Eduard's 1/48 Ni 17 conversion
Nieuport 23

by Garfield Ingram

Eduard's 1/48 scale Nieuport 17 Weekend Edition
is available online from Squadron.com for less than $10.00!

This is the Eduard Nieuport 17 Profipac kit built with a simple modifcation to convert it to a Nieuport 23. The gun was offset to one side and other than that. Nothing else was required as far as I could tell.

The 23 seems to be an export version of the 17 and in this case is done up in the markings of the Belgium Air Service. I find the combination of red/yellow/black to be very striking and looks even better with the silver and red colouring of this particular aircraft.

The kit gives you everything that is needed so the only the addition necessary is rigging. This was accomplished by pre-drilling wire locations with a #80 drill and using mono-filament thread.

The silver doped finish is Floquil Old Silver and the natural metal cowl is represented with Alclad II.

I never use decals for the rudder tri-colour as they don't conform and require a lot of touch-up to make right. I therefore matched the colours to the roundels (which was easy in this case), and sprayed them on. The comet insignia was a lot harder to do as I didn't have a decal to match. The star is simply a Viet Nam era kill mark whist the tail of the comet is a combination of red decal and careful airbrushing.

All of the red squares were cut from red decal paper and applied one at a time. Weathering was done using a combination of airbrushing and oil washes.

For those like me, who are just starting in on WWI aircraft, the Eduard Nieuport series are great kits to master the required set of skills needed due to their simplicity.

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Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2009 by Garfield Ingram
Page Created 1 April, 2009
Last Updated 1 April, 2009

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