DesertVlam

For a complete change of pace, I decided to tackle Eduard’s BF 109E instrument panel in ¼ scale. I’m a big fan of Eduard and their precision is certainly Tier One in my book. My goal for this build was to work on my neatness and not rely on ageing to hide my clumsiness. This kit was no different – everything went together really well and the fact that it is ¼ scale meant that I spent much less time squinting through my magnifying headgear than normal! If I have to be critical in a constructive manner, I would suggest to Eduard that the details for attaching the PE handle arms to the plastic handles are poor and a re-think is needed. Eduard’s two PE handle arms have a minute (perhaps a millimeter long) nib that protrudes from the end of the PE. The seemingly solid plastic balls which are the handles have a correspondingly minute hole to receive this nib. You can see these circled joints on the instructions below which I found to be poorly engineered and very weak – no amount of finesse and skill on my part was going to make these joints work, so I needed to come up with another solution. My solution was to cut a trench halfway through the plastic balls, wedge the ends of the PE into the trenches and then “backfill” with CA. This gave the strong joint I needed. Getting the pretty sizable (and thus not insignificant in terms of mass) PE handles to adhere to the slot in the instrument panel was a big ask, given the tiny contact surface. My workaround was to temporarily glue a piece of clothes peg into the slot and next to it to give the handle something to rest against while the CA dried. If that had not worked, I was going to have to either cut through the bottom of the slot through to the back of the instrument panel piece and attach the end of the PE handle from the back with a bigger and stronger joint. As a last resort, I considered re-making the PE handles from styrene sheet, but fortunately didn’t need to. Eduard: something to think about, please. Paints were Tamiya’s XF-63 German Grey and Gunze H12 Flat Black, with other Gunze colours as accents. It was my first time using Mr Color Dark Iron (MC214) and it is amazing stuff when you give it a little polish after the paint dries – incredibly realistic. I made some mistakes and took a few liberties here and there, including omitting colour to some of the instrument bezels – I found lots of reference photos of real instrument panels with plenty of variety in term of colour on some bezels. Some panels looked a little like Christmas trees with bright yellow, blue and red, and others were very stark and monochromatic. I went for the latter. I needed some way to display this, so spent a couple of hours with a sheet of Evergreen 2mm thick styrene sheet and came up with a custom stand, sprayed black from a rattle can. As a final touch and to try and give this one a little personality, I found a period-correct family portrait and re-printed it as a 4" x 5" in ¼ scale, left it in my sweaty pocket for a few hours on a golf course (summer has arrived in the Middle East) and then tacked it to the instrument panel. These aircraft were flown by men from families so I thought it would be believable that one of those men might keep a picture of his family on his “desk” while at work... This is/was a limited run kit, so isn’t that easy to find. If you do come across one, I highly recommend it. Hope you enjoy the photos.

Thanks, All. I really appreciate the positive feedback.

Superb paintwork and wonderful photography - congratulations. I'm sure that took many hundreds of hours!

Now, if only I could figure out how to post my photos from Pinterest into my topic rather than a link...

Greetings, All - this is my debut, so please be gentle! After many years of messing about I decided to get serious and tackle the stash. First up is the Revell 1/32 Stuka which I understand is actually Hasegawa plastic. I used the Eduard Interior & Exterior PE, the Eduard masks, the HGW fabric seat belts and Quickboost resin (exhausts, propellor blades & machine gun barrels). The interior is a mini-project on its own and I discovered that (in this scale), some thicknesses of guitar strings do a very good job of resembling hoses and cables in terms of texture & bendability (new word). The exterior came together reasonably easily, with Vallejo's plastic putty used from time to time to make good my own clumsiness in jointing. I found the seating of the canopy pieces on the fuselage frames quite problematic, and fitting the rear-facing machine guns through the tiny opening while preserving the minute PE gun sights on the ends of the barrels tested the limits of my patience. I have always appreciated the look of the eastern front Luftwaffe aircraft that received field-applied "whitewash" which subsequently wore off. As a tip: this is a great way to ease into model building and painting as you have multiple opportunities to cover your mistakes! These two reference images describe the look I was going for: Because I was going to cover them up anyway, I used some old Xtracrylix paints for the upper surfaces (RLM70 & RLM71) and for the undersides. I find Xtracrylix quite tough to use as it ends up splotchy within 90-odd seconds of use and the only way forward is to regularly remove the airbrush's (Iwata Neo-CN) nozzle cap and clean up. I thinned the paints with Xtracrylix thinners, without which I find the paints unusable. After some hairspray and because I wanted a very fine misted-on mottled whitewash cost on the upper surfaces, I reached for the more reliable Tamiya acrylic flat white which went went on like a dream. Planning ahead saved the day here, as I had done a trial piece before and figured out that I could only do so much of the hairspray/white/wait/scrubbing at a time. The Revell decals scored a solid 3/10 (thick and clunky carrier film) - I will not use these again in a hurry unless there is no alternative. In hindsight, I would self-criticize the build by finding these opportunities for improvement: 1. I should have flattened the tires. 2. I should have got the aerial cable between the canopy and tail on, but I had already weakened the mast part by bending it so wasn't going to risk it. 3. I got the pitch of one the propellor blades wrong, but tried to hide it by orienting the offending blade downwards and therefore making it hopefully less visible. 4. Golden rule for yellow fuselage bands No. 1: never, never, never use the decal, and always paint it on instead, The bigger the decal, the greater the opportunity for disaster. 5. Golden rule for yellow fuselage bands No. 2: never, never, never try to paint yellow over a dark camouflage colour - it won't work unless you do at least 10-15 coats. Instead, pre-spray a white base under the yellow. Simple rules and I broke both of them, then had to take the long road to recover as best I could. The Revell kit is fantastic value for money with lots of detail and it kept me busy for many months. If I had to do it again, I would leave out the Eduard Exterior PE but still use the rest of the after-market goodies I threw at it.