The Dragon (1/72 Eduard Fw190 A-8)

[keefr22]

What a great post Duncan, that brought back some childhood memories for me too...although our battlefields were a disused quarry & the dumping ground for a century of industrial waste from Swansea's copper industry. We always wondered why the puddles were such a funny colour...!! Still quite a few momentos of Swansea's blitz about too...

Russet - that's an apple. And a potato too...!!

So, what was this thread about? Oh yes, German fighters being shot down by Spitfires & Tempests. Your target is coming along very nicely PC!

Keith

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Great post, Duncan. I was born just over 14 years after the end of the War, so the war was just over 20 years gone by the time I really started devouring books like Reach For The Sky and The Dam Busters. 20 years is nothing - I left the RN 19 years ago this August, & in many ways it doesn't seem long ago at all.

My Dad was 21 at the end of the war (he was de-mobbed a year later). He never - and I mean never - talked about it when I was a kid; I knew he'd flown in the Navy, and that was about it. I might have known he flew in Swordfish, I guess. I hadn't even really made the connection that my Uncle Ted (who married Dad's sister in 1949) had been his pilot.

It was only when I came home from "my" war in 1982 that he opened up. I was about the same age as he'd been in 1945. Like many young people immediately after a war, I came home in "WTF; never again" mode, and I wrote him a letter about it during the 3 weeks it took us to sail home. A few weeks later we went to the pub and he told me about him & Ted walking round & round the flight deck of HMS Queen (escort carrier in which his squadron - 810 - had embarked their Barracudas ready to sail to the Far East). This was on or around VJ night (they were at anchor in the Clyde), and he told me they'd had exactly the same thoughts as me 37 years before. He advised me to give it 6 months, and to leave the RN only if I still felt the same then. He was dead right.

It was only after that conversation that this whole relative time thing registered with me. WW2 seemed impossibly long ago for me as a boy.... but my Dad was 35 when I was born, and I'm 56 now... He must have been 57 when we were talking post-Falklands.

Like Duncan, there were people around who I didn't realise at the time were damaged by the war. There was a lady at my prep school (I was a cathedral chorister as a kid, so went away to school when I was 7) called Mrs Craig. We thought she was about a million years old, but she was probably actually in her 50s. We never saw a Mr Craig, and it was only about 15 years later that I realised that the photo of the young man in Naval uniform on her mantelpiece was not her son (as I'd assumed at the time), but her husband. I did some digging and found that he was killed off Crete in 1941, aged 22.

I don't know how much of my interest in aviation and/or the Navy came from Dad. I am the youngest of 4 sons, and certainly none of the other 3 were remotely interested in this stuff; they were all train-mad as kids (still are in one case!), but for me it was always ships & aircraft. I guess there must have been some influence, but it was passive rather than active. Dad could answer a little boy's questions, but he never volunteered the information.

As my own flying career progressed I learned a lot from him - but even then I had to ask; he'd never talk about it spontaneously. Now, of course, I regret not wringing his memory dry (he died in 1999), but when you're young you always think there will be plenty of time. If anything I regret not asking Uncle Ted even more, but he died far too young, when I was still a teenager, so never knew that I followed him into a Naval cockpit. Before he crewed up with Dad he'd won a DFM as a Petty Officer pilot, sharing in a U Boat kill from a Swordfish. But I only found that out years after he died.

Winston will make his own mind up, but when he's old enough don't hold back about why you love this stuff. It's a key part of you, his Dad, and you don't want him posting on Britmodeller 2050 about how his Dad knew shed loads about all this stuff, but he never realised until after he'd gone.

Edited April 17, 2016 by Ex-FAAWAFU

[amblypygid]

Winston will make his own mind up, but when he's old enough don't hold back about why you love this stuff. It's a key part of you, his Dad, and you don't want him posting on Britmodeller 2050 about how his Dad knew shed loads about all this stuff, but he never realised until after he'd gone.

