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!

Building Bigger

Sometimes, with the pressure of one's daily obligations, a piece of work can be produced and clean forgotten. Below is a model build-up feature I wrote years ago, and even then it was a retrospective on a project which had not been documented at time of actual completion. I was browsing for some information in old articles and came across the text, so figured it was high time this one saw the light of day!

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As I’ve ruefully mentioned before on this blog, some modellers build bigger as they get older simply because they can’t see the small ones anymore. That’s very true for me, yet I haven’t built large scale planes since I was a kid – in fact I’ve only done one 1:32 aircraft in modern times. My previous was 34 (now 36!) years ago!

In 2014 I tackled Hasegawa’s big scale Fw 190 A-8 and had a great deal of fun with it. There were one or two hassles – the fit of the engine cowling to the fuselage left a lot to be desired and was a tough contour to fill and sand but that was about the only structural difficulty. The decal sheet was a let-down – I had selected Hans Dortenmann’s Red 1 and as with so many Luftwaffe aircraft the markings and the camouflage scheme particulars go hand in hand. It was bad news when it turned out the sheet was unserviceable, as the paintwork was fully finished. Patching the markings together from AM sheets would have been a $60 job (three sheets required). Fortunately a friend in Europe had the same kit and was doing it in different markings and sent me his sheet, which worked perfectly.

It’s a big, beautiful bird, and at this scale the problems of airbrush mottling are minimised – overspray can still be an issue but the battle for fineness seems less acute. The cockpit was easy to detail, and the 1:32 etched harness was incredibly realistic. The outer pair of canon barrels is missing – by the time I was done I was more than slightly browned off with Hasegawa’s engineering choice to simply scab them onto the exterior as optional bits, as my confidence to get them lined up in both axes while glue dried was in negative numbers, so she’s a slightly odd-looking A-8 here. Better that than make a mess after so much work had been invested…

I didn’t weather this one heavily – weathering is a skill mated t0 scale and one must learn to use a heavier hand as scale increases. I’m not comfortable with really laying on filth so this bird is in very well-maintained condition – which they must have been at least some of the time.

So why so few models in this scale? Simple, somewhere to put them. You can store four, even six, 1:72^nd scale models in the same area as the “footprint” of a 1:32^nd scale project, and you very quickly fill display cases with the big guys. I have plenty of models in this scale and would like plenty more, but until the day comes I have some sort of storage designed to receive them – shelves of the appropriate depth and at a spacing which does not waste cubic volume with empty air – I fear I’ll have to leave them where they are, buried deep in the stash.

There’s also a lot of work in a big model, even if it’s structurally no more complicated. It certainly uses a lot more paint, you’re aware of your running supplies being used more quickly. But that’s par for the course, I can only imagine the investment in time and materials the ship guys go to when they’re building the new Trumpeter 1:200^th scale battleships. Now there’s a project to conjure with – it gives a whole new meaning to the term “big scale.” It is to ships what 1:16^th scale is to armour or 1:24^th scale to planes.

Hmmm, that reminds me, I have an Airfix 1:24^th scale Harrier hiding away in the stash. After more than forty years since the basic tooling came out it might be high time it got the full treatment… If only I had somewhere to put it!

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!

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.

Lust for Lustre

I’ve had Hasegawa’s 1:72 N1K1 Kyofu “Rex” fighter seaplane (AP 35/#51335) in my stash for over ten years, and looked at it many times, thinking how great it would be to do something clever with that two-tone finish. The last time I ever finished anything in hinomarus, it was an Airfix Zero and I was a kid, so this is functionally the first Japanese aircraft for my collection. It certainly won’t be the last. But what convinced me to have a go at it at this time (I began it back in January) was the chance to try out the Microscale Satin clear topcoat again.

This is my third build with it and my technique seems to be holding good. The photo on the side of the box shows a very clean, glossy finish, which compliments Koike Shigeo’s always-superb box art, if contradicting it in a few places, and I felt it was a great candidate for a satin finish. The paints used by the Imperial Japanese forces weathered very fast, Japanese subjects are the holy grail of aircraft weathering techniques for many, but this one was going to be clean and tidy. I just wanted to see how the whole clear coating business worked one more time.



