Winter Warrior: Arii Bf 109 G-6

First of all, I have to say I'm shocked to learn I haven't posted in a year, but I've been very busy these last twelve months, delivering five book-length projects to publishers, and have only two competed models in the same period (it might be three by the end of the year if I really try!) So, apologies aside (including for the fact I didn't blog my 1:72 Leopard II from mid-year), here's an installment of the hobby saga from my workbench...)

I’ve long been fascinated by the Arii kits of the 70s, perhaps the first outing for engraved surface detail as we know it today, which only began to replace raised detail in the late 80s-90s period. These were sturdy, buildable kits with good outline, and while their details are few and soft by today’s standards, they can still look good on the shelf with some elbow-grease.

The object with this one was to make a proverbial silk purse from a sow’s ear, by drafting in as many aftermarket parts and features as possible. True Details wheels, Quickboost propeller, seat, joystick and gunsight, Eduard harness, brass cowl guns, Third Group decals (48-042)... I could have (and should have) added a few more, such as Quickboost pitot tube and Squadron canopy. There are Hasegawa parts here too: the SC250 bomb and it’s rack (this is the G-6/R-1 subtype), plus the supercharger intake, were unused parts from a Hasegawa sprue, and helped nicely. Certainly, even with the project officially done, there are still some parts I’ll change when I can.

This is my first ever winter camo scheme—an unidentified aircraft of 2^nd Staffel, JG 51 on the Russian front, spring, 1944. The idea was to evoke a field-applied whitewash, so I prepainted in black for a see-through look in the colour coat. Overall, it came out grimy enough to look like a recently-applied but already weathering field finish.

The basic build was straight forward, with relatively few parts. Swapping the cockpit details was easy enough, and I added the G-6’s distinctive yellow fuel pipe on the cockpit starboard wall from bent plastic rod. The biggest modification was to fit the propeller, which required the whole nose bulkhead to be cut away into a circular opening which would accept the cast stub of the new prop (which does not turn). The QB unit looks great when painted and weathered (my first time using a silver pencil for bare metal chipping on the leading edges of the blades), and was the last subassembly to be fitted. The wheels were more hassle than they should have been, rather refusing to accept the kit axles, so in the end superglue and patience were the order of the day.

The kit canopy was very poor, in both fit and clarity. Perhaps the plastic is simply too old (I’m not sure of the manufacture vintage of this example), but the one-piece clear part is a bit smoky and as a result the dark grey interior is almost invisible—very frustrating after the work that went into it. Squadron make a vacform canopy set for the Arii kit, but it’s the later Erla Haube, which is incorrect for the individual aircraft I wanted to model. The Arii kit has very specific seating dimensions too, so a canopy made for other kits will probably fit poorly all the same—and the kit part fit where it touched!

Same with the masks—an Eduard set for Hasegawa did not really match up, and was adjusted with custom-cut tape, which more or less did the job. We mask canopies because we don’t trust ourselves to freehand the struts with a brush (of course we don’t!) but the masks in this instance left such a hit-and-miss job that I ended up correcting them...freehand with a brush. It makes you wonder why you bother, sometimes. A sharpened matchstick was used to scrape away excess paint, and Tamiya polishing compound was applied with a Q-tip to clean up the plastic—not that it worked very well.

The Third Group decals were printed by Superscale so their application and finish are guaranteed quantities, and they went on very nicely over a paintjob of Tamiya Acrylics and Microscale clearcoats. Of course, it was only when I was nearly finished that a few tiny details occurred to me, like drilling out the exhaust stubs for an open look, which I should have done back at the beginning, (I got the Quickboost exhausts, too, but could see no way to engineer them into the model, so ended up not bothering.)

Arii tooled the main gear with the shock struts fully extended, as if the plane is in the air, a shortcoming of many kits for some reason. There are replacement white metal struts by SAC but the degree of compression designed into them is so small you could blink and miss it. The difference is only a couple of millimetres, so I let that one slide.

At the end of the day, there are nagging issues—I measured the yellow areas under the wingtips incorrectly, so the underside insignia are each about 5mm too close to the centreline. The flank insignia are slightly too large for the subject. The RDF loop antenna is way overscale and out of shape, and I’ll source a replacement if I can find one, or scratch build it, perhaps shaping detailing wire around a brush handle. The kit part is attached with thick whiteglue, which has only slightly more sticking power than spit, so it’ll pop off easily when the time comes. Same with the kit pitot (push fit only), which will get changed out for a QB part in due course.

I meant to rig an antenna wire from Ezy-Line, but the radio mast fits so poorly into the canopy that I’m afraid the pull of the line will just drag it free, so there’s a simplification...

Was it worth the work, time and the cost of all the accessories? Compared to the price of, say, the new tool Tamiya G-6, I’m probably still into pocket but in fairness the result is nowhere near what I would expect from the new kit. There’s much said about the challenge being the important part, that shake-n-bake kits do not make for real modelling skill, and this is true—but after the time, money and effort, I’m not super-impressed with my own result. I have another Arii G-6 in my stash, and I might repeat the process, knowing what I do, and using up the duplicate parts from the AM sets—but I don’t think I’d actually buy another. One experiment was enough!

