Hi guys....This is a very rare bird indeed. But extremely important in my country. Dornier Wal, at early twenties, was a step forward in the development of our naval aviation capabilities. It was a modern and sturdy aircraft and its high reliability allowed to dream with the conquest of an air route to connect the extreme south of our territory with the main cities in the middle of the country.
There are a handful set of heroes that pioneered this dangerous trips. One of them was Lt Rodolfo Marsh who named after the important chilean Navy Antarctic Base and Arturo Merino Benitez, who named after the Santiago International Airport.
Thanks to A Models we have a decent kit of Do J Wal. Huma Do J represents the Wal II model, a different plane in many important aspects.
A Model Wal brings a lot of sprues designed to build many variants. From the historic point of view, there are a lot of problems: Chile received various batches of aircrafts, with different engines, different paint schemes and minor details. But the worse is the scarse number of pictures and detailed descriptions of them.
My project was to represent Do J number 18, of which is a good enough pic in the web. Specific theme of interpretation is the painting of that plane. Literature says that chilean Wal's went in base metal, in light grey scheme and in a sort of slate grey (predecessor of the RLM02 grey, I thought...RLM standard was not existent until mid thirties). The cited pic shows an obscure fuselage, then I speculate with slate grey.
Picture from Museo Aeronáutico de Chile.
Back to the kit, I spectated a very simple task compared with the extremely complex Breguet Bizerte project, but was not so easy at all. The pieces needs a lot of trim, sanding and fitting tests.
Finally, it's a very attractive plane.
Cheers,
No comments:
Post a Comment