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

[JKim]

More gun work on the Nachtjager... after the mounting boot of the rear gun was cleaned up, I glued the brass barrel into place.

Next, I took a look at the guns in the ventral tray. The G-6 carried four MG151/20 20mm cannon in a ventral tray after experiences with the C-series indicated that the muzzle flash from the nose-mounted weapons were distracting to the pilot at night. Only the long barrels of the cannon are represented in the kit. The barrels are nice and round with hardly any hint of a mold line. But... those darned ejector pin marks! Their is one right at the business end of each barrel.

It would be difficult to remove those marks while keeping the end of barrels circular in cross section so I decided to replace the barrels with brass tubing. The tricky part is that the guns are oriented at a slight angle downward so maintaining that angle for all four guns would be very important. I wanted to use the base of the kit part but there is not much plastic there. I didn't think I could maintain a consistent angle by simply butting up the new brass barrel against the base of the kit part. I decided to use pieces of smaller diameter brass tubing that could be attached more securely into holes drilled into the base part. Once the small tubing is glued into place in the correct orientation, I could simply slide the larger tubing into place.

I did this one barrel at a time so that I could use the remaining barrel as a reference to get the proper angle. The smaller diameter brass tubing is glued into a hole drilled with a micro drill bit.

Then the gun barrel is slid over the mounting tube and secured into place.

The other barrel is then cut off and the installation process is repeated.

The joint is much more secure than if I had tried a simple butt joint.

I placed the guns in the ventral tray to check orientation of the gun barrels. Notice the square ports on the ventral tray.

Since there is no gun body detail included, I was worried about the view through those square openings. I decided to close up the bigger central ports with brass sheeting. I cut a piece of sheet styrene as form guide, first checking to see that it fit into the port with some room to spare.

I folded small strips of brass sheeting over the piece of styrene. I used a PE bending tool to square up the joints and then fit the rectangular brass tubes into the ports. Hopefully, painting the interior of the ventral tray and new ejection ports black will be enough to block the view into empty space.

The Ju88G-6 also featured twin 20mm cannon mounted on the top of the fuselage firing at an oblique angle. The Shrage-Musik installation is provided by the kit as two types of gun barrels... one with a conical flash depressor and one without. Due to the same type of ejector pin marks found on the ventral guns, I decided to replace these with brass tube as well.

I decided to use the same technique even though a simple butt joint with CA glue might have been sufficient here due to the shortness of the barrels.

I also jumped to the engine cowlings to take a look at some possible issues there. The engine cowling halves were glued together (very nice fit BTW!). The kit provides two sets of cowl flaps, open and closed. I've always liked the flared look of open cowl flaps. Doesn't this look very Dora-ish? Not surprising given the shared powerplant.

But using the open flaps will require thinning of the edges and to somehow dress up this view into the back of circular radiator, which is currently plain plastic. I wonder if I could work something up with a compass cutter? If not, there is also the closed flaps.

 

[fubar57]

Great work on the guns John. Watching this build and Andy's has convinced not to buy an -88 in the near future, skill-set isn't up to dealing with those marks yet.



Geo

 

[Airframes]

Nicely done John.
And I think whoever designed the mould tools, with the ejector pins in stupid locations, needs his Rs kicking !!
Maybe I'm too critical, but to go to the trouble, and expense, of making mould tools to produce some very nice detail, and then bung ejector pins wherever they seemed to be convenient, seems to be defeating the object of making such a detailed tool in the first place !

 

[Wurger]

 

[Crimea_River]

Agree with Terry. Fiddly work there John and well done with surgical precision. I don't think I will jump over that bar in those areas.

 

[JKim]

I thought I'd be learning about the pitfalls this Dragon kit from Andy and Sergio but it looks like I'll have to forge ahead on my own... at least for parts of this build. I'm still waiting on the Eduard cockpit enhancements to arrive so I haven't really spent much time on the interior. I'm not necessarily going to use all of the PE set either but I can't really decide until I have the set in my hands.

So I'm jumping around here and there and taking care of the smaller but time consuming details that need to be done. The exhaust dampers replace the traditional exhaust pipes. The fit between the two halves is quite good so I took care in aligning the parts to minimize the joint cleanup. Note... this is BEFORE cleanup.

Two major holes in the fuselage sides. I understand the ones on the top... clear perspex covers for the aerial attachments but these two were a mystery.

The forward one is apparently just a hole to be covered by a plastic plug. Perhaps it is some access cover on an earlier Ju-88 variant? The rear one is another perspex cover. The fit of these plugs was not very exact and since the edges of the plugs were so thin, I was afraid of a weak joint that wouldn't stand up to rigorous sanding. I could see them caving in.

