The Little World

When I looked at this 50¢ baggie that my friend Paul gave me, I wondered if it was a remould of a previous Airfix product.

No, apparently – the old Albatros I built in 1959 was a D.V and this one is a D. III…at least dating from 1963. The look of the thing is, of course, very similar…but the composition of the plastic is quite different, and the result may show it.

There are not a lot to 50¢ baggies save a few sprue trees and a lot of nostalgia. Enthusiasts can set to work scratch-building all the missing parts that the makers saw fit to leave out…but the effort in this small scale may outweigh the benefit. I intend to build it to the Revell standard and be satisfied with reasonable seams and a sketch of the real thing. I’ve googled the colour scheme and it is accurate enough for jazz.

The plastic is brittle – the mix of the time – but the dry fit shows the pattern to be surprisingly precise. The wing to fuselage fit is perfect. And the inevitable ejector pin marks are so shallow as to be able to be scraped out.

The decals are aged, but so far these Revell ones have lasted pretty well. Maltese crosses are also common in the spares box so I am not worried. No lozenge-pattern wings for this one, however – pure red for the most part with a yellow tail.

Did the colourful markings of the Imperial German Air Service have a detrimental effect in battle compared to the more restrained British or French patterns? I have never read an account of this, but would be interested to see what the thought after the war was.

One thing puzzled me. The small instruction sheet had one of the corners clipped out. This baggie was never opened – it travelled sealed from the distributor onwards. What was on that corner that the customer was not supposed to see?

Note: I’ve since been apprised that this was an indication that the NZ retailer had sent off part of the sheet to claim a refund from Revell or from a wholesaler. The inference is that there was some part of the kit wrong. However, I could see no defect that wasn’t moulded into it at the factory, so someone may well have been playing silly buggers.

A number of these gift kits that came to me – Revell and others – bore low price stickers showing that they passed through our local Bunnings stores at some stage of the game. Perhaps the NZ Distributor just clipped his coupons and then shipped the lot over the Tasman to get them away from his own country’s laws…accepting whatever further pennies might be recovered from a dump sale to Bunnings. Maybe they had just gone past the point of economical stocking or realistic sale in New Zealand.

Or maybe it happened entirely here in Australia. Whichever, I’ll bet this kit is still being sold by Revell Germany in some sort of a small box right now, and for a price that means you’ll be drinking water for the rest of the week.