Eduard 1/72 FW190 A-5

[SaminCam]

I did pretty well for Christmas (we modellers are easy to buy gifts for!) and had two lovely looking 1/72 Eduard models waiting under the tree!

 

 

Having just about finished an old Lanc I decided to take on the FW190 A-5 first to "cleanse my pallet" and get something made relatively quickly. The kit comes with photo etch and masks for the canopy so I'll be building it straight out of the box. I'm still pondering which scheme to go for and will save that decision until she's closed up and wings are on. 

 

Progress so far is to get the cockpit together. I sprayed a coat of rlm66 and then added the pe with super glue, so far so good and everything fits beautifully. Next step is a coat of varnish then a bit of weathering. Thanks for looking!

 

 

[Kitchen Modeller]

Nice work on the office - these eduard 1/72 kits are very nice. There some really nice schemes with this kit - my favorite is the Hermann Graf one from the box art - but that rose petal nose art might be tricky with the decals... 

[SaminCam]

Evening all, as well as getting photos taken of the Lancaster this weekend I managed to make some progress on the FW190:

 

 

 

 

 

First I got the front of the engine together and painted it with Tamiya acrylics and Alclad Polished Al. The engine and cockpit were then weathered with some drybrushing and black and brown washes. There's nothing fancy here as not much will be seen but I'm pleased with the "neat and tidy" look. The fuselage was sealed up without any dramas and then I painted and assembled the wheel wells. These are quite fiddly and took a fair bit of dry fitting before I came up with the best order to put them together. The fit is very precise and I've decided to glue the lower wing half on to the fuselage before adding the upper wings (the instructions would have you do it the other way around). So far everything fits really well and I think doing it in this order will help to minimise any gaps at the wing root - we shall see! Wheel well weathering and more assembly are next, will try and keep things ticking along, thanks for looking! Sam   

 

[SaminCam]

Made some progress with the fw190 this week. First off, I got most of the assembly done: top of wings went on, tail planes, flaps, rudder, panels on top of the nose and the front of the engine cowling. It's all very well engineered with sprue gates in sensible places so cleaning up is easy and a good fit between all the parts. The only slight difficulty I had was getting the wing spar parts, which you can see in the wheel bay, to fit - I tried with the PE bits first but they wouldn't allow the top and bottom of the wing to fit properly - not quite sure what I did wrong... In the end I used the plastic parts, modified with small holes drilled through them, and they look fine.

 

 

One of the great things about this kit is that it almost comes with two aircraft! The model on the right has the cockpit and engine installed and on the left is a paint mule made from the spare parts in the kit. When I took this picture, I had sprayed the starboard wing with a gloss black base while the other side had a matt Tamiya rubber black base coat. Over these I sprayed Alclad Aluminium and you can see the difference in the photo: with the matt undercoat it came out lighter and much less reflective while the gloss undercoat gives a much shinier, metallic finish.   

 

 

The reason for the foray into NMF was that I wanted to mess around with the hairspray chipping effect. The metal finish was sealed with a few thin coats of aquagloss and I then sprayed on my wife's best tresemme salon finish hairspray. This was done straight from the can but next time I'll decant some out and spray with the airbrush to get more control and to avoid spattering. I left this to dry for half a day or so and then went about preshading and painting the cammo pattern as I normally would. I was worried that with all these coats some surface detail would be lost but in they end they are all thin enough for it not to be a problem. Once all this had dried I got an old, stubby brush which I use for drybrushing and with water rubbed away at some panel lines and raised features on the wings. I found that after about 30seconds the top coat suddenly starts to chip and the metallic undercoat shows through. You can see the result in the photograph below. For a first try I'm pleased with the effect, it looks much more realistic than my efforts painting chips on with a fine brush. I won't do as much on the real model either, photos of fw190s from the war aren't as distressed as this and I'm going to make myself show some restraint! Interestingly, the more matt aluminium undercoat looks much more effective than the shiny undercoat. I'm going to have another practice on the underside of the mule, there are a few other tricks I want to try out, and then I'll get back to the real thing.

 

Any thoughts or tips greatly appreciated, I'm sure lots of you have tried out this technique at some point? Thanks for looking!  

 

 

 

 

 

[neil5208]

Good work on your paint mule, effective result but you can order the small parts overtrees from eduard and make a second Fw190 for peanuts.

[SaminCam]

10 minutes ago, neil5208 said:

Good work on your paint mule, effective result but you can order the small parts overtrees from eduard and make a second Fw190 for peanuts.

Thanks Neil, that's a great tip, surprised i haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere - are there other Eduard kits you can do this with?