So I stuck pieces of sprue into the holes and welded them in Tamiya Extra Thin. The sprue diameter was too small initially so I put the ends over a flame to bulb them out.

Probably more elegant ways to address this. I thought of a good one AFTER I had welded the two blobs... taping the outside of the holes and then dripping in a liquid putty from the inside. The method I went with required some concentrated shaping.

I used a Dremel to grind down the blobs to surface level and then further shaping with a sanding stick.

This is after fine sanding. There are some minute ridges around the edges of the patches that I'll fix with Mr Surfacer 1200. The forward one will disappear completely but the I'll enhance the rear one by scribing a small circular panel and then applying a smaller circular mask to mimic a clear cover.

The rear landing gear has some really nice detail including a mud guard. The wheel is designed to be trapped between the two halves of the mud guard but that would result in either an awkward painting situation or an unsightly seam on the mud guard.

I had some brass tubing close by from my gun barrel work so I thought I could make a brass axle to allow me to install the wheel after the mud guard has been glued together. I snipped off the mounting pins from the mud guard halves and drilled holes in their place to accept the brass axle.

The tail wheel with the various components in place but not glued together yet.

The wheels have been assembled, cleaned up and given flat spots for the weighted wheel effect. Anyone know what colors would be appropriate for the landing gear wells, struts and wheel hubs? I'm leaning towards RLM 02.

I cut the clear pieces off their sprues to take a closer look and was a bit dismayed to find a very faint line on each of the two main canopies. You can just make out the line on the front canopy piece going vertically from the pilot's side window panel. Under the magnifier, I ascertained that it was not a surface scratch but some other imperfection because the line is on both the exterior and interior surface. An imperfection that I'm going to live with. These will get a dip in Future (and no, that didn't fix the line).

There are a pair of intakes that go on the side of the engine nacelles. More seams to be cleaned up. The leading edges of the intakes will be sharpened as well.

Here is the open cowl flap again. I'm going thin the trailing edges and razor cut the sides of each flap so that they are separate.

A comparison between unaltered flaps and after they have been thinned and separated.

Tedious work that I have to repeat... one of the joys of twin engined aircraft. Experiments with the compass cutter didn't yield any usable results so I don't think I'll be able to replicate the annular radiator face. I'll probably just spray this black and maybe add actuating struts to the flaps as a visual distraction.

The front cowling rings have some nasty sink marks and a weird mold defect along the front edge that will need to be cleaned up.

That's all for now!

 

[Wurger]

 

[Airframes]

Very nice work John.
Those fuselage 'portholes' are also on the Dragon P-1 kit I have, and I guess, being common parts, they're on all of their Ju-88 kits. I'm not sure, but I think they're camera ports for the recce version. I'll need to fill both when i convert my kit back to a A-1 version.
From what I've seen, it looks like all Ju88s had RLM 02 wheel bays, gear legs and inside the bay doors, although in a couple of photos of late models, the latter could be RLM 66.
That mark on the canopy is irritating. It looks like a 'flow line' from the moulding process, which I've experienced on a few kits from different manufacturers. Unfortunately, being 'inside' the plastic, there's nothing that can be done to rectify it.

 

[Crimea_River]

John, go here for wheel wells. 02 and some bare metal would be my bet.

Re the cowl flaps, I'd need to look deeper but it may be possible that there may be sheet metal sections behind the outer flaps so that no gaps would be visible.

 

[Gnomey]

Nice work so far!

 

[Crimea_River]

Jumo 213 from a FW190D showing cowl flaps. Backing flaps in behind. Hard to see in Ju88G-6 pics but I think they are there.

 

[JKim]

I think you are wrong Andy. LOL... that is NOT a Dora cowling... it's a Ju88 engine and cowling, probably a Jumo 211, which is more to your point. Back flaps eh... now I see what you are talking about. I think I saw a picture and made a wrong assumption that the cowl flaps were separated upon extension and had no backing.

But I think I was mistaken. This is the best view from the rear that I could find.

Although I wasted LOTS of time separating those damn things, I could probably restore the back flaps fairly easily. And... I always have the closed flaps as a back-up if that doesn't work out.

Thanks for pointing that out Andy!

 

[JKim]

Happy New Years all! Reporting on a couple of days work on the Nachtjager. The two holes in the side of the fuselage have been button up. Here's the rear one with some scribing work and a mask over it to keep it clear.

A quick spray of primer shows that the panel lines needs to be cleaned up a bit but the patch job looks decent.