That pretty much nails it. My parents (and my friends' parents) were all to young to remember the war, though my mate's mother can remember how hungry she was in Holland in 1944-45. But their parents never opened up about the war; even my grandfather, who was ground crew in Bomber Command, didn't talk about it to anyone other than me. Everyone was rather surprised to discover (from his autobiography) that my mother's uncle was in command of landing craft off Omaha Beach. He felt that warranted one sentence in his book of life. I had a wonderful conversation with one of his friends, who had served in Burma with a mountain artillery battery. At the end he said that he wasn't traumatised by what he'd seen, but he'd never spoken to anyone else about it because he didn't think anyone was interested.

[Procopius]

A lot of lovely, thoughtful posts above, which I will address, but I just want to say: while this is mostly a good kit, the design of the IPs and the cockpit coaming is #^$^ing garbage. Absolutely awful. I have almost stomped this into smithereens in frustration. Who thought this was a good idea?

[Blogs On]

Deep breath, count to ten, then beat seven bells of ***t out of it! :-)

[Procopius]

And everything was going so well, too.

Just when I was starting to think this was actually a really great kit, great enough even to make me more or less want to build Fw190s (I was even looking up Fw190F-8s to see if one could be built from it), everything wrong with the kit began to accumulate into one great Hell-mass and then roll towards me, ponderously first, but with increasing speed.

So, first off, the IP. As you know, the Fw190 has two instrument panels one above and slightly forward of the other; this upper IP mounts the Revi 16 gunsight and is covered by a sort of coaming with a hole in it to allow the gunsight to project up through it. The kit includes three different versions of the upper IP: a blank plastic one (for a decal), a raised detail plastic one, or (because this is Eduard) a photoetch one. None of them really fit for me. I ended up using the plastic one with raised detail after wrecking the PE one and losing the smooth one -- I was unable to get the coaming to rest properly on ANY of these. After much trying and more swearing (I was really furious, so angry that the good mood I had been in was temporarily spoilt), I made it work.

I lost the gunsight and I didn't even bother painting the upper IP in the end. Whatever. I don't care. If you try and look in the cockpit, I'll crush your skull with my Valiant, it has about a kilo of noseweight.

Then it was time to move on:

The nose of the kit was designed by a Swiss watchmaker strung out on crack cocaine. No sane person would think this is an appropriate number of joins for a circular, heavily detailed area. Everything almost fits with incredible precision. Almost. And almost means there are gaps. The nose has not two points of contact (IE wings to fuselage, left/right fuselage to each other), but an upper cowl, the cowl sides (part of the respective fuselages), the lower cowl (part of the wing), and the two-part collector ring. More on the last later.

It's a very tight fit, and because of the shape of the area around the nose and the large number of parts, difficult to clamp together to eliminate seams. Mine is very gappy and will look like crap.

I also think, though I forgot to get a photo of it on the aircraft, that the collector ring's step is a little exaggerated in plastic compared to the real thing.

Anyway, I started to assemble the after canopy, which has the headrest as a two-piece assembly with three points of attachment inside the after canopy, maximizing the possibility of righteously buggering it up. I took a different route -- the kit has two canopies for each canopy type (the original type and the later blown one), open and closed, and somehow I picked the open canopy and did everything to it. So I have to start over there. So much for preparation.

So all in all, quite frustrating. The coaming is juuuust slightly too narrow to rest on the ledges of the fuselage sides, and it has to have the gunsight come through the hole, and fit atop the upper IP cleanly, and keep in mind it's added several steps AFTER the IP and gunsight. Why not make assembled the upper IP/sight/coaming one step and then add them all to the fuselage collectively? Maybe if I liked the type more, it would all bother me less. But everything almost fits perfectly, which is more frustrating than a bad old AZ kit that needs lots of filling: when it almost fits, I feel like I've screwed up somewhere.

