Luftwaffe Double Build – Update 5

September 14, 2016 Uncategorized Comments (1)

With the 190 finished, and the Mig-3 added, this should probably be called the “Great Patriotic War” double build instead.

My original plan was to do the Stuka in a scheme flown from France in mid 1940, but I am considering changing that to one from flom Russia in July of 1941. At least that way my pedantic mind can tolerate the thematic shift in the titular double build. Yes, that sentence is truly as awful as it seems, and no I am not changing it.

On to the updates.

STUKA

Having lost a weekend to a haze of BBQ, booze, friends and football (and being officially part of the largest football game-ever- [per Guinness]), I haven’t made huge steps on the Stuka. What I have done is to fix the bomb trapeze as best as I could with styrene rod. I’ve also painted the interior color of the canopy frames. This revealed that I still have a little bit of work to do on some of the seams where the engine cowling meets the fuselage. I also decided to attach all of the antenna, flap actuators, and counter-weights. I would normally wait until the build is almost done for this step, but Italeri had a conspicuous lack of positive location for these parts. I wanted to make sure I had a good glue bond. Attaching them pre-paint is the only way to guarantee that bond will be sufficient, and to easily clean up any mistakes with the glue. The down side is that now I have lots of easy to knock-off bits that I will have to work around during painting. Fingers crossed.

MIG-3

I have made some progress here. The aircraft has been primed with the blue underside painted. The remaining parts for the Mig are in different states of prep, but most all have been primed and or painted.

Painting a two tone spinner is always a challenge. This time I masked the line between the red and white with a thin strip of bare metal foil. Getting the foil to adhere to a compound curve is much easier than any other sort of tape I have tried. And, the line is nice and sharp (for the most part). While I wait for the blue underbelly to cure, I am going to finish up the landing gear and wheels. Then, I will make some masks for the upper-white v. lower-blue demarcation line. To date I have been very impressed with Vallejo model air white paint, but I have never used it on this much of a model. Let’s see how it works.

1 thought on “Luftwaffe Double Build – Update 5”

nicely11b says:

September 20, 2016 at 12:59 pm

Braving the Vallejo white? Glad it turned out well for you but I’d be afraid to use it after my previous messes with it. I still have a supply of Mr Color and Tamiya white so I’ll stick with those until I run out.

Your fix of the Stuka rack looks like it should do the job. Did you support the plastic with any metal rod or anything? Not that it’ll have a whole lot of stress on it.

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