The tail wheel area needs some attention. The opening is quite large so I'll have to do some work plugging up the view into the hollow body. There's also some obvious detail that can be added to simulate the hinges that the tailwheel retracts on.

I don't want to overly complicate things so I am preserving the tail wheel attachment point but cutting some of it away to keep it hidden.

I cut notches in the tail wheel base and added pieces of sheet styrene to simulate hinges.

Here's what the new tail wheel attachment point looks like. The tail wheel well isn't done but I'm going to have to think about this area a bit more before I do more work.

Back to the cowl flaps. As Andy pointed out, it appears that the Ju88G had cowling flaps with thin backplates. I should have thinned the flaps but kept the material between the flaps in place. That's water way past the bridge since I've hacked the flaps to the point of no return. Before I run to the closed flaps option, I thought I'd give a stab at restoring the back flaps. I used small squares of thin acetate for this. I also added flap actuating rods of stretched sprue to help cover up that space between the cowl flaps engine nacelle.

I shot it with paint to help visualize what I had done... black misted with RLM02 on the inside and RLM 76 on the outside.

Honestly... I don't really like the result. If it was the only option I had, I'd just go with it but I'm leaning towards ditching the open flaps and just using the closed flaps OR... cutting off the open flaps altogether and replacing them with some more appropriate like thin brass sheet. I'm going to put this aside for now.

Let's try some painting instead. The flame dampers have been cleaned up and are ready for some paint. I gave them a coat of gloss black to start.

Alclad Dark Aluminum is the base color of the dampers.

I highlighted the exhaust ends and the mounting bands with Alclad Steel.

I repeated the highlight but with a slightly broader spray using Alclad Exhaust Manifold.

I burnished the tips of the exhausts with a highly thinned black.

This is where I'd normally stop but I wanted to incorporate some of the techniques that I've been reading about in the AK FAQ book that I've been reading. So using one of the dampers as a test mule, I performed the additional steps of (a) running a highly thinned black paint around the edges of raised detail, (b) highlighting the raised detail (the bands), with a lighter color (Tamiya Metallic Grey) and (c) adding small splotches of a red/brown color with a fine brush to simulate rust.

There is a subtle shape difference in the flame dampers, which I've yet to figure out. All of them have a kink that directs the exhaust end away from the plane. But two of them also have a bend in the vertical plane and I don't know which one goes where. Depending on where they are mounted, I will have a pair of dampers kinked upward or downward.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Airframes]

Good stuff there John.

 

[JKim]

Futzed around today and didn't get much stuff done in the workshop. Mostly thinking and not much doing. I managed to finish painting up the flame dampers and adding the nice photoetched grills onto the fronts.

I think I figured out where the kinked damper goes. Due to the wing dihederal, the inboard dampers are directed slightly downwards to avoid the leading edge of the wing. Here's what the damper looks like mounted on the engine nacelle. I still haven't decided on the cowl flaps.

I'm leaning towards using the closed flaps and have started cleaning those up.

Noticed something strange in the instructions. The "g" note is for a ballast or weight. Is this one of those notorious nose-sitters I've heard about? I'm going to defer to Masters Sergio and Andy to figure out how much weight to add in the back and I'll follow suit.

After doing some pre-fitting with the wings, I followed Andy's lead and glued the tips on prior to gluing the wing halves together. I figure it's easier to do any minor trimming to the ends of the wing tips rather than filling small gaps between wing and tip.

The landing gear mounts have been cleaned up. I've been using a grindstone bit on a Dremel to shave these ejector pin marks down. Only a light touch is needed and I got over-zealous with the first one and needed some putty work to fill my divots.

Another example of the poor engineering choices that Dragon made with respect to these pesky ejector pin marks. This landing gear strut is littered with five small ejector pin marks on one side. If you look at the locating pin orientation, you'll see that the pin marks are on the visible side of the strut.

On the other, non-visible side, clean as a whistle.

 

[rochie]

Nice work John, those cowl flaps look great to me, but its you that has to like them though

 

[Wurger]

 

[Wayne Little]

Looking good!

 

[Airframes]

Good stuff, and I agree with Karl re the cowl flaps. Once the nacelles are in place and painted, and with the props on, I think they'll look just fine.
I've just had a look at my Dragon Ju-88P kit, and although there are lots of ejector pin marks, most don't look as bad as the ones on your kit. But they'll still need work, so I've decided to use the kit for a project for a belly landed Ju-88A1, for a museum, which will reduce some of the correction work, and use the new ICM kit for my BoB project.