**** DONE: 1/32 Fw 190D-9 - Allied Advance and Defense of the Reich WWII.

Looks good John , love the coil, you made

Doin' great man....

I'd agree with that.

Thank you all! Did lots of little things on the Dora the past couple of days. I'm piecing together the fuselage one part at at time. It can be easier to reach seams this way. The supercharger intake was added. The glue seam needs to be zapped all the way around the unit... what a pain! But much easier without the gun cowling and wings in the way.


Speaking of the gun cowling... I've removed some seams to replicate the later 3-piece cowling (vs. 5-piece) and have added the gun barrels. I like how they don't touch the cowl openings at all... looks authentic and its easier to paint.


At this stage, I was curious about the fit of the exhaust stubs. These should look really good after painting!


Also checked the fit of the clear parts. Like the exhaust stubs and everything else so far... superb! These will get a soak in Future before masking and painting.



I modified the three external antennae and pitot tube. The FuG antenna whip was replaced with a thinner piece of stretched sprue.



The small antenna on the rear bottom of the fuselage has a small circular base that I wanted to utilize. Instead of cutting it off and trying to handle the tiny disc of plastic, I just flipped it over and used the antenna as a grip while I drilled a small hole in the base.





The tip of the pitot tube was replaced by brass tubing. Strange... all of the above improvements looked nice and delicate at my work desk but looking at the pictures, they look kinda clunky. I'll replace if they don't look to scale.



As usual, the loop antenna is cut off the base and replaced with a strip of aluminum (coke can).



I have already thinned the edges of the cowl flaps. The one non-opening flap on the starboard side is portrayed correctly on the kit but I forgot to thin it. It happens to be the thickest flap and it took quite a bit of scraping to get to a less b-like appearance.



The cowling pieces have been assembled and painted. I added actuation rods on the back of the cowl flaps. The lighter piece on the right is the Eagle Editions radiator cowling... the one piece of resin on this kit that actually fits. The circular piece of card stock will be used to mask the radiator face when it is time to paint.


And finally... here is the drop tank... painted but not yet weathered.

Beauty, nice mods.


Geo

Doing great work John!

Very nice work John.

Terrific...

Yep, it is.

Great work so far John!

Thanks guys! The Dora's coming along now!

Very nice improvements John

Thanks people! A bit more progress on the Dora over the past few days to report. The gun cowling has been glued into place. Fit is very good and will need only a touch of filler in certain places.



The open radiator cowl flaps are attached after that. You can see the putty/sanding work that was done on the supercharger intake.


The radiator face is supposed to be removable for some reason using polycaps but I cemented it to get it as tight as possible. At this point I compared the Eagle Editions radiator cowling with the kit piece. The resin cowling has a subtle difference in shape and is less "squared off" than the kit cowling. It's hard to see any difference and would probably not be noticed. The resin part fits ok, a touch undersized but definitely usable. The kit part fits perfectly.



I jumped to the other end. The tail stabilizers needed some minor putty work. It took some time because of its hard-to-reach nature. After those joints were cleaned up, I attached the tail unit to the fuselage.



I decided to go with the resin cowling and secured into place using CA glue. As you can see, the fit is pretty good. I'll have a little bit of cleanup to do including adding some filler to "bottom out" the small gaps.

as usual John, great job

Nice work John.

Zehr schön.

Great work so far John!