The kit has only 37 parts (nine more build the handling trolley and there’s an optional boarding ladder), the fit is great, there were very few fiddles. Eduard make a canopy mask set for this subject in 1:48th scale, for Tamiya’s kit, but not for this one, so I masked the one-piece canopy with multiple tiny strips of tape, the old-fashioned way. There are several thin struts in the canopy and I masked these out completely, to be done with strips of painted decal, another technique I’ve not used in probably 15 or 20 years. (It worked so-so, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the willingness of the painted strips to part from their backing, or adhere to the plastic…)



Hasegawa paint callouts use the Gunze range, so I pulled out the plans for the Tamiya version and used their paint recommendations instead, a mixed green for the cockpit plus XF-11 JN Green and XF-12 JN Grey for the overall scheme. The box side pic shows a soft demarcation but at 1:72 that might be pushing things, and I hard-masked with tape. It’s worth noting, the red warning band on the float was supplied as a decal but I sprayed it in XF-7, slightly warmed with XF-3, as before coming to the decals I was sure the result would be much better that way. Would it? On reflection I’m not sure, but I am glad I didn’t fight with a decal that large, all the same. The paints went on smoothly, with no arguments, but very dull indeed, and I was really looking forward to how the lustre would bring the paints alive.



Alive is the word! I know the sheen may be a bit bright for authenticity, assuming the box photo was also way too bright, but the model has depth and dimension instead of a dull green that almost soaks up light. Perhaps that was the point of camouflage, but a model must also be decorative, and the lustre creates visual interest.

It’s also a wonderful base for decaling, Hasegawa’s decals went down very well indeed, the Microscale system pulled them tightly into the engraved lines with only a single application of setting solution, I don’t think I could have asked for better. The white-rimmed insignia for the fuselage were supplied in two forms, a single image or a nested white and red disc, and I used the latter as the single-image type were out of register. Even two nested decals still pulled into the detail with enough room for panel wash to partially catch. The whites were cream yellow on the sheet, though, which translated over dark green to a shade closely matching the JN Grey, but against the JN Green they “look” white enough to do. The decals cured overnight and were then gently washed in plain water to lift away the residue of decal adhesive.



I used Promodeller Dark Dirt weathering wash to accent the panel lines on grey areas only, as it became invisible against the green, and the panel lines, once the lustre comes up, are very distinct on the dark surface without augmentation anyway. With the panel wash done, I applied another coat of satin to seal it all, and was at liberty to unmask the engine and canopy, pending prop and struts.

A little rust on the handling trolley, paint and mount the exhausts, add some carbon staining with MiG pigments and an antenna wire from EZ-Line, paint the pitot in metallic silver, and I could call this one done. It doesn’t sit up square in the ‘dockwagen,’ it might take a shim or two, and although a solid plastic counterweight is supplied to nest inside the front part of the float the centre of gravity is still far enough back for the model to be unstable if the vertical guide marks of the float are aligned with the structural guides of the trolley.



This was a quick, fun build with which to get a bit more experience with the suite of techniques I’m using on aircraft these days, especially clearcoating, something I have only recently been feeling my way with. I’m reasonably happy with the result, it’s not perfect but then I’ve not often worked in this scale in many years either, and look forward very much to building it’s bigger brother from Tamiya: perhaps my weathering techniques will be up to making her look worn and weary by then!

Attitude: Resisting the Fiddly

Perhaps it’s the same phenomenon I was discussing last time, a mental blockage that keeps you from either seeing a solution or, just as importantly, implementing it.

I began building a Hasegawa Kyofu Rex seaplane a week or two back, a project I’ve wanted to do for ages and finally found an excuse to as another test subject for trying out those acrylic topcoats. The model fell together like a dream, there are only 37 parts in the plane and a few more in the handling trolly (the German would be dockwagon). The acrylics are all lined up and ready to go, the only obstacle was masking the canopy. Eduard make a set for this kit’s bigger brother, Tamiya’s 1:48 scale equivalent, but for the one-piece canopy of the little guy I was on my own.

