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Herringbone Gotha - Back on the go!


seiran01

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Seems like as good a time as ever to jump into my second Wingnut Wings Gotha G.IV kit. The first one from 2 years ago met an untimely gravity-related death when it was about 90% finished.

 

So here we go: WNW Gotha, unstarted. Pheon decals for the awesome herringbone scheme. The one (poor quality phto) of this plane leads me to believe the blue/mauve scheme is probably correct, but I'm going to do the blue fuselage / light blue wings scheme as I've not seen one built in those colors before.

 

Aftermarket to be used:

REXX hollow metal exhausts - REXX ehausts are gorgeous, and the Gotha ones are my favorite of all their products to date

Aviattic weighted wheels - packaging calls them Gotha wheels but really they're appropriate for all G-type and many / all C-type German aircraft.

Aviattic resin prop hubs

Taurus valves / lifters / timing gear for the Mercedes D.IV engines - I'll use these if I decide to do open cowls, as these details will be lost on closed cowls

If I can get Proper Plane to make me a set of wooden propellers for this bird, you can bet I'll be using these also.

 

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The gorgeous REXX metal exhausts

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I've added the HGW sets to this build, and gaspatch guns will also be used. Possibly Maxim's 20mm Becker cannon (through shapeways) for the nose gun ring as well, I've had a few of those in the stash for ages now

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Here we go!

Mike, i am salivating at the prospect of seeing this fully loaded Gotha come into being. It was quite a pleasant surprise to see you post this topic here, so much so that i have decided to take the plunge and join the group build with you guys. I feel a little burnt out building world war one aircraft so i will be going down a different route for the first time in a year and half, but i will be taking notes as i am sure you will end up with a world class beauty!

I have been considering for a while wether to buy rexx exhausts or not but the part sure does look superb. Did you give it a bath in burnishing fluid or did it come like that?

looking forward to your start on the kit!

Karim

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Cheers guys. Karim, I have a few aircraft less than a century old that I hope to start before long including some RNZAF F4Us, P-40s, A-4s, and one or two other surprises up my sleeve as well - so I'm looking forward to whatever you decide to build next (give us a hint, or drop me an email - mikeswinburne@gmail.com).

 

The REXX exhaust was photographed right out of the package. If you've ever seen a Moskit exhaust in person, it's the same type of thing.  I will say that I've noticed some of the rexx exhausts have shrunken a tiny compared to the length of the plastic part. I'm referring to the reach of the exhaust pipes coming out from each cylinder - in some cases they don't quite stretch to fully reach all six cylinders. There's a little bit of shrinkage on the gotha ones that'll have me remove the inboard bolts of the #1 and #6 cylinders to get everything sitting flush. Nothing that should be noticeable once things are assembled. 

 

I came across my many sheets of Aviattic 4-color painted night bomber lozenge last night - the stuff that I would have used on the Gotha G.V conversion (sold), not the stuff appropriate for the AEG. Thinking I may do some engine panels or even one of the outboard lower wings in this lozenge to give the plane some donor pieces and add some more interest to what will already be a pretty striking scheme.  I'm getting more and more excited for this build!

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Three cheers for the weekend! It's been a crazy week and I've not had any time to really start on the Gotha, but I was at least able to spend some time starting to clean up the mold seams. The HGW sets landed today, funny enough I found all four sets individually were cheaper than the "super set" containing all four of these (and nothing more), from the same seller on ebay.

 

Hoping to start playing around with the Aviattic painted lozenge also - Right now I'm thinking to do an aileron and one nacelle cover in this lozenge as parts salvaged from another airframe.

 

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Found the Gaspatch Parabellum 14s and the Becker 20mm cannon in my stash finally, turns out they don't belong in the drawer marked "spare engine sprues!"

 

I shot the cannon with a quick coat of Tamiya fine surface primer straight from the spray can, without doing any cleanup or washing of the 3d-printed part first. Looks like it's going to need only a little bit of sanding / clean up in some areas. The level of detail on this thing is pretty amazing, that's just a single part with the mount included.

 

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Here's a pic of the cannon on the Gotha. Side note, it's apparently only the Gothas built for Austria-Hungary that featured an anemometer, also shown mounted above the second window.

m9MdmBy.jpg

 

These cannons have been documented on Hansa-Brandenburg W12s and on AEG G.IV night bombers, in the rear gun ring of the AEG if I recall. Purely because it's not somehting you see every day, here's a Becker in the W12

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Guest Peterpools

MIke

Great choice and will be following intently.

Some terrific AM for sure and can't wait for the work to begin

Keep 'em comin

Peter

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Finally got to start some actual work on the kit today.  For the first time, I added (simulated) asbestos wrap around the intake manifolds using 2mm masking tape, and these were then sprayed with Tamiya fine surface primer.

 

The Gotha has a LOT of ejector pin marks on the cockpit sidewalls, just for laughs you can see them all in black dots on the photo below. The HGW PE set includes parts to glue into the nose panels that save a ton of time by covering these ejector pin marks up and I've applied them fully to one side so far. The tight quarters and shape of these areas would take at least an hour or two to to clean up neatly, and this way it's simply a 5-10min glue job. No such luck for the rest of the cockpit but at least I don't have to worry about the pin marks inside the stripey zone - these will be hidden by internal structure.

 

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