VMC Fokker D VIII

[TheLurker]

This is a reconstruction of the build thread that first appeared at HPA last year so it's more a retrospective than a proper build.
___________________________________________________________________________

MrsL bought me the VMC Fokker D VIII kit for Xmas '22 and I finally got around to building it last year.  As always the first problem was the scheme. Because I'm a lazy so and so I opted for I-ELIA.  No lozenges! This, the only surviving original D VIII airframe, was given to Italy as part of war reparations and its postwar livery was a rather pretty "rosso corsa" fuselage with clear doped (or possibly white) flying surfaces.

At this point in the preliminaries Bill Dennis, hello Bill, nice to see you here, popped up to wish me luck with the spoked wheels. Now, I had been planning to claim "lack of documentation" and go for solid wheel with spoke covers, but Bill left me no way of weaselling my way out of spoked wheels.  So that was the first job. Snaps 2 & 3 show the main steps in their construction, which follows the tutorial that GK wrote up, and the last picture shows them more or less complete but waiting final painting.

[TheLurker]

The next major difference centres on the motor cowling.  The kit comes with a good, accurate moulded plastic cowling, but for perverse reasons of my own I wanted to see if it I could build one from balsa.  The first step in this diversion was to make up a dummy motor for sizing / test fitting. Then to cut lots, oh so very, very many, balsa discs...

[TheLurker]

Finishing off the rough shaping of the cowling...

[TheLurker]

By now you're probably asking if I bothered using any kit parts at all.  Well I did, but (and you expected this, didn't you?) not always as suggested.  Next major step was the motor.  There was a discussion on whether or not the motor could be made to spin like the prototype.  The short answer is yest, but I pointed out that it was hard enough to trim FF models with static dummy motors without the complication of a possibly unbalanced lump spinning around.  A rotating motor is left as an experiment for more adventurous types than me.

The motor assembly was mostly as per the kit with a couple of minor deviations.  The "rocker covers" were fitted separately rather than being cut from the cylinder dowel so that I could make sure they were aligned fore & aft and the pipe work was made from bent basswood rather than the supplied plastic tubing. Wood was used for these because I have a poor track record with getting plastic components to stick to wood.  I also fitted a Type II KP Aero adjustable nose block.

[TheLurker]

Having got the motor sorted I made a start on the rest of the airframe.  Now, you've started to relax, thinking there are no more modifications, aren't you?  Oh dearie me no, this was a Lurker Industries Build, so no by-way nor dead-end was left unexplored.

I don't much like seeing large lumps of plasticene tacked to the nose of scale models; sometimes there's no alternative but if at all possible I like to provide a less obvious location for any ballast.  So it was with this one.  A small ballast hopper fitted to the back of  former No. 1 with the opening closed off by the nose-plug.  Is it big enough?  We shall see.

[TheLurker]

There's not a lot to say about the fuselage. I used in-fill over the top as I usually do and added a couple of 1/32" stand-offs to the side of the fuselage to support the card side coverings.  I found that, over time, the equivalents on my (now deceased) VMC Sopwith Camel became concave and these are to minimise that tendency.  There are also a couple of tiny slivers of balsa at the base of the fuselage, below the stand-offs, to make fitting and alignment of the wing struts easier for me.

[TheLurker]

Flying surfaces.  Again not much to say about these.  The wing was built with scale dihedral, a decision I may come to regret, but I did go for formed outline tail components.  The usual reason; it's a short nosed WW I type so any possible weight reduction at the back is to be grabbed with both hands.

[TheLurker]

And one final (utterly pointless) attempt at weight reduction; a cut-down tail skid.

If you do build one of these make sure the tail skid is /firmly/ fixed in place, especially if you try and trim over a hard gymnasium floor.  Peter Smart's build of this lost the tail skid inside the fuselage when the tail banged down.

[TheLurker]

A few "bones" snaps, 'cos it's traditional.

[TheLurker]

The rollout...

At this point Γιώργο K got out his (metaphorical) bottle of ρετσινα, cracked it over the cowling and named the model for me.  He pointed out that ELIA is the Latin alphabet transliteration of Ελια which is Greek for both olive & olive tree, something I'd been far too dim to spot; so Olive it has become. Pleasing when that sort of thing happens, isn't it?

[TheLurker]

Current State of Play

Olive still hasn't been flown.  The wing loading - haven't got the figures to hand - looked to be far too high to risk trying it in the fairly tight space available at Trinity and when I finished it in August "my" aerodrome was a rock solid plain covered in 3" to 4" punji stakes where the grass hadn't grown because of the appallingly hot and dry weather we'd had and there hasn't been a decent combination of grass, dry weather and calm air since. 

There's a very good chance it will be May next year before I get a chance to test it although depending on circumstances there's the very slimmest of outside chances I may take it to Walsall in April.