1:72 Siebel Si 204D / NC.701

The Siebel that outlived its maker

The twin-engine Siebel Si 204 came about at the close of the 1930s as a small transport aircraft, and during the war it became a training machine for bomber crews. The D series was given a glazed nose in which a navigator and a bombardier could sit. It was built largely outside Germany, in works on the territory of occupied Europe, and it is exactly for that reason that the life of this type did not end in 1945.

Wartime and peacetime markings

The sheet offers three subjects. Two are German machines with two letters before the cross and another two after it, the way aircraft outside combat formations were marked at the time. The third is the postwar French license-built descendant of the same type in a photogrammetric configuration, which photographed the landscape in Poland between 1947 and 1955. A single set thus covers two very different chapters: the wartime training one and the peacetime survey one. Ten years of service lie between the two states, and both can be shown on a model without buying a second sheet.

The glazed nose decides the result

With this type the impression the model makes stands or falls with the cleanliness of the glazing. The front part has a lot of frames, and glue that gets onto the glass will fog the surface for good. Use a glue intended for clear parts, then, or a thin water-based filler that becomes transparent once dry. Lay the decals only onto a cured varnish, and with the crosses running over a frame of the fuselage reach for a decal softener in two weaker doses, so that the film is drawn into the hollow and does not tear.