Well, slivers of tape must be coaxed into place with fine tools, obviously. But it took me a week or so to commit to the task. I felt like Sgt. Pinback being told it was time to feed the alien, in Dark Star… “Ohhhhh, I don’t wanna do that… I have to do everything ‘round here…” Maybe it’s my deteriorating eyesight, or persistent memories of being frustrated by such tasks before, but it took resurrecting that Corsair a few days ago to get me to the job. Eduard makes Corsair masks but it would be weeks before I could get hold of them and they cost money, a few slivers of tape are immediate and essentially cost nothing.



So, the mind sees the necessity, the heart deals with the angst, and the hands and eyes do the job. A couple of hours work spread out through the whole day so there’s no chance to go stale on the task, and I had both canopies outlined. From there it’s easy enough to backfill the areas with tape. One concession to the approach is that it’s obliged to be a two-part finishing process: main struts will be painted, fine secondaries, simply too small or intersecting in complex ways with the others, will be slivers of decal, which will be made from clear sheet at the painting stage.

The pre-cut masks are so convenient you forget grass-roots techniques like these. I’ve not made slivers of decal for canopy struts in 15 years, so it’ll be an interesting experiment to see how they work – or don’t. If they don’t, I’ll figure out some other solution.

The Great Phantom Showdown

 I love Phantoms. I’ve always loved them, ever since I was a kid and the F-4 was the real-life big kid on the block. I remember a McDonnell-Douglas add on the back cover of an aviation magazine from the late 1970s that praised the Phantom as “The Warbird of the Free World.” That magazine is still somewhere in my collection, if I ever get a chance to look through the old stash I’ll probably find infinite anecdotes. I also remember reading an article on the development of the F-4, it was probably in an old Aeroplane Monthly or Aviation News, that said the military brass thought the plane they were being offered in 1958 was downright ugly, “a great jagged juggernaut, massive as a WWII bomber, clumsy as a goose with its downswept tails…” That’s a verbatim quote, the words stuck in my memory thirty years ago. I shook my head as a young teen to read that: to me the F-4 was a beautiful aircraft, and I still think so today. Heck, my sister in law was a USAF crew chief and the F-4E was her plane. 

 Modellers tend to agree that the F-4 is, or was, a special plane. 5257 of them, in 13 major variants, not counting recon subtypes, and the markings of at least 15 services, gives enormous scope for variety, and model companies were not slow to recognise this. Early Phantoms were like any early kits, they left a lot to be desired, but by the late 1980s moulding technology was up to the challenge of creating really well-fitting kits, and the firms had recognised that modellers wanted models that not only looked good, they were as close to accurate as possible. At that point the challenge was on. Hasegawa and Fujimi, two of the Shizuoka City giants, went at it head to head in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a direct challenge for the market dollar on the subjects the model building public most wanted. They each delivered F-14 Tomcats by the bushel, they both fielded squadrons of A-4 Skyhawks, and Fujimi offered up all the major marks of A-7 Corsair as well. But it was in the area of the F-4 Phantom II that perhaps their greatest race occurred.

 By the early 1990s Hasegawa had released all the major variants in 1:72nd scale, and most of them in 1:48th as well, while Fujimi concentrated mostly on 1:72, with a few forays into larger material. Historically, Hasegawa won the battle, their product was more accurate, their packaging slicker, their decals better quality, and the market was willing to wear the fact their product was also correspondingly more expensive. But that’s not to say Fujimi’s product doesn’t have a lot going for it. Consider the most basic comparison: both Hasegawa and Fujimi standardised on recessed panel lines in the late 1980s, and all their quality late-tool Phantoms have fine engraved detail throughout. Hasegawa had better cockpits, and arguably better selections of subject matter, with their multitudinous releases of common parts wrapped in different boxes, decals and painting instructions for every one-off special commemorative scheme that came along, as well as a wide range of standard schemes and squadron markings from around the world. But Hasegawa’s philosophy was to break down the parts in a way that yielded maximum utility between variants, which forced decisions such as separate fin cap parts, and a break in the fuselage just behind the intakes to facilitate different nose sections, the area in which most variety between marks was found. Fujimi tooled the fuselage and tail for each major variation complete and provided a varying tray-like part for the underside of the nose, plus separate scabbed-on parts for scanners, intakes and antennas. This means a Fujimi is a simpler build with fewer seams, and that’s attractive. 

