At last completed! Here’s my 1/72 Junkers J.1 from Eduard. This is the profipack kit, with a little fret of PE and some lovely, if thin and fragile(!) decals for 4 machines.
The Junkers J.1 was the A-10 of its time, flying low-level to bring death and destruction into the trenches of World War One. Trading aesthetic for sturdiness, it’s mostly metal airframe allowed it to sustain a bit more damage than other flying contemporaries. The complicated struts lay-out dispensed with the usual series of cables that gave other early airplanes some rigidity.
However, if the lack of ‘strings’ could make this (rather large) beast interesting to would be WWI airplane modelers, I would only recommend this kit to those who have a bit of experience building biplanes. If those struts gave the real machine sturdiness, they gave me lots of headaches, and the whole assembly remains very fragile…
I chose a fairly simple colour scheme of light blue and green, with some decals providing the fabric lozenge pattern that was applied over parts of the airframe (the lozenge pattern is supplied with the kit decals). The scheme I really wanted was very similar but had blotches of purple over the green, but I just felt that the kit would not survive the masking…
Only 8 pieces of stretched sprues are required to represent the command cables coming out of the rear fuselage, and from the front ‘office’ to the top wing. The machine gun is plastic and PE and looks gorgeous!
The decals are superb but as mentionned earlier very thin and fragile though the only problems I really had were with the large crosses of the top wing rather than, surprisingly, with the ‘lozenge pattern’ ones.
So all in all, a quite superb kit. Highly recommended. The profipack kit is probably not really a big, big improvement on the highly detailed plastic kit.