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This is the DML kit of the famous WWI French Spad fighter. The kit was easy to build, except for aligning the wings. DML included several lengths of steel wire for the supports, as well as a small sprue of photoetched details. Unlike most after-market details, these photo-etched pieces were steel, and therefore much harder to snip and file correctly. I don't think I ever got the pieces to fit just right, and wound up having to cut into the more workable plastic pieces in order to get things to an acceptable position. The etched parts do add needed detail to a kit of this size, especially to the machine guns, engine area, and control surfaces.
For the propeller, I painted successive layers of variations of brown, creating a striped laminated wood pattern. I copied the camo pattern from the direction freehand onto small strips of paper, which I then tacked onto the kit as masks. I was able to get a fairly complex pattern with a minimum of effort this way. The rudder was painted red white and blue, as the decal was too difficult to work with. The other decals went down well over the relatively flat surfaces otherwise. I was worried about the star decals on the wheels, as the hub caps are slightly convex. However, once a drop of setting solution was added, they too conformed to the surface well. Detail was brought out with a thin wash of black around the engine components.
