| Latest News as of January 20th
2008: And again here appeared another article in one of our German aviation
periodicals. Although all text is in German language, we thought that we should not hide
this nicely looking atricle away from our foreign readers and visitors.
The magazine in which it appeared is called "Flugzeug Classic".
Feel free to download a complete PDF file of the article by just clicking on the
image below. Hope you enjoy it as much as we do although the text, - as mentioned - is not
in English.

The aircraft have been shippend and even
arrived safe at their destination already. They are currently being unloaded and
checked in detail to receive their approval. As soon as images are available, I will be
happy to show them to you here.
In the moment the rotary engines that will
power the planes are prepared for their final test runs. Also the final test prints of the
German multi colour camouflage printed fabric (you Englsih seem to prefer to call this
"lozenge") are curently also double checked with the original samples that have
been used as samples for the reproduction.
These sample prints have been made in a
digital printing way for the moment, but as soon as we have the colours and shapes of the
polygones matching the original samples perfectly the final way of printing them will be
done with dyes and rollers as they did back then.
For the covering of my personal plane I
decided to use the slightly off sample patterns. This will make my plane a bit more
colourfull and less accurate from the historic point of few, but it will also make the
plane unique in as far as the fabric used to cover it represents the process of making
actual accurate printed fabric...:-).
In the meantime I will finish the still
missing items for the planes, such as ammo boxes, tail skid, fuel tank, cowlings etc.
These will be send to the costumer once done. The following photo series shows some of
that stuff.

Non stearable tail skid end of the plane.

Alexandra and me are working out the wooden
tail skids.


Completed tail skids are waiting for further
processing.

Attachment of the spliced control cables to
the rudder.

Fuselage sternpost with tailskid in place.

Fresh covered stabilizer and elevator.
The different colours for top and lower side are evidient.

The holes for the passing through of the control
cables are leather reinforced, just as done on the original.


Steps in the making of the fuel on/off/drain cock.

It took a while and some experiments until I have
figgured out how to process etched aluminum plates and how to colour them, but finally I
succeeded and can make my own now..

Finished mixture lever and fuel cock with etched
plaquettes.

For every piece I create, I make my own drawings.
Here we see the comming into existance of the ammo belt box for the Fokker D.VIII.

Completed ammo boxes with hand shaped metal ammo
chutes.

Close up view of one of the hand made ammo chutes.
The burnished surface of the outside of these and the boxes themselves have been made for
anti reflexion proposes.

A lot of feeling is required to hand shape the ammo
chutes. The side walls of the chutes are made by stretching and shrinking the thin shet
metal. But the result eventually is a perfectly fitting sheet metal part.


One of the very first tries of creating an etched
Fokker nameplate. The originals have been stamped rather then etched. We will figgure this
out later.

Finished control grip frames for the control stick
top end.

.
Für weitere Informationen und viele Detailfotografien
während der Bauphase schaut Euch doch auch diesen Link an:
THE AERODROME FORUM => REPLICA
AIRCRAFT => FTS PROJECTS
Weitere Diskusionsforen
über die Arbeit des FTS findet ihr hier:
AEROFORUM
und hier
AEROCRAFT.Org
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