Thanks again for all the encouragement gents. I have been a bit busy over the past 5 weeks with SWMBO asking for a higher privacy fence to be built between us and our next door neighbours. Sadly, in the middle of setting up for all the work, Melbourne has been placed into a strict (Stage 4) lock-down combined with a night time curfew to help bring the number of COVID infections back under control. Luckily our numbers are very low still (compared to most other countries around the world), but higher than we are prepared to accept. As you might image this has created a fair amount of chaos both at home and at work.
Anyway, I have been able to spend a small amount of time at the bench, but have not taken many shots or had time to update this thread. The model looks as follows:
I took Andy's advice and fitted all surfaces in preparation for painting. Unfortunately the fit of some of these surfaces was pretty ordinary, I spent a lot of time getting these panels to fit such that they look acceptable.
The elevators were the best fit of all the control surfaces and I took the option of fitting them with a very small amount of droop. I looked at a lot of Spanish Civil War photos and it seems that if any droop was evident it was only very slight, so I went with that.
As I noted on the photo, the control rods for elevators and horiz stabs are very hard to see. I'm a bit disappointed they are so hard to see, but given the scale I probably should have expected this to be the case.
The ailerons and flaps were a very different story. The end of the flaps adjacent to the ailerons (on both sides) were rounded and had a corresponding front/rear gap with the aileron. It looks like the plastic was too hot when it dropped from the mold and sort of slumped as it cooled (only conjecture - my knowledge of plastic molds is based on PET and polypropylene plastics). Anyway, the result was that I needed to spend a lot of time sanding back the outside edges of the flaps and then filling the resulting gaps with plastic card to try and get the ends to be straight and square. Again photos from the time period indicated that flaps were very rarely left lowered when aircraft were parked - so that's the way I've set them.
In this kit Dora Wings have provided photo etched metal strips that are to be inserted in the wheel wells to represent the zipper in the leather shroud around the well perimeter in the wing. After trying repeatedly across one full week, I finally decided that this method of representing the zipper was totally unworkable. First, to get the photo etch metal to conform to a surface which requires a "twist" in the metal strip and to get CA glue to hold metal that kept wanting to spring back to a flat shape was, at least for me, mission impossible.
So my alternative approach was to use a very fine piece of stretched sprue and glue this around the wheel well as shown in the shots below.
I am pretty pleased with how this has turned out. I will likely sand this down just a little so that it ends up just being a little raised strip around the wheel well that I can highlight when painting the wells.
Finally, I have also fitted the front engine plate PE panel just behind the prop. It's not perfectly aligned, but it will have to do. I don't think it will be too noticeable once the prop is fitted.
I have also done some more work on the undercarriage oleo legs. I have inserted some brass rods at the top to help hold them into the wing panels a bit better. I remember the last 109 I built nearly 30 years ago was a real pain to keep the legs straight and not keep breaking off - this should help. I've not taken any photos of this as yet - but will provide more details in the next update.
As always - thanks for looking in!