that I ve always found the landing gear alignment on every model I ve built to be fiddly. The Eduard SPAD is typical of my experience. Assembling the landing gear of any WW1 model plane takes a great deal of patience.

Next up were the interplane wires. It is VERY tedious work, but essential if you want to do a WW1 model as it will look odd without it (like a ship model without any PE railing.) My method is to take a set of dividers to measure the gap and then cut a section of brass 0.008 diameter wire to that length and glue it with white glue. I have tried to drill holes, add fishing line and glue it in place with CA glue but I ve never got to to work well for me which is why I do it this way. I don t use CA glue (and will use it only for stubborn sections) because white glue is flexible enough to endure the contraction/expansion of metal with temperature. Based on the wire diagram in the instructions, I found that there was a total of 38 or 42 different wires (depending on how you cut the ones that intersect the middle spar.)

I worked from the fuselage out with all the interior wires and interplane wires that are in between struts done first. Then the outer wires, the landing gear wires and finally the tail assembly.

Once done, I carefully sprayed on some Xtracylic Semi-Gloss for the final coat and then attached the small canopies on.

Figures

The American Eagles kit comes with a resin figure of both Eddie Rickenbacker and Frank Luke. Eddie s figure is in three pieces which were glued together using CA glue and lightly sanded to deal with the seams while there was a small pin hole on Frank Luke s face that was filled in with Vallejo Plastic Putty. I hand painted them using various Tamiya and Vallejo paints. The details were highlighted using watercolor pin washes and thinned Vallejo paints. I m happy that they turned out okay.

I m satisfied (only exception is the landing gear alignment) with the results of my first attempt at assembly line modeling. I m not crazy about doing it again, but I did not make any SNAFUs that haunted me during the build.

The Eduard SPAD is a very well engineered kit as Eduard split the fuselage into three sections and eliminated the upper fuselage seam that plagued the DML and Glencoe kits. It does require a lot of patience on the part of the modeler to do them right due to the complexity of the struts and interplane wires. I wouldn't recommend this kit for the first time WW1 modeler to build (Eduard s Albatross and Nieuport series of kits are excellent starter kits) but I heartily recommend these kits if you have at least one WW1 kit under your belt.