Merry Christmas,

Mike Adamson

 

Tamegawa and the Case for Retooling

 

(This post was first published on June 1st, 2009. In the course of updating the image files for better quality and to retire Photobucket as the image vendor, the original post seems to have been lost, which is very annoying as this new version now appears thirteen years out of synch with its neighbours! Appologies...)

The giants from Shizuoka City need no introduction, there must be very few modellers in the world who don’t have Hasegawa and Tamiya kits in their stash. I find myself trying consciously not to talk too much about Tamiya, I don’t want to bias the content of this blog or have it become a Tamiya fan club, but quality does deserve to be discussed as and where it is encountered.

Hasegawa is a company for which I have had the greatest respect for the last 25 years, and I have a great many of their aircraft in my stash. I recently had reason to pull out their Bf 109 K-4 and was very pleased with the engineering, the look of the parts and the overall general accuracy. Detail by detail, she matches up with research for a very fair K-4. A few details can be added from styrene, you need to cut away the battery box of the G-10 behind the headrest and make the access hatch and canopy locking bars from scratch, but that’s easy enough. Same with adding the radiator actuator struts and some stiffeners inside the split flaps. The fuselage detailing right and left of the centreline doesn’t quite match up, but given that this kit was probably engineered in the earlier days of CAD-CAM, that’s fair enough.

One might expect the fact that the kit shares multiple parts for the G-6 and G-10 versions to cause problems with fit and engineering, this is fairly common. Indeed there are three instrument panels, redundant drop tanks and cannon gondolas, all sorts of bits not needed for the subject in hand, but they don’t seem to be a problem. In the old days Airfix would have sold this kit as the Bf 109 G/K, with instructions for using all the parts, and marking options for each type included on the sheet. (Remember their F-4 Phantom, with options to build the B, C, D, E and J all in the one box? Not a great kit but a versatile one with heaps of options.) Then companies discovered their range looked a lot bigger if they packaged the kit for each option separately, and each issue simply contained redundant parts.

But that’s by the by, the point of this post is that there is always room for improvement, and sometimes in ways you’d not expect.

I have completed two Tamiya 1:48th scale WWII fighters in the recent past, a Bf 109 E-3 and a P-51D. I was very impressed with their accuracy and ease of construction, and the quality of engineering throughout, and I was essentially expecting the Hasegawa engineering to be on a par. Overall it is, parts-fit is superb, dimensional accuracy looks spot-on, but I was frustrated to find an unexpected hitch. The cockpit. I thought initially that Hasegawa’s design solution of building up the cockpit from several parts as a subassembly to be mounted through the wing gap was a rather good idea, and it should have worked well, but…  

 First of all, the instrument panel is a different shape to the fuselage contour into which it is introduced, smaller, so it’s not simply a case of reshaping it with a bit of file work. This is a blunder I would not have expected of Hasegawa. Second, there is no positive location device for the panel either, so you’d be trying to tack it in place and keep your fingers crossed that it stays there. Third, the cockpit tub, though it assembles as a box structure, is not so accurately molded as to remove the tendency for the left wall to toe-in, so that the upper edge overhangs the cockpit sill. Fourth, there is no solid ledge against which the tub can be seated, so you’re supergluing it at its contact points and hoping for the best.

Hoping for the best? This is Hasegawa we’re talking about! The big guy, the one who makes Fujimi look second-rate! My solution was to glue the instrument panel to the cockpit walls and reinforce the joint with some scrap styrene, then use angle stock to reinforce the mounting surfaces behind the seat and some rod alongside the edges (below). With this lot it will hopefully stand up to the amount of handling to come without the panel becoming detached and disappearing forever inside. This was after a silly amount of fiddling, pulling apart and re-gluing, and the panel falling off and trying to vanish under my desk three times: not the experience I expect from this company.  

And not the experience I had with Tamiya. It’s been pondered why Tamiya have not yet expanded their 1:48th scale range to embrace the multitudinous possibilities of the Bf 109 F, G and K series aircraft, and the standard answer must be that Hasegawa have that market sewn up, with Hobbycraft taking up the slack for the cheap end of the field. ICM’s F-series planes are also very good, and strong contenders in the same race. But after my experience with the cockpit of this model I am dismayed to see that Hasegawa have used this device as standard engineering, certainly on their other Bf 109s, and the fact is that if Tamiya was to offer me brand new tooling of these subjects, engineered the way their other planes are, I would buy them in preference ever after. With Invisi-Clear decals such a kit would build as a stunner right out of the box.

So I find myself now doubly cautious about the asking price of models these days: Hasegawa’s K-4 is nearly Aus$40 on the shelf here, and that’s a lot of wedge for the firm to fall down on the details. I’m not asking companies to be perfect in every aspect, I have no doubt that this will be a superb subject in my display case when it’s finished, but I do look for sensible engineering where strength and fit are crucial. For instance the keyed alignment of the landing gear struts in Hasegawa’s 1:48th scale P-51D – a marvellous bit of planning and forethought. Maybe divinity really is in the details, and if so the race for sainthood will never be over: let’s just say, this cockpit fubar has delayed Hasegawa’s beatification slightly!

