IBG Models Gotha Go 242 in 72nd

 

Here in the 'garden of England' we are in the middle of a week of 20 C/ 78 F sunshine, so the modelling stuff goes out into the garden. Just coming to the final stages of the new IBG Models Gotha Go 242. The build log is elsewhere but here's a view from the garden..

Rolf Pingel's Battle of Britain Kommandeur I./JG 26 machine - Hasegawa Me 109 E

 

Fourth completion of the year!

Hasegawa Me 109 - is there an easier build out there? Not sure though that I'm 100 % convinced by the shape of the nose. Decals from Kagero. Pingel's Emil was photographed during November 1940 - the blue of the fuselage now heavily mottled, although the machine still has large areas of yellow.  I used Xtracolor enamels. 

of course, once again the aerial isn't right. I've since replaced it with something a little more acceptable, although I hate wrestling with EZ Line. The trick here is to zap the super glue with accelerator ..

Hs 123 Airfix 'Vintage classic' - applying EZ line/AMMO rigging

 

 I finished this Hs 123 last year - but was always unhappy with the aerials. I decided to replace them  with EZ-line - and took a few new photos. Application technique has been 'refined' since my rigging efforts with the new-tool Airfix Swordfish and the Airfix Tiger Moth. Firstly, decant some accelerator into a lid. Next apply a drop with a cocktail stick to the anchor point. Then touch the EZ line aerial dipped in super-glue for instant results.

..another Revell/Eduard Dr.1 - Richthofen's last machine 425/17 "Three wings for the Red Baron"

 

..time for a red Triplane. What collection of aeroplane models worthy of the name could possibly fail to feature Richthofen's Dr.1? This is the Revell re-box of the Eduard kit - and I'm still having trouble aligning the wings. For some reason the middle wing is slightly askew. 

Richthofen's all-red Dr. 1 was 425/17 - and this was the machine in which the 'Rittmeister' met his end. However Revell supply the old style crosses which is not accurate for the Red Baron's last flight.

Spot the 'deliberate' mistake - I've put the 'Axial' stickers on a non-Axial prop. Will have to fix that. Finishing was not as straight-forward as it might have seemed. Firstly what 'red' to use? and, secondly, how to 'weather' it? In the end I elected to go with  Humbrol 'crimson red' (132) brush-painted in very thin layers and to 'tone' it down a little I tried the oil dot filter method..

Photographed on Leon Bennett's "Three wings for the Red Baron" (Helion, 2019) - a treatise on early aeronautical science and the cul-de-sac that was the triplane. The book examines why exactly Richthofen was such an enthusiastic advocate for a machine in which both himself and other leading German aces lost their lives. Spoiler alert - it even appears that his 'admiration' for the Sopwith Triplane was based on no more than hearsay...and if Leon should happen to chance on this page can I just point out to him that 'la vache' has another meaning in French...

See my other Eduard Triplane build on this blog here

Boater Bill's colourful collection of WWI machines - Eduard Dr.1 in 72nd

 

Yellow: Lothar von Richtofen, Jasta 11
Black: Josef Jacobs, Jasta 7
White: Hans Weiss, Jasta 11
Blue: Wilhelm Schwartz, Jasta 13
Lilac: Rudolf Stark, Jasta 34b
Green: Friedrich Kempf, Jasta 2 Boelcke
Red/white: August Raben, Jasta 18

Bill's best tips for building the Eduard Dr.1 in 72nd

" Some things I learned the hard way:

- The wing struts have a top and bottom. If you put them in upside down, they fit OK on the bottom wing, but the top wing’s angle of attack will be way off (trailing edge way too low) and the cabanes won’t fit.

- Make sure the wing struts are parallel when installed when viewed from the side. There’s a little bit of wiggle room in the middle wing’s slot- any misalignment will be magnified by a top wing that is skewed, with a leading edge that is not parallel to the other two.

- It is easy to put the stab on upside down (twice!). It is too easy to overlook the little dimples that are for the strut braces on the bottom - that is the only difference between top and bottom. (No key or tab to align the stab with the opening in the fuselage.)

- Pay close attention to part numbers for the landing gear struts- it is very easy to mix them up. I learned to not remove the second one from the sprue until I had glued the first one in place, on the correct side. Ditto for the cabanes.

- I found it best to install the cabanes on the top wing first, let them set for a bit, then attach the wing to the model.

- The stab braces are very flimsy- I broke about half of them while trying to clean up the sprue attachment. A similarly sized piece of Evergreen styrene is less brittle, and easier to handle.

