DFS 230 Glider

 

I was looking through some of the models for the many, many incomplete projects I've started over the years, and found the bits that I began for Crete. That was never very successful, as I don't have access to any 15mm early-war Fallschirmjager, mainly due to the cost of postage these days. I thought I could proxy them with some PSC plastic late war paras, but I never did anything about that.

However, one thing I can do something about right now is my parlous lack of gliders, so I put together a 1:144 DFS 230 in Blender that should print pretty reliably on my Ender 3 FDM printer. Hopefully.

I'll probably split it up for printing, though I haven't yet decided exactly how I'll go about that. The most straightforward method is just to split it longitudinally and print it in two halves, but those wings are very long and I've started having occasional issues with taller models becoming detached from the print platen.

We shall see.

Test Print

I printed this with the model split longitudinally, which gave me good results with the wings and tail planes, but the layer lines are very apparent on the fuselage. A decent paint job could disguise some of that, but it really needs quite a bit of filling and sanding.

The figures at back are Battlefront 15mm desert Brits — 15mm is the scale I'd be using the model with, but I don't have any Fallschirmjager yet to go with the glider. The figures in front are a 10mm (1:150 scale) Bren team I printed in resin on my Mars Pro; they're much closer to being in scale with the glider.

Split version 1:
Straightforward, but printing artifacts on the fuselage are problematic.

Split version 2:
More faffing about with assembly, but smoother printing results overall.

I was struck by how tiny the DFS-230 was compared with the Horsa, or even the Hadrian/Waco. It carried just 9 men (plus the pilot), even with so few it was pretty cramped.