Recently Completed: Tamiya 1:48 F4U-1 Corsair (Birdcage), #61046

As a modeller who tends to have something like three dozen uncompleted projects at any one time, it’s always nice to get an older one past the finish line. This was a 2017 build that’s been playing shelf queen waiting for final details and paintwork ever since (it was a matter of display space, which opened up not long ago when I boxed for storage a batch of projects from around five years ago.)

This is the 1996 kit from the grand masters in Shizuoka City, and a sweet build it is. It can pull the odd surprise, but overall is a pretty friendly kit. To wit – the ovoid transparencies for rearward view on the fuselage sides are incorrectly identified in the plans, the numbers are reversed – swap them port and starboard and the parts fit perfectly. Interestingly, the masks for these parts on the Eduard sheet are also reversed!

The cockpit is quite well detailed, and if the canopy is to be closed you’ll see little enough. I used the decal seat harness supplied, and painted everything a dark bronze-green, as research suggested the cockpit shade of the time was somewhere about FS 34092.

I decided to depict a bird from VMF-213, companion squadron to -214, which became  the Black Sheep, when they entered combat in the Solomons campaign in February, 1943, the first Corsairs in-theatre. This is the two-tone scheme, which later gave way to three-tone, and finally to overall Sea Blue Gloss and its variations. I’m currently enjoying the 1976 series Black Sheep Squadron, which, though unavoidably compromised at a historical detail level, gives you a look at Corsairs in the field and the kind of effects the conditions created in their appearance. Solomons Corsairs were battered and heavily weathered by the elements, caked with dust and mud – one can certainly go to town on the weathering process, though I fancied something a little cleaner. Okay, a bird fairly fresh on the line!

The Tamiya Corsair is very well engineered, when it came out I recall reviewers raving about its click-fit precision. It’s not quite that easy, the folding wing option is a PITA to avoid an obvious joint line if building with wings extended, as I always do. The landing gear is very solidly engineered and fits into big receivers, but somehow the legs managed to be at different angles, meaning the wheels were a few millimetres out of alignment…

The paintwork is Tamiya Acrylics, mixed as per kit specifications – XF-18 + XF-2 (3:1) for the topside blue-grey, and XF-19 + XF-2 (2:1) for the underside grey, with soft-masked demarcations. I used Miscroscale Satin to seal both the paint and the following Florey washes, and Flat as the final low lustre after decals.

I made standby decals in case the masks pulled the paint off the canopy struts, but they were unneeded. This means I have 1943 blue-grey over black, with clear, decal material in stock in case any future USN/Marines project develops the issue!

Decals in this edition were by Scalemaster, printed by Vitachrome, and behaved generally well – I say generally as they did not offer to pull into engraved detail at all and did not seem to react very well with Microscale chemistry, wrinkling patchily. The roundel on the right fuselage side broke up somewhat after application and refused to settle in, being still wrinkled when dry. I removed it with the old tape trick, and replaced it with an identical item from a Superscale sheet; the blue is a fractionally different shade, but nothing the eye really catches. The Superscale item of course snugged down perfectly – I’d expect nothing else.

Oil wash and Mig pigments comprise the weathering – when I get a Prismacolour silver pencil I’ll take a crack at chipping but I aborted the attempt in paint when it became clear I had no control over the process at all. My hands seemed to do anything they liked, and I knew to quit before I made a mess.

The radio antennas were rigged with EZline, usually the last task of a model and not my favourite activity. I set the long piece first, pegged the mast end and managed to hold the thread in tweezers to secure the tail end (despite cramp in my right thumb…), then pegged the fuselage end of the short piece to dry over night. The upper juncture of the lines I found I did not have the dexterity for, no way could I hold the line in tweezers long enough for superglue to get hold. I made up a contraption of tweezers, two bulldog clips, a sanding block, a CD and two thicknesses of card that brought the end of the short piece into contact with the long, and left it to set. The applications of glue created a thick spot on the line, which suggests a ceramic insulator or some such, but of course there was nothing there on the real plane. The line was painted with black, some hull blue was used to touch up around the glue points and clear flat added to even out the lustre.

I hope to fit the 1000-pounder on the centreline rack, but the olive drab I sprayed it a year or more ago is very dark under a clear coat, dark enough for black decals to probably be waste. I’ll respray it in lightened olive drab when I next mix that shade, then apply the ProModeller decals for WWII ordnance and hang the bomb.

So, some work to do on her in future – hang the bomb, add the missing pitot probe (the entire project was complete and photographed when I spotted the omission – d’oh!) plus do the above-mentioned chipping.

Last year I built all 72^nd scale for reasons of storage space, and it’s nice to get back to something larger. I’ll be completing a 1:32^nd scale Bf 109 in the months ahead, too – at least that’s the plan!

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Building to a Theme

I’m sure I must have posted on this idea before, but sometimes you find yourself building to a theme. I found myself doing so earlier in the year, turning out a Hasegawa Bf 109 F in a North Africa scheme, then remembering that I had Gleed’s Spitfire V, also by Hasegawa, in common scale, on the shelf too and begging to be opened and finished from the mid-construction stage at which I’d left it, oh, a long time go.

