There's no arguing that Eduard's tiny Spad is the best you can get in 1/72 scale. The cockpit interior includes an instrument "panel" with individual decal gauges and a seat with a photoetched-metal harness. Exterior detail includes louvers and vents around the engine and a subtle rendition of fabric-over-form construction. The struts are very fine. Photoetched-metal details include individual bezels for the instruments, alternate cowl vents, gunsight, harness, and aileron actuator rods.
Well-printed decals offer markings for French aces Charles Nungesser, Fernand Chavannes, Léon Blanc, and René Fonck.
The creation of the kit is a beautiful thing; the build, not so much. The instrument "panel" attaches to a deck surrounding the cockpit and sits too tall to allow the top of the fuselage to fit. I had to reinstall the deck lower than shown in the instructions, then shave off the top of the instrument mounts. With the instruments scattered about inside, each dial face is a separate decal to which you can add a photoetched-metal bezel. But the instruments are less than a millimeter wide, and most can't be seen on the finished model.
The time to paint a biplane model is after the assembly of the fuselage but before mounting the upper wing. For the six-color camouflage, I picked Testors Model Master enamels SAC bomber tan (light green), SAC bomber green, military brown, and Polly Scale sand, with a Testors Model Master light ghost gray bottom. The small patches of "black" were hand-brushed with Polly Scale grimy black.
The biggest hurdle with any biplane kit is mounting the upper wing and struts. Eduard shows this task in one step in the instructions - wishful thinking, I'm afraid. I first studied the rigging diagram and reference photos, then drilled holes in the bottom wing and fuselage with a No. 80 bit. Most of the struts are individual moldings and go in shallow dimples in the wings. I mounted the cabane struts first, then discovered they had too much forward stagger to reach their assigned dimples in the upper wing. I trimmed off the mounting tabs and remounted them. The mid-wing interplane struts are molded together with a cross member, so that helped.
At this point I strung the cross-rigging on the interplane struts with 1-pound nylon monofilament, then glued the upper wing to the installed struts. I added the outer interplane struts and aileron control rods after the upper wing had set, then completed the rigging. The instructions don't show that the wires from the bottom of the fuselage to the upper wing are doubled fore and aft. In all, there are 35 attachment points of struts and tubing to line up and 36 runs of rigging - all within a span of 41/2" and a space of 3/4" between the wings.
I chose the markings of Nungesser as they were the most colorful. (Chavannes' spider-web motif was tempting, but no decals were provided for the ultra-fine lines of the web.) The decals went on fine and were opaque enough to cover the paint.
I spent more than 35 hours on this tiny model, most of it under the Optivisor with tweezers in hand. The finished model looks fine, but I'll need time to regroup and get up my nerve before tackling another.
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