Wingnut Wings Gotha GIV slow build

[jamo]

Greetings from Wellington, EnZed, home of Wingnut Wings and The Vintage Aviator Ltd.

I have been looking forward to this kit since Wingnut Wings went public a couple of years ago and from the start it featured in the Coming Soon section. For a large model the box is not as large as you might expect, but it is packed with sprues.

I built the 1/72 Roden kit five years ago which was an enjoyable build, challenging in parts, and served to build my interest in these early strategic bombers and the men who flew them



I stocked up then on reference books and particularly recommend 'The Sky on Fire' by Raymond Fredette which is very readable, 'The Gotha Summer' by C M White, 'German Bombers of World War One' by Alex Imrie. More recently there is 'First Blitz' by Neil Hanson, which is also very good. I have also bought the Windsock Datafile Special featuring the build of the WNW kit.

There is quite a bit of preparation involved before starting to build. Wash the parts in soapy warm water, lots of nipping off the sprues and removing mould ejector marks, particularly from the interior of the fuselage. These took quite a bit of patience and effort to completely remove, the ones around the nose being hard to reach. I ended up making a new tool to help with this, on old paintbrush sawn off with a bit of wet n dry glued on the end.

Following the painting guide in the instruction manual, the interior is mostly 'dark wood'. I decided to use Flesh as a base colour for the wood grain, from a Tamiya rattle can. Then I mixed up a dark reddish brown from Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber. I followed the special instructions for doing woodgrain from the WNW website, wiping off most of the oil paint with a clean brush onto a piece of paper, leaving as little as possible.

Here is the wood grain in progress:




The fine details on the kit are quite extraordinary. I loved the circular fuel selector switches, the control wheel and the instrument panel. Just brilliant! Some of the instrument decals are slightly too big, especially the yellow gauge #56 on the left hand console, but this is not hard to remedy. Trim the decal carefully before applying and if necessary use a sharp scalpel after its dried. I use a generous blob of gloss acrylic medium (Mod Podge) on each instrument face which shrinks as it dries into a nice glassy circle. Finish with a protective coat of Future/Klear on the glass.





The instrument panel won't be particularly visible when the model is finished, but I know it's in there