No modeller worth his salt can ignore the siren song of such a notion, and before I knew it I was reassessing the older project, and imagining the two warbirds of the ’42-’43 period, contemporaries in the Mediterranean Theatre, displayed together. I doubt the pilots, Werner Shroer and Ian R. Gleed, ever met in action, but they were in-theatre in the last six months or so of the campaign before the collapse of the Axis endeavour on the continent of Africa in May 1943. It seemed just the right thing to do to build a second aircraft to compliment the first – place it in context, if you will.

The models themselves are superb, as you expect from one of the big guys from Shizuoka City, though the Messerschmitt’s tooling design calls for separate engine panels, presumably to allow for the production of change-out parts to cater to other sub-marks, and this allowed for some warpage of the forward fuselage and a lot of elbow-grease to correct the resulting inaccuracies of alignment. From the firewall back the parts matched up as perfectly as you could wish for, so it was likely simple warpage of the parts after demoulding that was to blame.

The Spitfire assembled beautifully, with only the characteristic fine mismatch on the underside at the rear of the wing subassembly to fill and sand, which seems endemic to all Spitfires the way intake seams are endemic to Phantoms, regardless of manufacturer. Other than these points, building was smooth and a pleasure, and I mixed the colours for both from Tamiya Acrylics, applied kit decals (the ones in the 109 were a special edition by Aeromaster) and used Microscale chemistry for decal set and cleaercoats. The roundels under the wings of the Spit were required to conform to various bumps and dips and took many applications of setting solution, plus attention with a blade, to lie down as well as they did, which is acceptable but not perfect. Flory (Promodeller) panel washes and MiG pigments finished the process for each, and I had my first foray into the African phase of WWII.

I like building to a theme. I have a Tamiya Jagdpangther under way, to be finished in the markings of the Ardennes offensive period/area, to compliment the King Tiger I finished six months ago, and have a Pz. IV for North Africa also underway. In a way, building to a theme allows more comprehensive justice to be done, reflecting one’s interests and the depth of research that is done, leading us on to new and fascinating projects.

Of course, themes can get out of hand… I have nine German single seat fighters underway at once, and am aiming to finish a bunch of them production line fashion, and there is something to be said for learning the requirements of certain periods and amassing the materials to do justice to them, but one’s collection shows the dearth of attention outside the theme – and begs for another theme to be addressed. What about US naval aviation? What about the British FAA? What about those vinyl sci fi figure kits? Perhaps things go in waves of interest, and that could also be a good thing. I can’t wait to get stuck into those magnificent 1:20^th scale vinyl dinosaurs… One day!

Kit Review: Tamiya 1:48 Gloster Meteor F.3 (Kit #61083)

The Gloster Meteor was Britain’s first service jet fighter and the Mk. 3, evolving beyond initial teething troubles, was deployed forward to Belgium before the cessation of hostilities in the west. The Meteors did not encounter the Me 262 in action, which may be a good thing as analysis generally comes down in favour of the Messerschmidt being the faster, more advanced design.

The type has not been all that well served by kit makers. Airfix produced it in the early days of the company in 1:72, Dragon tooled a new Meteor F.3 to the same scale in 2010, to a high standard and garnering excellent reviews, and there are limited-run and resin specialist kits of some of the later marques, but Tamiya’s F.1 and F.3 kits are pretty much alone to this day if we’re talking large scale and loads of detail.

Tamiya’s eighty-third release in its 1:48 aircraft series came out in 2002, and I can only describe it as a delight to build. The mouldings are high quality and fit is near-perfect, though the one-piece lower wing and separate top wing sections can bite you a little bit when dropping in the engines and fuselage. Take lots of time to study the sequence “dry” and only commit to glue when you are absolutely sure.



The cockpit could be accused of being spartan, with a decal seatbelt, but not much is visible through the canopy if closed, and Tamiya offer some great twists, such as a cast metal weight which is installed in the fuselage to bring the centre of gravity forward and avoid the model being a tail-sitter (much more precise than loading it up with lead sinkers or whatever and hoping you’ve glued in enough!) and landing gear which locks very solidly into place to be sure of carrying the necessarily greater weight of the previous item, as well as ensuring its own perfect alignment. The engines are nicely detailed and can be left visible either via detachable parts for the top of the nacelles or the supplied clear equivalents.

Decal options include one of the aircraft deployed to Belgium, which were painted gloss white for recognition purposes, as they were in essence only there to gather experience, they were not intended to fight; plus two camouflaged options from perhaps later in 1945. The kit will also build the F.4 model, as it includes the teardrop-shaped conformal fuel tank characteristic of early Meteors, and while some reviewers have finished their F.3s with this tank, it did in fact first appear on the following version.



Assembly was quite straight forward with the exception of that previously mentioned fiddle with lining up the wings and fuselage to close tolerances, and if I have a particular criticism it is that the gear bays, moulded in with the top wing halves, generate distinct and quite wide gaps in a place they are impossible to really do anything with. The side walls of the bays are also undetailed, and I would not be surprised if there was an etched metal set out there that plates the bay walls, hides the joint lines and beefs up the detail level in one go.