Ex-FAAWAFAU, Duncan, your lovely posts reminded me of this passage from Achtung Schweinhund!, by Harry Pearson:

"It says something about the difference between our two nations that the American comics were in colour while ours were in black and white. More than that, though, the nature of the heroes differed wildly. The American kids had Spiderman, Daredevil, Batman, and Thor. British kids had the Second World War. Burma and the Western Desert were our Gotham and Metropolis. The men who saved our world didn't have extraordinary powers, fancy gadgets, or bizarre costumes (though Keith's granddad sometimes wore his old jungle hat when he pruned the roses and Mr Maynard from down the road who'd help sink the Tirpitz owned a colour telly)."

This gets at the heart of why I build models or read or do anything: there is a power to the act of remembering. I couldn't even put it into words, I don't think, but some things I feel with electric clarity (I know that's a mixed metaphor) I spent an hour one night memorizing the names of Colin Grazier and Tony Fasson of HMS Petard, drowned while retrieving the Enigma codebooks from a U-Boat in 1942. What possible purpose does this serve? I don't know, I just know that I don't want to forget.

Obligatory Winston photo:

[CedB]

Something woke me early this morning and now I realise it was the cries of a fellow modeller in pain...

Egbert I think the photos show you've overcome any problems with the kit - if not the frustrations. Certainly I can't see a 'very gappy' nose and the engine and guns look great too.

Chin up that man!

Winnie does look cute in that photo - great T-shirt

The birds are now singing their heads off in what I used to enjoy until I read Douglas Adams. Now I know they're probably shouting to each other about good places to find food and any tricky wind currents in the vicinity. Like your Dragon, it's all about perspective

[Procopius]

Being married to an avid bird-watcher (and unfortunately, owner), all the romance is taken out of birdsong for me: I now know they're all just making incredibly obscene propositions to each other.

[Stew Dapple]

Yes, but... but... well I can't help but feel that you are struggling a little and I really do sympathise... but it does actually look good from here, it looks like a technically engaging puzzle but it looks like it should be fun. Is it not fun?

Being married to an avid bird-watcher (and unfortunately, owner), all the romance is taken out of birdsong for me: I now know they're all just making incredibly obscene propositions to each other.

I think I might actually like them a bit more now.

Morning Ced old chap, how's things?

Cheers,

Stew

[Grey Beema]

I am sure we all see faults in our own work that others do not see. This is just a cowling that you think doesn't fit but when I look at the photos it looks to fit fine, even under the all seeing eye of the camera. It really is a fine job. You will never be totally satisfied with it but none of us ever are, which is why skills evolve and techniques improve (well in most cases, I still have hammer and nails).

I do agree with you about the heart of modelling. I enjoy the research. I like to do a specific persons aeroplane, to learn about the person and then build the model to support that learning. Then, when someone comes and looks in the cabinet in the cave, I can bore them to death with all the facts and figures about that specific aeroplane..

I think it's a great build, keep going, finish it out.

[keefr22]

Whatever. I don't care. If you try and look in the cockpit, I'll crush your skull with my Valiant, it has about a kilo of noseweight.

That made I laff....!!

But - gaps? What gaps? All I can see are very slightly wide panel lines that the merest smidgin of somethin like Pertfect Plastic Putty smeared in & wiped off will cure. Other than that it's looking great. For a target....!!

And anyway, you can see by Winston's face that he's thinking 'gaps wil be the last thing on his mind when my Spitfire ges behind him....!!' And however gloomy plastic Focke Wulf's may make you feel, that smile must surely take it all away...?!

Keith

[CedB]

Well, there you go PC, consensus is 'good job'!

Morning Ced old chap, how's things?

Cheers,

Stew

Hi Stew! Fine thanks, and I hope you are too. I'm over here!

[Duncan B]

The engine cowling looks fine, the real thing wasn't exactly a marvel of smoothed out joints. I've only built the one Eduard Fw190 and that was the 1/48 Dora however there are a couple of strange similarities in that I had exactly the same problems fitting the IP, gunsight and cockpit cowl. The latter didn't fit across the fuselage halves as you'd expect but just sort of floated in mid air balanced on top of the ill fitting IP, I though it was just something I'd done.