 

 Hasegawa never got around to retooling the British Phantoms with wider engine bays to accommodate their Rolls-Royce Spey turbofans, but Fujimi did: their F-4K, F-4M, FG.1, FGR.2 and F.3 kits feature generally proper proportions and dimension for the British fleet, and in 1:72nd scale they’re the only game in town if you discount Hasegawa’s old-tool F-4K and M (which featured raised detail throughout), and Matchbox’s old FGR.2, which most serious modellers today will do on account of its way overscale recessed detail. Various options are included in each brand’s product, deployed flaps, positionable surfaces, openable canopies, and different degrees of detail in wheelwells and afterburners, but the averagely-sighted person would have to look twice to decide which kit a model was built from. Given Fujimi’s essentially complete range of variants and their slightly lower shelf price (often much lower today on eBay, though in the early 1990s Fujimi was a notoriously expensive brand, certainly here in Australia), Hasegawa’s top spot is not universally secure and Fujimi have a great many fans for their late-tool product.  

 It is said that Fujimi have not released a genuinely new military aircraft product since their “war on Hasegawa” ran out of steam in the 90s, but there are a great many kits out there in circulation that are fun to build and for which there are oceans of aftermarket accessories, certainly piles of great decals, and unless one is peering into cockpits and wheel wells with a magnifying glass the differences cease to be apparent about 18 inches back, so it stands to reason both brands will continue to compete in the marketplace for the Phantom Phanatic’s modelling buck. Given Hasegawa’s agreement with Revell/Revell-Germany, and the lower price for which Revell can rebox Hasegawa’s toolings (hence the Revell items in the pics above), quality Phantoms are probably easier to get hold of than ever before. I’ll be building 1:72nd scale F-4s from both stables during 2010, and will be retrospectively reviewing and comparing them right here at World in Miniature, so stay tuned.

Final Review: 1:48 Hasegawa Bf 109 K-4

 

 With the K-4 finally done (okay, maybe there are one or two details I missed – I blush, I forgot the wingtip formation lights, so she’ll be coming out of the display case for a quick spot of red and green…) I can finish my work in progress articles with a roundup of this kit’s qualities. Hasegawa’s kit #09063 (JT63) is quite the gem. It has many unused parts from other variants, different cockpit sidewalls, the droptanks and underwing gunpods of G-series bomber-destroyers, three different tail wheel struts, three different instrument panels. You need to keep a careful eye on the instructions to make sure you select the right parts for the variant you’re building.  

 Marking options are supplied for two aircraft, Yellow 4, “Ingeborg,” of II/JG 3, March 1945, and a second contemporary airframe. Markings include a full suite of stencil data, even including the Werk numbers which may or may not have been carried on the tail of Yellow 4, depending on the sources you consult. I was originally a little put out with the engineering of the cockpit, but from that point onward the model literally fell together. The propeller attachment could have been smarter, trying to accurately align the fuselage halves while trapping an un-glued rotation piece in a channel at the front end was quite impossible for my dexterity and I settled for gluing it in place as a fixed stub, thus creating a non-turning finished prop. Parts alignment was superb for the most part, my only criticism is a tiny fore-and-aft mismatch on fuselage right and left detailing, which is only really visible where the aft fuselage segments are delineated on the underside. The flaps were marred by a long sink mark on the upper surfaces, which was only visible in certain lighting, virtually guaranteeing the parts were mounted before the problem was noticed. Similarly, the leading edge slats can be mounted open or closed, and while the deployed configuration adds visual interest the separate parts come with the usual penalty for assembling them closed: they don’t fit as well into their bays as the slats of the real plane would.  

 But these are minor quibbles, really. The surface detailing is accurate for a K-4, the hatches and access panels are in the right places, the Erla Haube looks convincing, and with a few extra details scratched together (the radiator pitch rods, battery bay hatch and flap ribs which I covered in my first post on this kit) it builds into a visually convincing model. I could have added hydraulic lines from fine wire but I was out of time and application on the project, that’s something for future builds. Another detail which I had meant to use was Quickboost’s exhausts, beautifully cast with open throats and midline weld seams, however they did not provide the locator slot for the glare shields of the late-series 109s, molded as separate kit parts, and I didn’t fancy scratching this detail at so late a stage. The resin AMs ended up in the drawer against a future build.  

