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Swiss Bf-109G-6, 1/72, Airfix


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Bf-109G-6 | 1/72 | Airfix

Fliegerkompanie 7 | Swiss Air Force | 1945

 

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I finished this on July 29th, 2019. It is the much maligned Airfix kit. I had to wait for some enamel to cure on my Banshee and decided to give this one a try. I'd wanted to do a Swiss Bf-109 since seeing one as a computer desktop wallpaper, but heard bad things about this kit. After seeing @John D.C. Masters build of this kit and reading how much fun it was, I decided to give it a shot.  It took me about 2 days as there wasn't a lot to it. It was ready to paint within 2 hours.  

 

Much of the criticism of this kit is deserved.  Airfix did something unforgivable by merging the 2 blisters ahead of the cockpit into one, for reasons unknown:

 

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I can understand how this would be enough to put someone off of the kit (and even off of Airfix!), but I decided to fix it with an Xacto knife and some sandpaper prior to gluing the fuselage together and it looks good enough from a distance that I am satisfied. It's very hard to take a picture of, but here's the best I could do:

 

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Other criticisms have to do with accuracy, but most of which didn't concern me because I don't know as much about 109's as other planes. Others were unhappy with the lack of cockpit (just an inaccurate seat), but I found you can't really tell when looking through the tiny frames of the canopy, so I wasn't too concerned about that either.

 

The good points of this kit are that it is well engineered, so I had little seam work before painting and the parts fit together beautifully.  The wings were a bit of a challenge as the wing tops taper in such a way that you can't mate them to the fuselage if you follow the instructions.  I had to kind of gently bend the wing assembly into an anhedral to fit the fuselage in the opening. My suggestion is to glue one wing-top on, glue to the fuselage, then glue the other wing top on.

 

Another good point is the decals: with a strong enough solvent, they settle in nicely and have lots of tiny stencils that really add to the build. My only concern was that the red of the insignia was brighter than the Insignia red they have you paint on the fuselage and rudder. I don't know if that was the way they were in real life, but I suspect not.

 

Painted the aircraft by black basing with Mr. Surfacer 1500 black, and used Mr. Color paints, except for the testors enamel insignia red.

 

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Thanks for looking! Comments, questions and constructive criticism always welcome!

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Edited by opus999
Forgot a picture
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2 hours ago, Roman Schilhart said:

I didn't know how bad the Airfix kit is - but your build proves that, in the hands of a talented modeller, even the poorest kit can turn into an attractive model.

Thanks for the kind words! It's a real shame that the kit is subpar because it was pretty effortless and a lot of fun to put together!

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4 hours ago, Kitchen Modeller said:

Nice work opus - this was actually the first kit I tried when I returned to the hobby last year... the resulting model wasn’t that nice but it was enough to wet my appetite for more😁. Lovely paint job on this.

Thanks! This is only my second attempt at German mottling and I'm really happy with how it turned out.  I had all sorts of trouble with the red finding all the gaps in my "perfect" masking, though! :( 

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Excellent. You've done wonders with the old dog. What I really like is the subtle  'in scale' mottling. Makes it look bigger than 1/72.

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Good job!

I've built the same kit while ago and I also did fix the blisters and I did scratch built an interior for it.

In the end is a presentable kit:

If you want to see how mine turned out, please follow this link: 

https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/234967879-wip-airfix-a02029-me109g-6-finnish-air-force-172/

Cheers

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