Edited January 26, 2020 by SaminCam
Typo

[neil5208]

I think its just the FW190 kits and only a few, the A5 you have and the Grunherz boxing as that has 4 wings/bodies. I got that and 2 small parts overtrees so I can make 4 out of 6 of the schemes in the box.

[Walter]

8 hours ago, SaminCam said:

Made some progress with the fw190 this week. First off, I got most of the assembly done: top of wings went on, tail planes, flaps, rudder, panels on top of the nose and the front of the engine cowling. It's all very well engineered with sprue gates in sensible places so cleaning up is easy and a good fit between all the parts. The only slight difficulty I had was getting the wing spar parts, which you can see in the wheel bay, to fit - I tried with the PE bits first but they wouldn't allow the top and bottom of the wing to fit properly - not quite sure what I did wrong... In the end I used the plastic parts, modified with small holes drilled through them, and they look fine.

 

 

One of the great things about this kit is that it almost comes with two aircraft! The model on the right has the cockpit and engine installed and on the left is a paint mule made from the spare parts in the kit. When I took this picture, I had sprayed the starboard wing with a gloss black base while the other side had a matt Tamiya rubber black base coat. Over these I sprayed Alclad Aluminium and you can see the difference in the photo: with the matt undercoat it came out lighter and much less reflective while the gloss undercoat gives a much shinier, metallic finish.   

 

 

The reason for the foray into NMF was that I wanted to mess around with the hairspray chipping effect. The metal finish was sealed with a few thin coats of aquagloss and I then sprayed on my wife's best tresemme salon finish hairspray. This was done straight from the can but next time I'll decant some out and spray with the airbrush to get more control and to avoid spattering. I left this to dry for half a day or so and then went about preshading and painting the cammo pattern as I normally would. I was worried that with all these coats some surface detail would be lost but in they end they are all thin enough for it not to be a problem. Once all this had dried I got an old, stubby brush which I use for drybrushing and with water rubbed away at some panel lines and raised features on the wings. I found that after about 30seconds the top coat suddenly starts to chip and the metallic undercoat shows through. You can see the result in the photograph below. For a first try I'm pleased with the effect, it looks much more realistic than my efforts painting chips on with a fine brush. I won't do as much on the real model either, photos of fw190s from the war aren't as distressed as this and I'm going to make myself show some restraint! Interestingly, the more matt aluminium undercoat looks much more effective than the shiny undercoat. I'm going to have another practice on the underside of the mule, there are a few other tricks I want to try out, and then I'll get back to the real thing.

 

Any thoughts or tips greatly appreciated, I'm sure lots of you have tried out this technique at some point? Thanks for looking!  

 

 

 

 

 

Nice work on the chipping I've just started to experiment with this technique too

[SaminCam]

Evening all, only a bit of progress on the FW190 over the last few weeks as I've been really busy at work and with life in general. The photo below shows where I've got to this afternoon with the "real" model, rather than the paint mule I was testing the chipping effect on. In the end I'm going to have the canopy open but it is currently tacked on with PVA to make things easier to paint. I also masked up the wheel bays and then gave it a shot with Tamiya rubber black as a base coat. Good news is that the seams don't need any more work (only a smidge of filler and sanding required anyway) and its now looking suitably mean in the black all over colour scheme. Next steps will be a little bit of aluminium on the leading edges, wing roots, and a few panels where I'm going to try and do some hairspray chipping. Thanks for looking!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

[SaminCam]

Evening all, next step was to spray alclad aluminium on the bits of the model i want to chip: leading edges, intake, wing roots, cockpit edge and a panel or two. This was sealed in with a gloss coat and once this had properly dried i airbrushed the hairspray on to the shiny bits. For the leading edges and intake cowling I'm using a slightly different technique - I've carefully dabbed on a little bit of maskol with some packaging foam and when rubbed off later will leave bits of exposed metal.

 

 

This evening I've settled in for an hour or two and built up the preshading. For this i like to fill in the panels with lots of light grey squiggles which hopefully gets some texture into the final finish as well as lowlighting panel lines and rivets. Next up ill get some light blue/grey on the underside...

 

 

 

[SaminCam]

Got a little more done last night in topping up the preshade with some white squiggles. I then sprayed a thin coat of the white on the areas which will get a blast of yellow. Picture shows masking nearly complete for the yellow and hopefully I'll be able to get some colour on over the weekend. 

 

 

 

[SaminCam]

Got the yellow painted this morning and next I'll start with the light blue/grey on the undersides and tail. Hopefully have some more to show later today (windy and wet is perfect modelling weather...!) 

