Michael G. shared his build experience on this great looking Albatross.
I purposed this Eduard Weekend kit to be half of a dual build for our WWI FB here, pre-designating it as an operator from the Greco-Turkish War in 1922, just prior to the end of the Ottoman Empire. As an OEFFAG product, it varies in slight ways from its Luftstreitkräfte cousins, and the kit parts (both used, and leftover) help place these nuanced differences. After the end of WWI there was little will or heart for a continued war for territory in the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), but the Greeks were steered by the British to do just that – expecting a quick victory over the Turks and newly acquired land. After a bloody conflict, this conquest did not occur, and the affair ultimately ended with the Ottoman Empire being replaced by the new, sovereign Republic of Turkey. The D.III was allocated as a Turkish fighter plane to aid its homeland defense, while Greece had its own allocated aircraft, including, among others, the French Breguet 14 (the other half of my dual build.)
Building highlights for the D.III include: Wood paneled fuselage, achieved here with light ochre base and med. ochre top mottling – composed of gloss acrylic medium and artist acrylics. This was applied (squiggly-style) with a stiff-bristled kids art brush, along with small daubs added in with a pointed brush. The square emblems were all masked, with the 8 white squares being applied first. Rigging was done with smoke-color invisible thread, painted dk. grey after install. For terminals, some rigging brackets were fashioned with spare PE parts. The prop was primed with a rust color, very thin masking then added for the lines, and a med. wood color applied. The prop then was overpainted with a more transparent lighter tan. A scratchbuilt windscreen was fashioned from a discarded Loctite packaging, and an Eduard PE set for another D.III version was used for certain cockpit parts, as well as some external details (though a lot was leftover.) I chose not to include the kit overcowling at the engine, and I did choose to add the spinner cap…though the pilots complained that it often fell off during flight.
Overall this kit was a joy to build, with good, contemporary engineering and detail. My decision and efforts to assemble the cockpit as one module instead of attaching parts willy-nilly to the fuselage halves (as per instructions) produced a very minor fitting challenge, but really paid off in order to display pictorially whole here. Lastly, this is my fourth attempt at aircraft rigging, so I am growing at this, learning by doing.