 The decals went down actually quite nicely, reacting well with Microscale chemistry, though the spiralschnauze tried to curl up on the paper and was broken into pieces to be applied, and the big open crosses silvered somewhat. The 60 or so decals make a visually ‘busy’ aircraft, even if the real “Ingeborg” may not have carried a full suite of stencils (references and reconstructions do not, as you would expect, always agree.) Promodeller panel wash and MiG pigments created the worn appearance, the carbon stains and dust that denote a service aircraft being hard-flown, and EZ Line provided the radio antenna. Without going to the extent of AM cockpit and wheels, opening the canopy etc, this model makes a sweet display piece that really captures, the gutsy, brutish yet still graceful lines of the ever-more powerful ultimate Messerschmitt 109. I would recommend this kit to anyone with a few builds under his or her belt: while the multi-tone camouflage will be a challenge and the many decals will certainly occupy more than a couple of evenings, the basic soundness of the kit engineering will foster an attractive finished product if approached with care, forethought, and above all, patience. 

Hasegawa Bf 109 K-4: Soft-Masking the Camouflage

The Hasegawa K-4 has certainly been gestating a long time, what with professional commitments and a month’s jury service, but she’s on the last lap now. I just completed the paintwork and for the first time I’ve tried the technique of soft-masking.

The late-war German camouflage patterns were a simplified, time-saving exercise. Gone were the masked, hard-edge patterns from the early war years, replaced with free-handed patterns on the horizontal surfaces and ever more complex freehand disruptive schemes on the fuselage sides. The challenge here is to reproduce that scheme with smooth graduations between the colours at a resolution which is a fair scale representation of the feather of the original sprayguns. There are many approaches, and while you can change down to a fineline tip and needle on your airbrush, and adjust the thinning ratio of the paint and the pressure delivery to the AB, these techniques take a lot of mastering. Soft-masking leaves the paint operation alone and addresses the problem directly on the model.

The idea is to mask the camo but support the masks clear of the surface by around an eighth of an inch, so that the cloud of paint passing the edge lands on the surface in a tight but still diffuse edge, creating a resolution often difficult by regular means. The first step is to prepare the paint scheme: 

 

 I sprayed the underside LM 76 first, and when that was thoroughly dry I masked the edges of the flying surfaces, including the wavy-edge demarcation at the leading edge, using Tamiya tape. The card masks are photographed with the model at this stage.  

I masked the sides of the fuselage to protect the 76 and the RLM 75 grey topside colour was then sprayed on the horizontal surfaces and left to harden. Then I cut rectangles from white 120-gsm cardstock large enough to cover each area of the grey to be protected. The card pieces were laid onto the wings and tail, fuselage and nose, and the shape was roughly drawn on in pencil, then cut out with small scissors. At this point it's worth noting that Hasegawa "kicked" the grey/green pattern on the left wing: reverse them, grey areas for green areas, to get the historically correct pattern. I kept the positive and negative area masks for the fuselage sides as I was pretty sure I would need both. 

 

 Above: The card masks were attached loosely to the model with rolled out strips of blu-tac (the same stuff as you use to put up posters) and then extra bits of tape were used to link them together where necessary. With the fuselage sides masked I went on to spray the 75 on the upper parts:  

The three masks crossing the fuselage crest were made on the fly, matching with the horizontal masks already in place:  

Lastly the RLM 83 green was sprayed overall, and when dry the masks were carefully removed. 

The blu-tac develops considerable grab, so it’s important to remove it carefully. The mask crossing the canopy was so firmly attached that it pulled the canopy right off, so it will be reattached in the final round of work. A soft eraser removes some slight residue remaining on the paint. From this point I touched up as necessary, including applying the negative masks to protect the camo on the upper parts of the fuselage, so I could touch up over some overspray darkening the 76, 

then I removed those masks once more, revealing the virtually complete paintjob:  

The definition between the colours could have been softer, I thought, to be more clearly soft-masked rather than hard-masked, but overall I’m very pleased with the result. While labour-intensive, it was a lot less traumatic than trying for fineline airbrush effects can often be. Now, onto the small details and the decals!