**** DONE: 1/48 Fw190 D-9 "Blue 12" - Winter War / Eastern Front WWII

[Crimea_River]

The pit looks very good John and thanks for the compliments on White 11. If I were to do Black 6 again, I think I'd make the RLM81 less chocolaty.

Interesting sprue connection points. I've not noticed that on other kits.

 

[Slam]

Placing the sprue gates on mating surfaces seems to be a Trumpeter thing. The gates on the 1/32 P-40 I did were configured like that. One of the few things they did right...

JKim, I'm quite enjoying this build. I agree with the gang - good job on the cockpit.

One can never have too many 190s or 109s. My cabinets are stuffed with them. And nary a Spitfire in sight...

 

[JKim]

I'm progressing in fits and spurts. Still have not figured what to do for seatbelts yet. Added a throttle lever and a fuel primer pump on the left console.

Putting the cockpit aside, I started looking at the wheel well opening details. The kit comes with a few things but based on the Eduard 1/48 and the Hasegawa 1/32 kits, some things are missing.

I dry-fit the wings and fuselage to see what can be seen from the wheel wells to give me a better idea of how to add some details.

There is a big space on the right hand side. The Eduard and Revell kits have some sort of coolant/fluid tank so that becomes the first order of business. Started off with a piece of sheet styrene. Actually two pieces that have been glued together.

Using a file, I chamfered off the corners...

Chamfered all of the right angle edges as well...

Smoothed the edges into curves with sandpaper... you can see a picture of the tank from the Hasegawa kit that I used for reference. Lot of work to make a Chiclet.

Fast forward and I've base painted the parts of the back engine plug. The left side of the picture below shows the results of my pathetic scratchbuilding progress to date. The black tubing is from a Tamiya motorcycle kit and bound with strands of electrical wire and will fit in the drilled holes I've made into the bulkhead. The completed coolant tank has been fitted with tubing made from stretched sprue and will be glued directly onto the fuselage side. I wish I could assemble and finish the plug in one piece and take a picture of it but it is going to have to be pieced together in parts.

The wheel well is filling up but I think I need to add a few more bits and pieces of tubing.

I had to take a break from that scratchbuilding... it hurts my head! Since the exhaust pipes need to go in before the fuselage halves are joined. I thought I'd paint the pipes and the fuselage surrounding the pipes and then mask that area off to save on touch-up painting at the end. The paint on the exhausts is really rough because I had a brain fart and was using acetone to thin the paint when I should've been using iso alcohol.

I had to throw away a whole batch of custom brewed grunblau 76 (aka 84) because of this mistake but luckily I caught it before it caused major damage. The grunblau is eyeball-mixed using the paint chips contained in the Model Art 190D/Ta152 book that I have.

 

[Slam]

I like Chiclets. So much so that yesterday I ordered a D-11 from Amazon.

Great job, and I think your "RLM84" is bang on. As for rough paint on an exhaust manifold? Only hot-rodders have shiny smooth exhaust manifolds. I like the way you did yours.

 

[Crimea_River]

Agree. The exhaust stubs look very realistic.

 

[stona]

John, the patches of primer were painted over the camo as repairs. German aircraft used a 1 coat system with no primer underneath.

Yes they did. Here's what Jerry Crandall had to say about the system and paints used, here commenting on another 'Dora'.

"... the factories were using the patented Warnecke Böhm or licensed resin based camouflage paint. The idea was, this flexible paint would adhere to any kind of aluminum or magnesium and would eliminate the need for any primer. So this single coat system saved time and weight. However, it appears the metal under cowling was not properly prepared for the paint resulting in flaking. As Dr. Pomper of W&B would say, when I showed him photos of flaking paint on Luftwaffe aircraft, "either that is not our paint or the metal wasn't clean when our paint was applied."

The paint referred to was developed by W+B but manufactured for the RLM by several other companies to the W+B formula.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Nice work there John.

 

[Wayne Little]

great progress going on here...Dora's forever!

 

[Gnomey]

Lovely work so far!

 

[Donivanp]

Gee I love this work. Really good work going on here John, I mean really GREAT stuff.

 

[JKim]

A little bit of progress to report. Finally finished the seats using Eduard P.E. Luftwaffe seatbelts. My first experience with this particular product. I'm amazed at the level of detail that can be attained with some of these aftermarket parts. Since the cockpit is complete, I can start placing sub-assemblies into the fuselage sides and see how the scratchbuilt parts of the engine plug are going to fit.

The last detail I am going to add to the engine plug are some wires. I made a wiring harness out of sheet styrene to anchor the wires on the top back of the engine plug bulkhead and will drape the wires randomly.

The cockpit plug has been glued into the port fuselage side so I can dry fit the engine plug and check clearances for all of the fiddly bits. The finish on the rubber hosing turned sticky after spraying it Alclad Flat. If I can't clean the tubes in place, I may pull them and try again using a different flat coat.

Finally, I added some actuating rods for the cowling flaps using stretched sprue. Initially, I was concerned with trying replicate the rear face of the annular radiator but dry-fitting the cowl showed hardly any space between the fuselage and the base of the cowl flaps... decided it was not worth the bother.

 

[Slam]

Lovin' it thus far. I agree about those belts; they look fantastic.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Harness looks great and all that wiring, I was intrigued at the fine wire you used as cable ties around a couple of the other bits of piping, #51 pic 5.

 

[Crimea_River]

Great job to date John.

 

[Wayne Little]

Nicely done!

 

[fubar57]

Coming along very nice John. Regarding the I.P. decals. There's a company based out of the U.K. that sells the world's supply of individual dial decals, enough on the sheets to do several panels. These are the Luftwaffe dials...

airscale - high resolution cockpit enhancements for model aircraft.
I'm gonna get me some when I recharge my PayPal.

Geo

 

[Lucky13]

Looking good mate!

 

[JKim]

Harness looks great and all that wiring, I was intrigued at the fine wire you used as cable ties around a couple of the other bits of piping, #51 pic 5.

Hi Vic,
That fine silver wire was from random piece of electronic gear from the house that I stripped. It was pretty easy to wrap it around the black tubing a couple of times and clip the ends.

I actually pulled both sets of black tubing off, cleaned off the shiny gooey mess that had resulted from the clear coat, reapplied wire harnesses and reattached. The fuselage halves have been glued together... I'll try post an update this weekend.

 

[Gnomey]

Great work so far!