OEFAG Albatros

 

The Albatros D-III was built under license by the Austro-Hungarian OEFAG factory, but they improved it considerably with a much more powerful engine and strengthened structure.

They usually (but not always) removed the propellor spinner, as they found it made the machine faster.

It was often armed with a pair of German Spandau machine-guns, like the original D-III, but it was also often armed with a pair of fully-shrouded Schwarzlose guns shooting out through the engine bay, as I've represented here. 

I've taken my 1:144 scale Albatros D-III model and given it a new nose profile and engine to represent the OEFAG Albatros.

 D'oh!

 The test print went absolutely fine, but I gradually became aware that something was missing.

When I exported the STL from Blender, I had the centre-section struts hidden, so they weren't rendered.

I still didn't notice right through the slicing process, and printed it like this.

The simplest thing to do would be to just re-slice and reprint the whole thing, but instead I'm printing some struts and I'll glue them in position. It will be a fiddly task, but doable I think.

If that doesn't work, I'll reprint the whole thing. 

 Later...

It didn't work. 

Instead, I made some replacement struts out of copper wire.

It was a fiddly job with my sausage-fingers; they kept twisting in the tweezers and getting out of place, but I managed it eventually.

They're slightly wonky, but they'll do the trick, and it means that a couple of otherwise fine 3d prints won't go to waste.