I have read that the little butcher suffers from the etched IP being too big for the slot it's supposed to fit into and requires either it trimming or the slot increasing.

Wee PC's a real cute looking fella but I'm not fooled I've seen that Devil inspired look before on my own 1:1 scale production. You'll be happy to know that the torment you're probably being put through by the wee fella only gets worse as time passes by but it will alter so you are continually kept off balance (err em that isn't really helpful is it?). Mine's off to Uni in September so it'll be financial torment I'll be suffering from.

Duncan B

[CedB]

That reminds me - teething babies generate a lot of, er, saliva so holding them at the angle shown in your photo can be a bit dangerous, but not as dangerous as Mum's reaction when you throw him around to try to avoid the dribble.

Just take it like a man!

[Fritag]

Typically great thread PC

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

I'm with Duncan on the cowling. All of us tend to get obsessed with making every join utterly seamless in our models, but occasionally forget that the fit on the originals was awful in places. To my eyes it looks fine (though I accept that this was only after a Procopian beating of epic proportions to get it to fit at all).

Love that Harry Pearsn quote! My Dad certainly used to prune the roses in his old flying boots, and apparently (before my time) his flying jacket perished after several years' use trying to protect the engine of the knackered old Riley that was his first car. The fact that he was 6" shorter than me so none of this would have fitted me in no way reduces my angst. I did manage to get my Uncle's RN greatcoat, an Arctic convoys veteran. Utterly impervious to wind of any sort; an amazing garment!

[Procopius]

That reminds me - teething babies generate a lot of, er, saliva so holding them at the angle shown in your photo can be a bit dangerous, but not as dangerous as Mum's reaction when you throw him around to try to avoid the dribble.

Winston now gives kisses! Gross, open mouthed, slobbery kisses, but kisses nonetheless. It is weirdly affecting -- I think I may have blurted out that he was a "little miracle" when he gave me one after I got home yesterday. Not bad for six and a half months. He also now has a single mighty tooth, jutting like a menhir from his lower gums. It is very sharp, and I know, because he got my whole ear in his mouth (and I have huge ears that stick out like Martin Clunes', this would be an impressive feat for an adult) and tried to tear it off and masticate it.

(I am home watching him because my mother has taken ill, and he just woke up. More later.)

[Tomoshenko]

Nice post Mr P. Yes Duncan's and Ex-FAAWAFAU's posts struck a cord with me. Being born in 1964, growing up nearly all the grown ups I knew and older generation types had experienced the war first hand. My mum as a little girl, living in Digbeth, Birmingham returned to her home after spending the night in a bomb shelter, only to find a crater and a pile of rubble in its place! Digbeth Institute was the home for her and her brothers and sisters for some time afterwards - Digbeth Institute is now a trendy club come gig venue! On my paternal side my grandfather spent his time in the desert and part of the occupational force in Hamburg. When I was older he would speak of his experiences and some of the horrors he witnessed. They were in guarded tones, never boastful or in pride. They would never be volunteered, I would always have to ask. I think he told me these things because he knew I valued history, things that he never told my father about. As kids me and my mates would often play "British and Germans" having been brought up on a diet of WW2 movies. It seems bizarre now that such subject matter could be treated as a game, but as I say we were innocent kids and meant no harm.

Right, the build. It's coming on nice, and as the others say, don't get too fussed about any flaws. I must say though it is a triffle over engineered. I sometimes think some kit designers come up with convoluted design sequences as a matter of ego. Anyroad keep it coming.

[rob85]

I find the post from you chaps so intriguing, I have had very little of that in my life. All I had was a few my grandad's friends (most a fair bit older than him) who used to tell me little bits when I would see them (normally in a random pub). One had been shot on Dunkirk beach.... He was rather flippant about telling me it was while being strafed by aircraft.... My grandad always wore a big great coat which was very tatty, turned out it was this chaps and it was the one he was shot in. They used to laugh hard at me asking questions as they thought it was all not very interesting.... Really wish I had the opportunity to talk to them again.

