This is an Airco DH9 from WnW. An odd choice for me as a car and motorcycle builder these days but I was inspired by sandbaggeruk and his recent Armstrong-Whitworth F.K.3 . I picked this up on EBay for £100. More than I wanted to pay but way less than anyone else it seems has to pay these days. I decided on WnW as I doesn’t look like I will need to break the bank on extras which can often cost more than the original kit if you start adding 3D decals, 3D engines and so on.

In the UK we have a pair of these, I think there are only 4-5 left in the World. Both the UK ones were found in a redundant elephant stable in India , one restored and the sole flying example and one static restoration for the imperial war museum hanger at Duxford
Powered by an ultra rare Siddeley-Deasy 230hp engine it was rather under powered The RAF experimented with a Napier Lion powered 430hp engine and broke the world altitude record of 30500ft which it achieved in 66 minutes for most of the flight the pilot was unaware his observer was unconscious as his oxygen had failed and both he and his pilot were hospitalised with frost bite on landing .Eventually by the end of the war the DH9-A used the American Liberty L-12 at 400bhp.
the Spanish fitted a 300hp hispano suiza engine and some of their aircraft were still flying in 1940.

There is an excellent article with everything you could ever need to know here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airco_DH.9

first job, experiment with oils for wood finish. I sprayed a good coat of deck tan then over brushed with a mix of oils

these oils take an age to dry so i will probably look at the engine next

Thanks for looking in 😉

No easy way to tackle these vintage control panels. They are very 3D so not a lot of good for 3D decals or PE, you just have to get your smallest paint brush out and hope no one looks to close

The instrument panel looks good. You’ve also achieved a great wood grain through painting.

Lots more of the wood painted now,and it needs a week to dry as its oils so playing engines at the moment 😀

Maybe its just something I have missed in the past but I was surprised to see the propeller on the DH9 on “back to front” so much so that I had to check some original pictures 😊 I would normally expect the straight edge of a prop to be the leading edge .

Ironic that you do the work on the inside but can only photo the outside 😂

i just hope this lot fits inside the Fuselage halves.

11 minutes ago, Paddy said:

i just hope this lot fits inside the Fuselage halves.

The moment of truth with WNW kits, I wish you luck. Interior looks great, even from the outside .

Cheers Rob

Buttoned up and looking OK ..............thats a relief :-)

So... thinking about rigging again. this picture shows a gaspatch turnbuckle. Some 0.18mm line and a bit of 0.6mm tube, 0.4mm bore to take 2 bits of 0.2mm line.

The Gaspatch links could take up too 0.4mm line so twice as thick as the line shown however that would need 0.9mm tube to get 2 pieces through and that would be over 1.2 mm OD. or way to large for the turn buckle.
So if you are following this the 0.18mm line above would equate to 6mm rigging rods in real life (0.18 x 32) ? i just wonder if that ids enough ? as usual the problems of scaling down can make smaller items like this almost disappear. On the other hand go larger like the manufacturers do with motorcycle spokes or even panel thickness to get the required strength and it can totally ruin the life like results we all want.
The reason i am quoting sizes of tube at twice the line thickness is i cant see a better way of joining the line once its through a turn buckle or a home made bobs buckle. which is what i did on the FE2B in 2012

I used brass tube here and i cant remember what size but if i got 2 pieces of line through it i would guess i used 0.6mm OD x 0.4mm ID as thats std Albion alloys size and that what i use. I have to say i look at this and i think....I am 15 years older, my eye sight is 15 years older and my finger tips are pretty numb these days and i feel a bit defeated before i start :-)

Edited August 7Aug 7 by Paddy

Just catching up on your build. The paintwork looks fantastic.

Not sure what i will do yet but i made some "bobs buckle" type buckles today, the wings need 44 in total so about 60 should do it. These are 0.2mm tinned copper wire with 0.5mm eye.

A handy tip here is if you take your age, divide by the Dia of the wire then add half the quantity you need you can calculate how many you will drop on floor , never to be seen again

One of the things i really like about MRP paints is its ready mix so the colour is constant , so not dependent on dilution . Secondly its very fine/thin so while it needs about 6 coats it makes it very easy to vary the coverage of coats to give a more varied finish/shades

You notice on aircraft with a doped linen top and underside surface the ribs are more visible on the wings as the light shines through but on aircraft with an olive drab top surface the light is pretty much blocked and any shading appearance over the ribs is due to the undulation of the fabric between ribs, These are in semi gloss finish at the moment so i will mat coat after the decals

Edited August 9Aug 9 by Paddy

Things are going from bad to worse I found some older WnW decals but because they were on white backing paper i didnt notice that 2 had white rings round the edge and 2 didnt, you couldn't see that really on the paper. Now i have the white ring roundels on the bottom and they should be on the olive drab on the top

I might have some more with white rings.

