The line drawing bandwagon

[Jesters-Ink]

Outstanding work as usual BH.

[GrubbyFingers]

Looking good, BH.

I love detail. It just sucks me in to the picture every time.

To get rid of the excess spokes, just run the "Remove Excess Wheel Spokes" filter in PS!!! It's nice to be able to help you for a change.

Grubby.

[BLOWHARD]

Oh, never thought about that filter Funny thing, I might need to use it, my wheel disks still show a 10 spoke outer pattern instead of eight

[BLOWHARD]

Have I spend enough time on this already???


The good news is these should work for most single engine German planes, certainly for the Fokker Dr.I and D.VII

[gamary]

Isn't the tire a bit too grey? It looks pale to me, but I don't know much about them.

[BLOWHARD]

Ah, I had to look this up for the details but I knew the basics already.
And, basically, really early tires, 1800s to early 1900s, were white or off-white. Why? Simple, rubber is white. It isn't black, that's for sure I had heard that tires manufacturers started adding carbon dust to their rubber, so they wouldn't show dirt as well. It turns out that's only part of the story. From a automobile page-
Joyrides | Blimps, whitewalls and radials -- How the tire industry developed

Most of the early tires were white, the natural color of rubber. Some were tinted with a pigment and were light gray or tan or beige. But by World War I, they were all black. They were black because tire manufacturers began adding carbon black ash to the rubber recipe to enhance toughness and wearability.

This turns out to not be completely true, at least as far as aero tires are concerned, because you can find light colored tires in photos all the way to the end of the war.
More, from another auto tire page-
Coker Tire Resource - History of the Tire Timeline

1912 - Carbon black commercialized by:
*Diamond Rubber Co.
*B.F.Goodrich
1913-1917 - Tires
*4 or 6 Ply cotton, All-White or All-Black tires
*Conventional tire size 32x4, etc. straight side high pressure
*Flat base demountable rims
1917 - Last year for All-White Tires

Again, this deals with auto tires and probably focuses on the US market.
But, that's the gist of it. Ya lean something new every day




To my eye, it looks like Germany used more white/light gray tires than other countries.
Either way, I can't pass up a fun detail like that!

[GiantFlyingRobots]

That is an interesting bit of detail, I would have assumed, not bothered to research, then drawn the tires as black.

[BLOWHARD]

It mostly just comes from years of looking at WWI stuff, models, paintings, photos, and also looking at early auto stuff too. If you see a car in a museum with bright white tires and the letters NON SKID forming their tread, you start to pick on it

Of course you could get away with black or even gray...

[gamary]

Thanks for teaching us another interesting detail, BH. I'll keep that in mind next time I do some WW1 bird...

[Otterkins2]

Is there anything Blowhard doesn't have? I ask for a left hand grapple gromet for a Dinklewerf GX 3000. Sure enough, he's got a picture of it.