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

Looks great so far John!

Very nice John. You're leaving me in the dust here!

Looking good now John!

Thanks guys! After work yesterday, I used Terry's suggestion and filled in the canopy gap with some White Glue. It's a subtle difference but there is no longer a see through crack between the two canopy pieces.



With some time on my hands as the wing root putty dries, I went about assembling the Master brass FuG220 antenna arrays. The stalks and cross pieces are all individual pieces and each unit needs to be assembled. Soldering is recommended but I'm in no way prepared to go that route so I had to do this with CA glue. I was hoping that CA glue at the actual joint plus the two tiny braces would be sufficient to hold these things together.


I figured out that the easiest way to put these things together to ensure alignment was to lay the two vertical cross pieces on the table, apply a dab of glue on the middle of each cross piece and then place the horizontal stalk on top. I drew lines on my table and used a piece of Tamiya tape to hold the cross pieces in place. After the CA glue had set, I could gently remove the array unit from the tape and then drop in the braces. It was almost impossible to get the little braces in perfectly straight but I didn't really care as long as they were in contact with both the horizontal stalk and vertical cross piece. For additional strength, I applied another dab of CA glue at each joint.


My mini production line made pretty quick work of the antenna assembly and I'm glad that this worked out well. Obviously the brass units are finer and more to scale than the kit parts but the kit parts are fairly fine themselves. So much so that they are prone to breakage and one would be advised to use great care in cutting these off the sprues and cleaning them up. My kit came with six antenna arrays and only four of them were extracted from the sprues intact. More breakage may have occurred if I had attempted to trim the sprue gates off each one.


The assembled antenna arrays were given a spray of Mr Surfacer 1000 as a primer coat and then set aside for future painting. The Master set includes five antenna arrays, which is exactly the amount the Ju88 needs (four in the front and one trailing from the tail).


The brass tube-enhanced cannons were painted using Alclad Steel over a gloss black base. Alclad Airframe Aluminum was misted over the barrels to lighten them up a bit as the Steel color was a bit too dark for my tastes. I then sprayed the tips of the barrels with a highly thinned black.


I'm very close to the painting stage but I'm not quite there yet. Still need to do some minor filling at the wing roots. I'll probably be able to start painting in a couple of days.

Good stuff.

All looking good John

I'm close enough to camo painting that I've decided to attach the ventral cannon tub. I'm not going to mask the cannon barrels so I'll have to repaint them afterwards. The barrels point slightly downward and look fairly parallel to each other so the brass barrel modification seems to have worked ok.



All of the tail surfaces have been added. The top edge of the rudder was a tad too high so I had to trim it down.


A minor detail: I'm going to replace the kit-supplied circular antenna with one cut from a aluminum soda can.


The radar arrays have been painted and surprise, surprise... I did not have any of the elements break off on me during masking or unmasking. The vertical elements were painted black while the horizontal elements were painted dark grey just to give the array a little visual contrast. The lower elements were painted red and white. The one off the tail was painted in RLM 76. I'll probably touch up that one to break up that continuous red section in the middle of the trailing array.


The wheel wells and bottom cockpit hatch have been stuffed with tissue paper. Masking these types of openings has always been a pain in the past until I started doing the tissue paper thing. I get a wad of tissue and start stuffing it into the opening but not completely. While the paper is still bulging out of the opening, I'll use a paint brush dipped in water and start dabbing the tissue paper. This will allow more compression and the tissue becomes very easy to manage. I'll finish pushing the paper to the edges of the opening with a toothpick. You can get a surprisingly nice edge without using adhesives. The water will soon dry, leaving the paper stiff and stuck in place.


I think I've primered the trouble seems enough to go straight into preshading. Painting of the Nachtjager is coming up next!

Like it!

Great work so far John!

Very cool. Looking forward to the paint

Thank you gents! A short update when it comes to pictures but this covers two of my fairly long painting sessions. The first one was pre-shading the panel lines. It's interesting... there are some that really like to emphasize the panel lines in their work while others dislike the technique intensely. I rather like the technique but tend to keep it on the subtle side once the camo colors go on.



A second, more lengthy, session was needed to do my secondary preshading, which is to paint random wiggles all over the aircraft to help give the overlying camo colors some visual depth. This technique works better with solid colors (such as most aircraft bottoms) and low contrast camo patterns. High contrast patterns tend to obliterate the effect. I'm not sure if the RLM 75/76 mottle will crush the preshading or not but I'll find out. Both of the longer cannon barrels in the ventral tray got knocked loose by the airbrush cup during painting so I'll have to re-secure them afterwards.





I don't have any other pictures of the camo pattern on 2Z+AW besides the one that was posted in Andy's thread.


From that limited view, the mottle seems to be larger, well-defined mottles spaced closely together with no mottling on the tail. I'm aware of Chris Wauchop's build of 2Z+AW but I don't want to mimic his work, as beautiful as it is, so I'll try and put my own stamp on it.

Great work John. I love those antena

Moving right along John.

Great job John

Didn't get as far as I wanted. The Ju88 is signficantly bigger than any single engine fighter that I've worked on so far. Getting a layer of RLM 76 over the preshading took me all of my free time on Sunday.





Mottling will be next. I tried some freehand mottling on a test piece. Paint consistency and edge control with the Gunze RLM 75 is good but I have a hard time getting good shapes doing it freehand. I may do the watercolor pencil trick that I did on the Toryu just to "train" my eye.

This is going to be a stunner when finished!