What i have found is there are 2 shades of colour blue. Now i always though the was the change from RFC to RAF but its apparently just a tendency for early roundels to fade. So they started life all the same blue. Its confusing because some models including WnW use the faded blue but only sometimes. Upper dark surfaces had the white ring round the outside but often that was painted over as it stood out at night.
Another problem was photographers in the early days tended to use Orthochromatic film which made blues much paler so original colour pictures often show the blue as much lighter than it really was which has misled historians and model manufacturers over the years.

. These are roden light blue with WNW darker

and these are both WnW, from memory the lighter were SE5 and the darker is the current DH-9 build.
That darker one has the white outer ring so you can see how i didnt spot it before it was too late.

Every day is a learning day. Now i need to get those roundels off the top wing....

If you didn't clear coat yet, or you didn't use a strong decal solvent.......Sometimes pulling them off with strong adhesive tape will work. Worth a try anyway.Even Blu tak can work

on small decal fragments. Otherwise , of course ,the only option is, stripping the paint. Tamiya acrylic comes right off by soaking in Simple

Green. But not MRP .I have used leveling thinner to remove paint (gasp) from plastic and resin parts. I know, expensive, but so is a WNW model kit.Removes Mr color lacquer. This must be frustrating...... Your build was coming along nicely. I wish you luck.BTW I mean the extra

strong double sided type tape. This stuff works. Testers Easy Lift Off.......it used to be made under a different

brand name....but its the same stuff I used years ago. Probably the best course if you find it in the UK.

Edited August 11Aug 11 by Belugawhaleman

Bummer with your decal issues Paddy, I hope you get it solved. I always use self made Bob´s Buckles for my WWI builds, I cut pieces of 0,5 mm diameter aluminum tubes with an inner diameter of 0,3 mm, rolling the tube on a cutting mat with a sharp blade. That helps reducing the burr. I don´t remember which diameter of fishing line I use, but with fiddling it through the tube twice, it has some friction and is therefore easy to pull taught.
I don´t know, if this method looks good enough for r British rigging, all my WWI builds were German planes.

Cheers Rob

Thanks Rob, i went the old school way with some warm water and a wire brush :-)

and re painted.....

Bottom line is i have had to go with faded blue on the top as thats all i had in my spares box but at least the top now has the white surround circle.

Eventually i will have to fix these wings on the Fuselage .......Yiikkes !! I cant put it off for much longer ☹️

Just now, Paddy said:

Lots of wires😮. Good luck.👍

A problem i had with Italeri a while back was the plastic becoming ultra brittle when subject to Spirits based washes. I couldn't prove it either way in tests but i found the wing struts on this model seemed to lose the pin ends very easily after being painted with spirit based oils ?
The pin ends are 1mm which is handy as i was able to drill the end of the struts 0.5mm, incert a hard steel pin and then fix some 1mm alloy tube over the steel pin on abouty 50% or the struts

Edited Friday at 09:55 AM4 days by Paddy

One step forward , half a dozen back. thats just the way some builds go. Another decal failure on te top wing despite this being clear coated

I absolutely refuse to shell out any more money on this, i dare not tot up what its cost so far. maybe i can turn the damaged roundel into battle damage .....I will continue with the build but TBH this is not a model that would ever make my display cabinet , too many compromises. its also a reminder why i gave up with these scales and went to bikes and cars at 1/12 and 1/9.... its and age deterioration thing 🤣"
I have a couple more WnW in the stash so i will make a few bob on ebay with those i think sometimes you have to adapt to your limitations.

With the top wings now fitted the model doesnt really have any strength/integrity , if its anything like the Brisfit i built years ago, that will come with the rigging, much like the real thing. With the top wing in position i now have a very small window to work through to do the rigging. TBH i am looking forward finishing this, its a bit of a chore

If you ever want to remove decals, or paint for that matter them Mr Color leveling thinners is your friend.. this took less than 1 minute and its safe on the styreene

I found another pair of decals so just need to slash some paint around with my new airbrush and hope the next decals stick though tbh i cant see what else i can do as i used micro sol and set last time and clear coated them

I actually found some roundels with the darker blue here and the white border so i am better off now than i was at the start of this episode Another save, my luck will run out eventually

I got half way with the rigging ie: one side not counting the control lines then half of one of the under side decals came off stuck to my finger

This fast turning in to a blog on how "NOT" to build a model 🤭