I used a number of finishing techniques on this one, starting with pre-shading all panel lines in black. I used Humbrol enamels for the Medium Sea Gray underside and Dark Sea Gray topside, but by then I had really had enough of the solvent fumes and the model lay fallow for a while. I soon discovered that Tamiya had already produced very close equivalents for these shades plus the topside RAF Green 2 as XF-81, 82 and 83, providing an acrylic option for late-war RAF subjects, and I decided at once to complete the model in acrylics.



Camouflage was masked with innumerable pieces of tape, the hard-edge wavy scheme being drawn onto de-tacked tape laid onto the demarcation zones. These pieces were then peeled off carefully and the wavy lines cut with scissors. They were reapplied, then the gray areas backfilled with more tape. The process took at least three days to complete, which is one reason I put it off for so long.

Next, I refreshed the preshading in the remaining areas, then overcoated with the green. When everything was comfortably dry, I unmasked everything but the canopy, nosed gear bay and engine intakes, touched up as needed, and coated the model with Microscale Satin. I had intended to use Promodeler Dark Dirt weathering wash, which was fine for the underside, but against the topside camouflage their Black was necessary to stand out as tonally different. More Satin sealed the accenting.



At this point I brought out the Eagle Strike Late War RAF Roundels (48136) set I bought, replacing the kit insignia as the fuselage roundels were slightly off register. I found the ES set included three sheets and decided to use the full suite as the colours were much truer than those on the kit sheet. They behaved very well and laid down into recessed detail tightly with Microscale chemistry.

Squadron codes and serials came from the kit sheet, along with the stencil data, which is exceptionally small and fine. In all there are eighty decals on the model, though the stencils largely disappear unless viewing from very close range. The model was carefully washed with soap and water in an effort to remove the invisible decal residues, even bathed with saturated tissues, which was mostly successful; a little more Satin was misted on over the decals to seal them. I had considered drawing the lustre down and experimented with Microscale Flat, but could distinguish zero difference between them (I have heard this on forums, their Flat is notorious for being semi-gloss) and having no other flat to hand I decided lustre was good!



A few jobs remained, painting, assembling and installing the landing gear and oil wash weathering the detail in the gear wells; removing my from-scratch masking of the canopy and hooking out the tissue protecting the intakes and nosegear well; fitting the jet exhausts; painting and adding the radio mast and pitot tube; and painting and glossing the formation lights. The clear parts for the three vertical lights on the underside will be added when the clear sprue shows up again on my chaos of a bench…

Tamiya brought their signature quality to this under-celebrated subject and I would recommend it to anyone wanting a larger, highly detailed replica of this subject in its immediate post-WWII configuration. One or two aspects are tricky but there is nothing even a moderately experienced builder should not be able to handle, and the seasoned modeller can turn out a really impressive piece incorporating aftermarket cockpit dress-up sets and decals, as a stand-alone display or diorama subject.

Simplifying Soft Masking

Back when I started this blog, one of my most-viewed early posts was about detailing Hasegawa’s Bf 109 K-4, and one of the techniques I explored was soft-masking, cutting card masks for the camouflage and applying them clear of the surface by an eighth of an inch to hopefully create soft-edged demarcations.

I have been putting together Hasegawa’s Bf 109 F-2 in markings for Operation Barbarossa, and when coming to soft-mask the camo this time an interesting twist struck me.

I had not particularly thought about the masking until I got to the relevant stage, then I compared the pattern on the K-4 to the one on Werner Molders’ aircraft to see if the same masks would serve, at least for the wings and tail, but the pattern, being hand-applied on the original aircraft, was different enough to warrant a new set of masks being cut.

Rather than a process of trial and error, holding pieces of card to the model and trimming them until they looked about right, and in the absence of a 1:48th scale reference drawing, I pulled another unbuilt 109 from my stash and laid the wing, tail and fuselage parts onto a sheet of light card, ran a pencil around them and abruptly had my profile plans. From that point it was an easy matter to copy the camouflage from the kit plans onto the sketch and outline the segments to be cut out. It doesn’t even have to be very exact.

The virtue is that you can pre-design cutaways to fit around the wings or to run under the tail surfaces, or long tapers to shield the sides of the fuselage, helping reduce tape usage. And, if you’re careful with the cutting out, you’ll have a negative mask as well, which you can lay over the opposite tonal area to touch up overspray if needed.

On this model I’m using Model Master Acryl paints (well, on three models simultaneously, in fact), so look for a review of these paints in the near future.

My too-full schedule has been cleared somewhat lately, so look for new posts rather more often.

Kit Review: Tamiya 1:48 Fw 190 F-8

This kit is 15 years old, #39 in Tamiya's expanding 1:48th scale aircraft range, and while there would be many reviewers quick to point out that the kit is "showing it's age" in ways, I would sooner concentrate on the ways in which this kit is still a very good one, and a very pleasing build. Some might point to Dragon's and Eduard's offerings as being far more detailed, with hatches that display engines and guns, but I would point to the sheer unfriendliness of those kits to build, their susceptibility to misalignment of the major components if key elements of their multitudinous internal fittings are not mounted with exact precision, something many builders only discover retrospectively after doing it wrong the first time.



