Burg Eltz
Ricardo Leite
Photographs by the author
Burg Eltz is one of Schreiber-Bogen older paper kits. This is easy to remark because there are no specific pages with instructions or diagrams. Both of them are printed in the back of the parts themselves. I prefer Schreiber.Bogen's newer standard but the older one also works very well. For a change the first picture is taken from below, and what I said before is readily visible there
Picture 1 - Bottom view, with instructions inside
The kit is printed in no less than 16 A3 sized pages of very good quality paper. The printing is also very good. Having 'just' 349 parts it is easy to conclude that, on average, they are quite large. The model itself is more than large: it is huge! Around 36cm high, 35cm wide and no less than 78cm long. Be sure to have space for it, if you intend to build one.
Pictures 2 to 4 are general views of the model
Picture 2 - General view, left of the main gate
Picture 3 - General view, right of the main gate
Picture 4 - General view, from above
This model is made from the top to the base. It has 12 major subassemblies, each of them for a building or group of buildings. Apart from that there is the base, itself with several layers. This can be seen in Picture 1 and also in Picture 5.
Picture 5 - Inside view
I found the kit very fun to build because it is not at all repetitive. Each subassembly is different form the other and there is not an ounce of symmetry - see pictures 6 and 7.
There are only two things a bit nasty to make: the small roofs with windows and the trees. If the objective is to cut their pieces properly it really takes time. You are supposed to make the trunks. I used paper for that and put a bit of wire inside. The parts are all numbered and the kit is to be made in numerical order. The numbers refer to small assemblies, usually with less then 10 parts each and many of them with just one, mainly in the base. The trees are the last to be built but, because cutting the parts is very time consuming and comparatively tedious I advise you to start doing this much earlier and assemble them only at the end. Pictures 8 to 10 show diverse details of the model. Overall it is really impressive, because of its size, and also pretty, because of its colours and fine printed detail.
Picture 8 - Inner yard detail