- The guns won’t fit properly unless you sand the fuselage opening part to make it a little wider.

- If you are adding a pilot (I used the nice PJ Productions resin figures) don't bother to install the seat.

Bill's WWI slideshow is here

Recent addition to Bill's collection from the Revell kit a JG III Dr.1   - all markings painted and masked. Intending to do some of Loerzer's machines so posted here..

Giampiero Piva Luftwaffe models on Flickr

 

Giampiero Piva brush-painted Luftwaffe models on Flickr

 https://www.flickr.com/photos/162245214@N07/

A cautionary tale - by 'Sanguin' - " for a modeller the quest for knowledge can become self-defeating"

 

Sadly no longer with us, this is a cautionary tale from 'Sanguin' on BM. Probably too late for me. Regular visitors here will know that my build/completion rate fell off a cliff last year..mostly due to books and 'research'. This year I'm not buying (or writing) books and trying to build some kits instead..

" ...Books can be very helpful and informative, but may also be counter-productive. The following tale is true, the folly of a man who began with Airfix in the 1950s and probably has never properly grown up. Personally I began to be interested in a theme of building kits of Swedish aviation in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Before that it was random Airfix/Matchbox/Frog etc. In Britain I was a minority of a minority of a minority. Magazines sometimes covered the Draken. Lansen and later the Viggen but little else. Correspondence with Swedish people was by post and I used something called 'International Reply Coupons' to pay for their return postage so they would write back to me. I rarely ever got a response, not even to polite requests for information from the Air attache of the Swedish Embassy in London. This was along time ago.... Heller made kits of four SAAB aircraft but that was about it. An Airfix Draken that was rather crude. A Matchbox J29. Malformed Canberras, Catalinas, C-47s., the odd Junkers and a vacform or two. It was only through IPMS UK and Ted Burnett that we later formed the Swedish Airforce Special Interest Group and gained both a membership and a degree of respectability.

I write this as a warning. When you know little, you have fewer options to attain authenticity or realism or whatever you seek by making a decent replica. The quest for making the best can become self defeating. Over the years my hobby switched from making a few models, mainly fairly mediocre but some were good enough for a club stand, to amassing a collection of kits and books.

Before the internet and websites it was just magazines and a limited range of books that were our main sources of information. As publishers sought authors who could plough the soil of history to turn up the stories that were unknown to us, we enjoyed discovering the range of things that we could replicate expand beyond our wildest dreams. There were books with decent illustrations, better paper and much more information, histories of airfields, squadrons, aircraft in their many versions, colour schemes and markings and covering a huge range of aviation.

Suddenly my obsession (which it was in many ways) with things Swedish was diluted with learning about Air-Sea Rescue from Hawkinge in Kent, then 500 (County of Kent) Squadron, then the test/development aircraft flown at Farnborough/ Boscombe Down and so it went on.....the development of the Spitfire, captured aircraft in enemy markings, personal aircraft flown by senior officers, aviation oddities. I had a large and expanding library, a loft full of kits to match and neither the time nor inclination to build anything because I wasn't that good anymore. My standards were reduced by cataracts, dodgy vision in general, a chronic lack of time and a fear of having a lot more knowledge than skill. Even retirement increased my book collection but local community stuff replaced my meagre attempts at finishing builds.

This is a confessional, really. And not a proud one either. My lungs are seriously damaged by ciggies and pneumonia and my life expectancy is now very short. So in the last year I have sold it all. There is no way I could leave that lot for my wife to sort and get rid of. Books, kits, decals, resin and white metal, the whole lot. I sold it all (well, there are a few kits stashed away, either part-built or just of interest to me, less than 20.....honest). Had I built all that I had stashed away then we would have had to live in the garden shed. It was ridiculous.

So books are a useful addition to your knowledge, but they can become a diversion, an opportunity to vastly expand your knowledge but possibly at the expense of actually building models. Like everything in this life, you have to control what you do and 'moderation in all things' is perhaps the maxim to follow. Had I stayed with just the Swedish stuff, I could have binned all of my model collection a few years back and started again on more modern (but not always better) Swedish kits that have appeared and probably spent more money on beer and family and friends. This confessional may have bored many of you, amused a few and perhaps reflected something of the obsession that we have all had in differing degrees but it is how my relaxing hobby turned into something more. It may be that for some of us a surfeit of knowledge is a dangerous thing..."  

RIP John