In contrast, Tamiya offers a basic cockpit and engine, the latter of which is pretty much invisible behind the prop and fan (as is going to be the case with any closed-cowl 190), and the cockpit looks just fine through a closed canopy. Add some harness hardware, that would be about all you'd need to up-detail the cockpit, unless opening the hood.



The cockpit features raised instrument detail which responds very well to drybrushing, and a gunsight which is clearly visible through the windscreen. A choice of standard or Galland Haube (blown) canopies is provided, both crystal clear. The prop mounts on a poly cap, a Tamiya trademark, which allows it to be slipped into place at the very end, easing not only painting and decaling, as the spiralschnauze really needs to be applied to the spinner cone before the prop is built up.

There are some stores options for this, the dedicated ground attack variant of the 190. Twin underwing pallets for R4 unguided rockets are optional vs a quartet of well-molded SC50 bombs and their pylons, while a 300L droptank and rack are provided for the centreline station.



The Tamiya kit builds beautifully. Buildability is a dependable trait for Tamiya and even so early in their series, only a few kits after switching to recessed panel lines as standard, the parts fall together very neatly indeed. The main fuselage and wing parts are super-accurate and align correctly on their pins; the tail surfaces literally snap into place and their tabs and slots are size-coded so you can't get the surfaces on upside down. The engine cowling is a single moulding into which the completed engine sits before the unit fits back onto the fuselage and the gunbay cover drops into place.

A separate insert for the wheelwell brings up the possible detail level, while separate parts for the retraction struts, locking to the legs at fixed pivot pins, assures the main gear will almost fall into correct alignment, a boon when one considers the forward rake and toe-in on the Focke-Wulf undercarriage that can be a challenge on some kits. This is standard engineering that will be found throughout Tamiya's 190 range.



Similarly, the single-piece lower wing surface assures the correct dihedral and a gentle flexed fit for the wing to fuselage joint, often the major issue with joint dressing but here requiring no attention at all. Overall, the joints were dressed with a little adzing and wet sanding over superglue assembly, while some joints were closed with liquid cement on natural panel lines,. Filler was used in only a couple of places, such as behind the engine cowl, down by the wing roots, and to eliminate discontinuities where sprue attachment points fell.

The decals provide for four aircraft, all interesting choices, including the famous Black 10 of 2/SG4 in tropical camouflage for the Italian campaign of 1944, Green Double Chevron of SG2 in March '45, White 7 of I/SG2, in Hungary during the winter of '44 to '45, and Red 2 of I/SG2 in a zebra-pattern winter camo over standard RLM 74/75/76, in early '45. In 1995 Tamiya was recommending mixing rations to reach RLM equivalents from their acrylics range, while later kits offer matches from the Tamiya enamels range.



Their formula for RLM 76 (XF-2 Flat White plus XF-23 Pale Blue plus XF-66 Light Grey ata ratio of 7:1:2, provides a virtually perfect match for the original, lacking only lustre, and an addition of 25 to 30% X-22 Clear Gloss approximates the sheen of the original RLM colours. Unfortunately, their suggested formulas for the 74 and 75 are miles off, and I experimented to find a decent fit. For 74 they recommend XF-24 Dark Grey and XF-27 Schwartzgrun at 3:2, but this was too dark and too green, especially compared to the Model Master enamel equivalent. I reduced the ratio to 3:1 and added 1 part Flat White as well, then brought up the lustre with 30% Clear Gloss. For the 75, Tamiya suggests XF-51 Khaki should be a component, but as 75 has no green hue at all this mystifies me. I mixed it from scratch, starting with XF-24 Dark Grey and adding Flat White at a ratio of 2:1, then adding 30% Clear Gloss. On reflection this was too much gloss, as darker shades reflect more strongly than lighter ones, and 20% would have been ample. The final shades were acceptably similar to the Model Master enamel equivalents, though I have to say the acrylics are both more delicate and lack a certain 'gutsiness' that the solvent-based paints have. I mixed the RLM 04 Yellow also, warming and lightening XF-3 Yellow slightly (it could have gone still lighter...)

The camouflage was soft-masked using light card, while hard edges were acheved with Tamiya tape. This was my first time doing an all-acrylic multi-tone paintjob and I was quite pleased with the result, not pleased enough to say I'll retire enamels, but pleased that I can pursue a build like this in weather which forbids taking the hobby outside to spray solvent-based paints.



If there was any particular shortcoming to the kit, it was the decals. Two sheets are provided, one large, one small, with all the stencil data on the small sheet along with a few squadron markings. The small sheet was glossy and the glue was both slow to release from the backing paper and quick to dissolve thereafter, resulting in decals that were not predisposed to lying down invisibly. Even when gauging the soaking time correctly, some of the decals were prone to wrinkling, calling for considerable skill with solvent and setting solutions to get them to even out and pull into surface detail. I'm very glad I painted the block colour areas of the scheme I chose, as the decal version of those areas I am certain would have been unnecessarily difficult to apply and not looked half as good. There are, of course, aftermarket decal sets for the Fw 190 almost beyond reckoning, many of them probably being released with this very kit in mind, so this is perhaps the least of concerns.

