Spent my first day cutting plastic on the new Eduard Gustav in 48th. What to say ? ...the politest thing to say here is probably no comment! ..bluntly, I'm not a rivet-counter, but frankly this kit looks like it will be something of a disaster for Eduard. How could they let this happen after their brilliant Bf 110s (1:72nd) and Spitfires (1:48th). Beautiful detailing, fabulous in the box, but is the new G-6 accurate ? nah, not really! When I first read/heard that there was a potential problem with this kit, I was kind of prepared to just accept it, put it down to one of those things even. I mean I tend to think that 'accuracy' when building a kit shouldn't necessarily be the be-all and end-all of modelling; but there are limits, the subject has to at least look 'right' as a scale replica. Now after having purchased two Eduard Bf 109 G-6s (total outlay with postage, 60 euros) and then received a third one for review and cast a critical eye over the parts, I'm not too sure that this one will..
Of course this is probably old news to most of you, but here's a look at the kit parts put up against the plans published in both the Kagero and the Aerodetail monographs. Firstly, the cockpit aperture is just far too big. The two photos immediately below show the Eduard fuselage parts taped and placed next to a partially completed Hasegawa 48th scale Gustav..
Aerodetail plan above, Kagero below. Note over-large cockpit aperture and overly long fuselage. While the nose outline forward of the cockpit appears to conform to the plans, it nonetheless appears to be overly bulbous. I notice that 'Andy' on Aeroscale is attempting a rather convoluted 'fix' that involves chopping the fuselage parts in two and dissecting the wings! - simply put, the kit is over-scale and there's really nothing you can easily do to correct it..
Here you can see the wings are far too long towards the tips. The Bf 109 wing has considerable dihedral so a comparison with one-dimensional plans is, I agree, hardly an exact science, but even so, note how long they are. In the comparisons above and below they are minus the large rounded tip parts....but I can tell you they are a whopping 8mm longer than the Hasegawa wings. Trimming the wing-tips, good luck with that, given their nice aerofoil section!
...and that's not all of course. The undercarriage has been molded with no compression and the locating lugs mean the gear legs are too long and "up-right" making the stance of the model from the box totally wrong. Incidentally an attempt has been made to mold the brake lines on the gear legs - but they are straight sprue-like 'lines' standing proud of the leg and look rather unrealistic to me..
Below, well I made a start on attempting to correct some of the more 'obvious' errors; here's my first day's work on this kit; modifying the gear legs, the locating apertures for the gear and performing surgery on the wingtips...
..oh and while I'm here, why on earth has the join between the lower wing and the fuselage been designed as it has, with a 'V'-shape..? I recall the Fujimi kits way back getting slated because they introduced panel lines where none existed on the real machine- why break it down like this ?
I notice Brett Green has now "revised" his review to take into account all these various glitches he missed first time around and he writes,
"..there are a number of strange detail errors and probable misinterpretations, and it seems certain that the kit is oversized too. Having said that, there is no doubting that this model looks like a Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6, but those who want a 100% accurate kit will be disappointed by these issues..."
of course I suspect -and indeed I'm hoping - that once built up and displayed on its own a very nice model will result, in fact there have been a couple of nice examples already posted, especially on aeroscale by Ayhan Toplu below - it will though be a nice model like the Trumpeter 32nd scale Emil is a nice model ...
And here's a couple of finished examples from my own bench, also on this blog
Yikes! Somebody needs to fall onto their scribing tool!
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