 

 

 

 

[SaminCam]

I got a bit more done this afternoon between painting 1:1 window frames and skirting boards... First I sprayed a few thin coats of Mr Color RLM76 thinned with Mr Color Levelling Thinner - don't use the Tamiya x20a, they are not friends! Pretty happy with that and should look good with a bit of oil paint weathering and highlights

 

 

Next I've started to paint RLM 71 on the upper surfaces. I'm doing this freehand with a heavily thinned mix so that the different colours can be sort of mottled together, it'll need another thin coat or two to calm the pre-shading down. It's going ok so far I think but will have a better idea how it'll look once I've laid some RLM70 black green down. Thanks for looking! Sam

 

[SaminCam]

Ok, got the RLM70 black green sprayed and another coat of RLM71 down so she's starting to get there. Overall pretty happy with how its looking - I like the blurred line between the light under and dark upper colours but I've found that the downside to freehand spraying is that you have to get close to the surface to get a decent distinction between the colours. This means it's much harder to add thin layers and preserve the shading from the pre-shade. If I was doing this again I would perhaps use blue-tac to mask between the green colours and then freehand the transition to the underside colours. Next I've got to add some mottles to the tail and try to get the chipping to work. Both of these are new techniques for me so lots of opportunity for things to go wrong! Cheers, Sam

 

 

 

[almac]

Nice work so far. I’ve built this kit and it goes together without too much hassle. I found the landing gear fit to be a bit vague with only shallow recesses which for me made for a fragile undercarriage. Your paint job looks good. I’ve found freehand painting on the fuselage and Blutac masking on the wings worked best for me with FW 190 camo.

 

Cheers Allan 

[Bangor Lad]

I have one of these which I'm aiming to start on in the not too distant future.

 

Really enjoying your thread and looking forward to seeing her finished.

 

Cheers

[SaminCam]

21 hours ago, almac said:

Nice work so far. I’ve built this kit and it goes together without too much hassle. I found the landing gear fit to be a bit vague with only shallow recesses which for me made for a fragile undercarriage. Your paint job looks good. I’ve found freehand painting on the fuselage and Blutac masking on the wings worked best for me with FW 190 camo.

 

Cheers Allan 

Thanks Allan, I'll watch out for the landing gear - not too far off now. 

 

I made my first real foray into hairspray chipping and Luftwaffe mottling last night and it's looking ok! I scrubbed away with an old brush at the wing root and intake cowling and got a nice effect - I'm trying not to overdo it so will leave it there. I also tried to chip away around the cockpit edge but paint wouldn't really budge - I ended up respraying with green because it looked a bit of a mess...  this was maybe because there were too many layers of paint built up on the hairspray in this region, the wing root and cowling only had one coat. 

 

 

 

I've been practicing mottling every time I've had some spare paint in the airbrush and felt like I've got some control so I went for it on the tail:

 

 

Happy with that! This was done with Mr Color thinned about 70:30 with MCLT and sprayed from close up with a low pressure through smallest nozzle (0.2 I think?). One trick I did find useful was getting the fin really close to the newspaper I paint over so I could get the paint flowing how I want before hitting the model.

 

I think I'm pretty much there with painting and I have just given her a first coat of gloss, decals coming soon! Thanks, Sam

 

 

 

[JasonC]

Tidy airbrush work!

[SaminCam]

I've got most of the big decals on and its coming along nicely now! Only one minor disaster which was that one of the fuselage crosses spectacularly disintegrated on me (water too hot?) - can you tell which side has been masked and painted and which is decal?!?

 

 

 

[Bangor Lad]

Excellent save with that decal!

[Roger Newsome]

That's looking very nice and tempting me to get one of my Eduard 190's out of the stash.

Roger. 

[mick]

great work

[SaminCam]

@Bangor Lad @Roger Newsome, thanks gents, it's a lovely kit, would recommend you give it a go. Currently fiddling around with undercarriage, update in the next few days. 

[stevehnz]

On 2/26/2020 at 1:50 AM, SaminCam said:

can you tell which side has been masked and painted and which is decal?!?

Starboard side masked? One of the horizontal white bars appears very slightly narrower but it could just as easily be the photo angle. This is looking good, I did this on a Hasegawa kit a few years ago, with a combination of kit & Mistercraft decals. I reckon its a super scheme.

Steve.

[SaminCam]

Making progress with the undercarriage:

 

 

I've added coiled thin copper wire for springs and stretched sprue and bent wire for the brake cables. I'll get a coat of gloss on then add some washes and highlights.