Finishing tricks included carbon staining and dust applied with MiG Productions powder pigments, and an antenna wire made from Berkshire Junction EZLine.



I'm sorry this kit is out of production. Hopefully it will be reissued at some point, and until then one must haunt eBay with a watchful eye to catch it when it changes hands from time to time. My verdict on the Tamiya Fw 190 F-8 is that it is a very pleasant build with few challenges, which can be both tackled by a beginner and enjoyed by a master, and which certainly captures the stance and look of Kurt Tank's masterpiece fighter.

Fascination With “Type”

Sometimes, without consciously meaning to, we find ourselves on a single-type production line. It can happen for a variety of reasons, and plain fascination with a particular subject matter is probably the single most significant. The hobby is about entertainment, education and general knowledge come decidedly second, so when a hobbyist finds him or herself focussing on a particular subject it's probably because there's an abiding interest.

It might be that you're a fan of MOPAR muscle, and you're on your tenth 1:25th scale Chrysler Corp F-body pro-streeter in a row. Maybe you're an armour fan who belongs to the "panzers only" club because they're colourful. Maybe your thing is vintage biplanes and between them Roden and classic Aurora have occupied your bench time for the last two years.

Of course, it can creep up on you. I recently found myself building four Fw 190 fighters at the same time sort of. One was started four years ago, brought to the painting stage and almost forgotten, back in its box. One was a quick build to work with some AM decals, another was a long-delayed foray into building a leading manufacturer's offering with all the bells and whistles. The last was a chance to work in 1:32nd scale for the first time in twenty years, and only the fourth time ever, on the assumption that there will shortly be somewhere to store and display a model that size.

However it worked out, there are four German WWII fighters on my bench at the same time, which will mostly be in the same RLM 74/75/76 scheme, and that's a plus to production-line building. You can get at least two of them ready for the paintshop at the same time and do both from the same mixing and cleaning cycle, which reduces work and economises on air if you're not using a compressor.

Does it risk boredom? Seeing a long line of the same subject ahead of you can either whet your appetite for completion, as each finished build fuels the next, or dull it completely when some other fascinating body shape and colour scheme comes along to compete with the same-old same-old. I think I'll stagger things, do a 1:72 and the 1:48 together, tackle the 1:32 on its own due to sheer volume, and the last 1:72 separately by default as it has a slightly different scheme. It'll take months to work through them, but I have every expectation that each finished plane will more than inspire me to press on with the next.

I suppose the three Phantoms I have underway also count as a fascination with type. Look for posts in future picking up the theme of the great Hasegawa/Fujimi Phantom Showdown, as both these brands are on the bench and will be reviewed together.

PS: I'm now using Picassa for my image loads, click them and you'll get a larger version from now on.

To Detail or Not to Detail, That is the Question...

I have long fancied scratchbuilding the mighty MBT-70 Main Battle Tank under development as a joint US/German project in the late 1960s. The pre-production prototype batch demonstrated great potential, and a number of its innovations appeared in other tanks on both sides of the Atlantic, but the vehicle itself was too ambitious, too costly and too unreliable. It is a long, low, mean-looking tank with unusual features, such as a driver in a stabilised cockpit in the turret, and a secondary cannon which could be operated from within. I have long pursued research, trying to untangle the differing running gear details of the US and West German versions, and one way I tried to do this was to find Aurora’s old 1:48th scale kit on eBay, to see in three dimensions how the repetitive detailing of the unique hydropneumatic suspension system was handled.

I was somewhere between surprised and disgusted when I discovered that Aurora’s solution to all that complex detail was to ignore it. No suspension detail was offered at all, which makes the kit a somewhat expensive and rather pointless addition to my stash (joining the eBay sell-on pile…) Back to the drawing board on the MBT-70 project, but that absence of detail set me thinking.

What constitutes a necessary detail for a kit?

Knowledgeable folk will tell you that not a single truly accurate and representative F/A-18 model exists in 1:72nd scale, and that is more than likely true of just about every subject, but it must be a matter of degree. Detail appropriate to the scale is a major consideration, as the resolution of detail reproduction will make it clumsy to try to include some details when they become too small. Go to the other end of the spectrum and consider the older kits in which detail in the wheel wells, even the cockpit was considered unnecessary. In the 1970s Airfix’s 1:24th scale ‘superkits’ were something of a benchmark, but while they featured significant cockpit detail (not actually complete, it should be noted), they featured no wheel well detail at all, simply the open interior of the wing with a mechanical pivot for the gimmicky retractable landing gear.