Your posts are so interesting and it's such a shame that generation is disappearing as there is a lot my and others after can learn from them. (God isn't history ace! )

Any how the 190 is really cracking on mr p and looking excellent! I would be in now way disappointed with that work, the kit looks detailed but not for the faint hearted.

Winston is looking such a happy and cute little guy! As for the being interested in your hobby, my two are and they love hear about history! The girl asked for the 'warby' story again tonight (Adrian warburton on Malta) all I have done is be really open about all I do with it and make it fun when they inevitably asked! You always pick up stuff from the rents without knowing, that's why I have such a soft spot for folk music, Morris dancing and drink😃

Rob

Edited April 20, 2016 by rob85

[Fritag]

Yes Duncan's and Ex-FAAWAFAU's posts struck a cord with me. Being born in 1964, growing up nearly all the grown ups I knew and older generation types had experienced the war first hand.

That goes for me too - born in 63. My folks lived in Southend - on the Thames Estuary - and near to Rochford Airport (as it was in the early years of WW2), which was a satellite station for Hornchurch and my Dad remembers as a youngster seeing the Spitfires and Hurricanes taking off and landing during the BofB - and seeing the contrails of the battle and he also remembers having spent nights in air raid shelters.

One of my mum's aunties was apparently the family 'disgrace' because of her reputation for consorting with the fighter pilots.........(that's the closet I get to having a fighter pilot in the family )

There were a lot of surviving anti-aircraft 'pill boxes' in the fields around Southend when I was growing up and we gravitated to them for our games of soldiers etc.

One of my grandfathers had been in the Territorial Army before WW2 and he was sent to France and then evacuated from Dunkirk - and back in France again a day or two after D-Day; the other was in the Merchant Navy and was torpedoed on more than one occasion on the North Atlantic runs - he survived the war but had a lot of lung problems and died when I was quite young - the family always blamed his ill health on the time he spent in the water after being torpedoed and more specifically the quantity of oil and sea water he swallowed.

Neither of them would voluntarily talk about the war - but I wish now I'd pressed them harder because I have only the odd anecdote to remember them by. My Army grandfather was in the REME after D-Day and would ride around just behind the front line on a motor bike to keep the infantry communication equipment maintained. He received the personal attention of a strafing German fighter on one occasion and remembered the shell strikes hitting the road all around him as he rode his motorbike rapidly into the nearest ditch. He also remembered getting lost on one occasion and suddenly getting a horrible feeling that he'd gone through the British front lines. He stopped, turned around and rode back the way he came and quickly reached some British Infantry troops who nonchalantly said that they'd seen him pass through the front line and thought he might be lost...........I got the impression that he was rather unimpressed that they hadn't seen fit to warn or stop him - and I've sometimes wondered if, as battle hardened infantry troops, they really just didn't care awfully much what would happen to a REME rider 'stupid' enough to ride straight into the German front lines. On the other hand perhaps it's more likely that he just took them rather by surprise as he motored past

Edited April 21, 2016 by Fritag

[keefr22]

One of my mum's aunties was apparently the family 'disgrace' because of her reputation for consorting with the fighter pilots........

'Consorting', what a lovely WW2 era word, you don't hear it nearly often enough in conversation these days!

[Procopius]

I'm staying home the remainder of the week to watch Winston, which isn't terrible, though I have to use sick leave time (and remember, in the USA, we get far less sick and vacation leave) and still do my job on top of it, as I have no backup.

Also, Winston just woke up.

So, quickly:

Trying to create the discolouration I've seen on some exhaust panels of real aircraft with a mix of Alclads:

[rob85]

That's rather effective! Nice work. Good luck with the little man

Rob

[CedB]

That looks great PC, cool!

[TheBaron]

Nice work on that metallicizing.