**** DONE: 1/48 Ju88G-6 NJG6 - Night War of WWII

Lovely work so far!

I pretty much had what you show there John. I pinched the fuselage with clamps, first slotting the bulkhead to enable the walls to line up. The step behind the canopy is also what I had but keep in mind that, if you are using Tamiya glue, the plastic on the mating surfaces gets soft and the parts can squash together more, giving you a larger step than what you have with a dry fit. It's a tricky area to try to smooth out as well, given the presence of those aerodynamic fairings.

Thanks guys! I've regrouped to the point where I wanted to tackle the scribing again. I have a scribing template set of common shapes for the little circles and ovals but I didn't have one that matched the shape of the bottom hatch. So I decided to cut a hatch out of brass sheet and either use it as a glued-on piece or as a scribing template. I drew a straight line on a small piece of brass to serve as a guideline.


I printed the drawing that Wojtek posted to approximately 1/48 scale using the distances between panel lines as a rough guide. I glued the drawing on the brass using white glue and set that aside to dry.


The shape was cut out using scissors. The edges are a bit rough but this can be tamped out.


I smoothed out the piece on a piece of glass using the blunt metal end of an x-acto knife handle.


I glued the hatch onto the bottom of the fuselage using two small spots of CA glue. If it sat down perfectly, I could be done with the hatch. If not, I could scribe around the brass hatch and then pop it off, which is what I chose to do. I scribed around the hatch with a sewing needle chucked into a pin vise and pried off the hatch afterwards.


Clean up of the scribed line consisted of a repeated cycle of sanding, brushing off the excess plastic with a stiff paint brush and then lightly rescribing with the needle. Towards the end, I used Tamiya Extra Thin cement to dissolve any little plastic burrs that were left.


The bottom was primed with thinned Mr Surfacer 1000 to check my results.


I now felt brave enough to tackle the multiple small hatches and ports on top of the fuselage. I used a combination of three different scale drawings, which all had slightly different interpretations of the number of hatches on top. Guidelines were marked in pencil and I made sure that I taped the template at each location securely (very important!!!).


After all of the template scribing was finished, I cleaned the work up using the same cycle as the bottom hatch. A coat of primer is used to check my work.


With the scribing work done, I can start joining the major parts together. The wings are still being worked on. I found the need to shim one of the engine nacelle mounting rings.


That's all for now. I should be able to do a lot more work on the Nachtjager since this will be a long weekend for me!

Nice work John !

Making great progress John. My weekdays are pretty much shot with other stuff.

Making great progress John. My weekdays are pretty much shot with other stuff.

Where did you get your brass sheet?

Nice work on the scribing John

Looks great so far John!

That looks great John

Wow, impressive work John, and clean too!

Looks pretty good to me!

My 4-day weekend got clogged with visitors and a trip up to Los Angeles so my time in the shop was cut down to almost nada. Here's a scattered report of what I've been able to do here and there over the past few days.

The wing to engine joints were shaped as much as possible prior to the gluing stage. The port wing required some shim work.




Milliput White was used to fill in the major gaps and then shaped before drying with a wet paper towel to reduce the amount of sanding. The joints were sprayed with primer to check the putty work.



The prop blades are separate and I cut them off the sprues and cleaned them up. They are the thinnest injection molded blades that I've ever seen.



The EZ16 direction finding radar in the large circular housing was painted and installed. The clear piece was masked after gluing in.





Before I attached the cockpit module to the fuselage, I wanted to check the radar array fit. I bought after-market radar arrays that fit onto the kit stalks. The use of the AM arrays required snipping off the locating pins on the stalks and then drilling an accepting hole into the end of the stalk. Very fiddly due to the narrowness of the stalk.


Dry fitting the radar antennas hinted at the challenge of aligning the arrays in multiple planes. Getting everything to be aligned and pointed straight while maintaining the 45 degree skew of the crossbars is going to be a real pain.


The mounting angle of the upper stalks looks off.


I had the brilliant idea of using heat to gently bend the base of the stalks to get the correct mounting angle. I shriveled the piece instantly when I hovered it over a candle flame.


No amount of cursing was going to reverse time so I took a deep breath and scratched up a replacement using plastic card and undamaged parts of the melted kit part. I tried to incorporate the correct angle into the replacement and I gently bent the other side without heat to get it to a better angle.


Some minor detail work on the fuselage before the cockpit module gets attached... the holes for the Shrage-Musik cannons have been drilled out and a couple of small intakes are glued in place.

After reviewing the fit between the cockpit module and the fuselage very carefully, I decided that a thin shim between the radio cover piece and cockpit module would help eliminate the step on the upper surface.


I attached the cockpit module to the module using masking tape, making sure to get a good alignment at the wing roots. I then brushed Tamiya Extra Thin into the areas clear of the tape. Once that bond had secured the pieces, I removed the tape and applied Tamiya Extra Thin to the rest of the joint.




The radio cover piece was dry-fit and trimmed to ensure the best fit possible. And then it was glued into place.

Nice work John, and good recovery on the damaged antenna mount.
When I've had to bend delicate, thin parts in the past, such as prop blades for a belly-landed diorama, or helicopter rotor blade 'droop', I've immersed them in very hot (not boiling) water for a couple of minutes, then, wearing gloves to protect my hands from the heat, made the very pronounced bends in stages, repeating the immersion if, or as, required.

Very nice work John

Great work so far John!

Gnomey said:

Great work so far John!

Click to expand...

I second that !!! Excellent John

Very tidy John. Yes, the antennae are a pain and I'm anticipating spending plenty of time in that area. By the way, in your wheel well opening, the back edge of the opening is actually the edge of the main doors. You might want to consider filing down the extra plastic that our Dragon friends generously provided there.