Then there’s the odd notion of including things in the kit that aren’t there on the real thing, in the name of marketability, or having to add a detail and making a genuine mess in the process. I’m thinking of the tile pattern grid Revell added to their 1:72nd scale Space Shuttle back in the 1980s… A truly overscale raised grid to represent the actually recessed micro-fine division between the ceramic tiles of the craft’s hull… I'm sure the 1:72nd scale raised representation was actually larger than the 1:1 scale recessed reality, which goes to show what accuracy counts for compared to the young buyer's expectation that something as important as the thermal tiles must be there, whether it's visible or not. The company engraved the moulds, the same approach as raised panel lines, and just as inaccurate, though compounded by the regularity of the grid over the craft’s surface. I had that kit, bought it for a great price, but a few years later I sold it on, unopened. Why? I just could not bring myself to build a hypersonic flying machine with a rugose hull texture that would shame a rhinoceros, any more than I could see my way to laboriously removing the entire grid and rescribing it. Had Revell left well alone I might have got up the chutzpah to try scribing the grid (though I’d probably have made a mess and ended up refilling it and trying some sort of paint trick, spraying through a mesh perhaps, which I once saw done to great effect on the 1:144th scale orbiter.) As it stands, though I would love a large scale shuttle, there’s no way I’d tackle the Revell offering, even with my current skill level.

I’m not entirely sure but this beast may have been retooled to switch the grid to recessed, but it would still have been way overscale. Decal company Cutting Edge went a long way to rectifying the whole accuracy problem for Orbiters with decal versions of the heat shield areas, and accurised engines and window painting masks were also produced, way back in 2003. Check them out:

http://decals.kitreview.com/decals/ced44001decaplreviewbg_1.htm

So where should a kit company draw the line between what needs to be there and what needs to not be there? My gut feeling is that if the detail is recessed, recess it, and if the detail is visible at the equivalent scale viewing distance, it should be on the model. That’s a fair yardstick, with plenty of wiggle-room, and I think the best companies are probably working around just such philosophies now. Perhaps that’s called learning from the past, standing on the shoulders of yesterday’s industry and building on not just their experiences but the consequences of their choices. Models certainly look better, right out of the box, now than they ever have before, even if they are not ‘accurate’ in the sense that purists use the term. And yes, the gentle art of ‘rivet-counting’ will be another topic!

Kit Review: Tamiya F-51D Korean War #61044

 It may seem odd to review a kit released nearly 13 years ago, but there’s always room for a retrospective. For many years Hasegawa’s P-51D was the standard, and it remains a very good and entirely competitive kit, but Tamiya’s builds somewhat easier and is superbly detailed. The Hasegawa cockpit is slightly better, but unless you have the canopy open you really can’t tell what’s in the pit anyway.

The 81-part kit features optional parts for the Inglewood or Dallas canopies, Hamilton-Standard or Aeroproducts propellers (blades and spinner cones), and features 6 5” HVARs and a choice of 2 500lb bombs or 2 75-US gallon droptanks for the wing racks. The kit comes with decals for three aircraft of Korean vintage, the famous FF-943 (“Was that too fast?”) of the 12th FBS, 18th FBG; the CO’s aircraft of the 18th FBG; and “Buckeye Blitz” of the 36th FBS, 8th FBW.  

 The clear parts are crystal clear and barely-distorting, while the overall fit of the model is outstanding. I needed only a little filler on the underside seam where the fuselage halves trap the cockpit/radiator assembly. The cockpit is quite adequately detailed for the scale, and while no harness is included, not even as a decal (as with Tamiya’s Corsair), there is a gunsight glass and the canopy frame brace. The propeller seats back onto a stub which engages a poly cap trapped between the hub parts, which means the prop can be mounted in the final assembly round, after all major handling is done, minimising the chances of breakage.  

 Tamiya must use very high-pressure injection moulding, as the sprue attachment points are as small as technically possible. They are also located in carefully-considered locations where the inevitable inconsistencies where the sprue is cut and filed back show as little as possible.

Alignment and fit are of a very high standard and the kit pretty much builds itself, certainly for any experienced modeller it should be a breeze. There were no problem areas to speak of. The decals were thin and opaque and reacted well to setting solutions, but were not particularly ‘sticky’: three small stencils simply disappeared during subsequent handling, underlining the desirability of clearcoats.  

 I finished the model in Humbrol enamels, mixing #11 Silver Fox 7:3 with #56 Flat Aluminium to create a weathered metal look evocative of the beating the aircraft took from the severe weather conditions in Korea. The yellow accents were sprayed in a mix of Tamiya Acrylics (XF-3 Yellow, warmed with XF-7 Red and brightened with X-22 Clear Gloss). The prop blades, anti-glare panel and rudder trim tab were sprayed XF-1 Flat Black. The cockpit and gear bay interiors were sprayed Interior Green, mixed 1:1 from Tamiya XF-3 and XF-5 Green. The overall recessed panel lines were accented with ProModeller Dark Dirt panel wash, and the natural metal finish was varied with graphite, burnished into the paint with a stiff brush, and masked (with the greatest care!) with Tamiya tape. MiG pigments were used to add dust to the gear bays and underside, plus gun carbon and exhaust staining.  

 This was a very enjoyable build, the model looks proud in the display case, and I’m sure I’ll be building many more, working through my decal stash to collect the elegant Mustang in many of her historically famous schemes.