A Flying Boat on the Wall

This is a 1:144 scale model - the scale typically used for model airliners - of the Dornier Do-X, a very large flying boat built in Germany in the 1920s. Claude Dornier was one of the great early German aircraft engineers, a pioneer of all-metal construction. I believe only three of these aircraft were built; this one was flown across the Atlantic in 1930-31 with great fanfare, taking 10 months over an elaborate route via Africa and Brazil; and if you Google images of it you will get a sense of the big impression it made on arrival. It suffered numerous malfunctions and delays. Dornier's ambition was over stretched in this instance. There was a tendency among early designers to fall into the trap of treating flying boats as ships of the air, and this vessel was far too heavy. Despite its 12 engines, it was underpowered and unable to climb above 1700 feet. I suspect it mostly flew in ground effect, like the Soviet-era ekranoplans. Nevertheless, it is notable for the records it broke, especially in taking off on one occasion with 169 on board, including 9 stowaways.

It's a very old kit. Here's the box: as you can see, I bought it as a Matchbox kit, yes the same firm famous for its die cast toy cars. They had a long spell producing model kits, some of them very welcome as types which no one else had put on the market. But I think this kit originated elsewhere, from a Japanese firm called Otaki(?). More recently, it was available from Revell of Germany. They changed one noticeable detail, converting the colour of the large serial numbers into red. It's actually quite hard to tell which is correct from black and white photos, but I daresay Revell would have done the research.

There's no interior in a kit like this, and what with the small scale, you would think it's quite a simple model to build. But rigging and aerial wires always complicate things, and that extraordinary array of engines on top took up a lot of time and patience. Then there's the metal finish. I normally brush paint, but there's no argument that metal finishes are much better sprayed, so I automatically reached for the spray can. But which one? I have several brands and varieties, and having once started this model some time ago, found I'd forgotten which one I'd already used. Duh! And then, I messed things up by first trying a can which must have well I don't really know but it splurged out a very grainy kind of finish. I tried to wipe it off, sand it down, but it left a mess in places.

The main factor by which I made it complicated for myself was that I wanted to hang it on the wall. The kit has been hanging around in drawers and on shelves, in this and a previous house, waiting for me to collect a few kits of flying boats and airliners of the Twenties and Thirties, and then hang them so as to create a bit of a theme for a bedroom. This meant that instead of a simple base I put this together - see right; it needed to be no thicker than usual, but to feature the eyes to string a wire between. I put in that many only because I couldn't decide which way up was best. The plane itself is glued to the base. Thanks to the wide sponsons many of these boats had (those are the stubby thick 'wings' sticking out of the sides lower down), and to the fact that I'd thrown it on my belt sander to grind the hull down to the waterline, there was a lot of contact area for the glue to take hold of.

Here is a shot of the effect I was looking for. I don't know if that does anything for you, but I like it. It's not where it's ultimately going to go, because even though it sticks out less than 10 cm, these pieces need to be away from where one walks. And I have six or seven other kits to build to go along with it. Don't hold your breath :)