[Romani]

I am a completely unskilled, and inexperienced modeller, so I am eminently qualified to give advice to those poor souls new to modelling that don't know what mess they are getting into, based on my experience

"Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement!"
- Ancient Chinese proverb

0.- Preparation

Paint the small pieces like struts and those difficult to hold like wheels while they are still on the sprue. Don't cut them with a blade or scissors since that usually results on the piece flying away on breaking into your eye or into a portal to another dimension present in every carpet :P
Use a small nail clipper instead to separate the parts from the sprue.

Also, store all the tiny bits into something, self sealing clear plastic bags are the best, if not a small envelope will do provided you keep the habit of pouring the pieces inside a box and return them to the envelope everytime after you get a piece out of it.


1.- Planification.

Plan carefully your moves. Discard the building sequence in the instruction sheet, 99% of the time it's bloody useless. Do not start building based on ease ("let's stat with the easy bits to warm up") or difficulty ("once the hard part is done it's all downhill") or any other arbitrary factor ("since I have the blue paint can open I'll do all the blue pieces now")

In example, the usual method is to do the fuselage first then attach the wings. But when you realize you are going to need to hold the pieces somehow, is a good idea to leave the tailpane, propeller, pilot and other fittings like machineguns or undercarriage for later, since at various stages you are going to hold the fuselage with your grubby fingers at either end or midway.

Similarly, realize that some painting operations have to be done on 2 stages, don't think you can go on detailing a piece figuring out later you just have to glue it on.
In the fuselage example, since you have to attach the wings to it and it will involve glue and filler stains, it's better if you just give the basic coat of paint to the fuselage stablishing the color demarcation zones and then leaving the shading, painting of details like cockpit rims or flare cartridges and of course decal application, until after you have glued the wings.

There's an exception of this norm of "paint, then assemble" and that is control surfaces. One of the first advices you receive is that they look better if they are cut out and then repositioned. Turns out that is much easier to leave them attached to the wing , fin or tailplane because is much easier to paint or cover them with lozenge decal , before the rest of the wing is done.

But then here's a twist, if the control surface is painted, is a simple matter of painting the area of plastic exposed by the cut, but in the case of lozenge, you would have to apply the decal to one side, *then* cut the part, and then later apply the lozenge to the other side to cover the cut line.

This just an example of the unexpected complications you can find so think things in advance. The same could apply to national insignia decals (like roundels or crosses) that extend over control surfaces.

Since I have mentioned lozenge decals, here's another caveat that the most logical order is not neccessarily the best one. Since the upper color overhangs the wing, the novice mistake is applying the upper colors first, since these are the most visible , and applying a certain excess as a safety marging ensuring a good fit, assuming any excess overhang on the undersurface will be covered by the application of the lower color decal cut exactly to size. wich is easier to do since the undersurface is flatter.

Wrong. Decals have a life of their own, and if the decal moves or is a milimeter too long, it will wrap around the edge , or even worse, if you are trimming the excess , a strand can easily stuck to the upper surface, and light colors on dark stand out like a sore to the eye, and removing it it's very difficult without scratching the decal under it.

Given all this is better to do the undersurface first, as mistakes or patches on the undersurface are less visible and easier to conceal.

Once you have figured the correct assembly and paint sequence for a piece, write it down, and fit them all in a flow chart or a numbered list of things to do. That way you will avoid forgetting it or doing things out of sequence, and it gives you a encouraging sense of progress as you do items on the list even if the airplane is not taking shape yet.


2.- Alignment.

One of the most frustrating things of building airplane models is getting the wings and tailplanes aligned. There's nothing worse than seeing a plane with skewed or drooping surfaces.
In WWI planes the wings are one piece, wich is a relief, but since most airplanes have more than one wing, alignment is critical.

The main problem with wings is that even when they fit perfectly into the fuselage they usually have an unwanted diedhral. My advice is that for a lower wing without it is that you hold it into place against a flat surface (like a glass table) and adjust the fuselage to it, not try to fit the wing to the fuselage.

Sometimes you will have to do the upper wing first. In the case of a Sopwith Camel I would do the flat upper wing first, holding it into place upside down and adjusting and aligning the struts, before ataching the fuselage to it, and then the lower slanted wings. Each aircraft is unique,

And finally, with all that filing and gluing and filling and sandpapering to get the angle of the wings adjusted, you might miss that they have to be aligned in the horizontal plane too, that is, perpendicular to the fuselage. I suggest placing the model on a sheet of square grid paper to check that the wings are at right angles to the fuselage, because it's easy to miss that the wings are skewed at the wing root when you are adjusting the angle, but a milimeter or two at the wingtips are indeed noticeable.


3.- Build your own tools.

Some say that the quality that sets apart man as a species is the ability to build tools. Improvisation is the key. A rig made of bent wire may be as good as fully articulated modeling holder with base and alligator clamps or better.

For example, I've run into the problem of sandpapering the wing roots after I'm done gluing and filling them with putty. I can't use a bent piece of sandpaper because I would erase the first rib. I glued with superglue a small piece of sandpaper to a toothpick and I had an instant sandpaper wand to work on that area and other difficult to reach pieces.



Hope this helps.