1/48 Tamiya Messerschmitt Me 262 A-1a

Gallery Article by Tudor Gheorghiu on May 28 2010

 

I decided to expand my Luftwaffe model plane collection by adding their infamous jet fighter, the Me 262 "Schwalbe".  The model, given that it is made by Tamiya, went together very easily, with no fit problems.  It was built OOB, and the scheme used was Heinz Bar's "Red 13" bird, while flying with III/.EJG 2, in Lechfeld.

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Scratch-built seat belts (from masking tape and thin steel wire) were added to the cockpit.  The fuselage interior was painted with Model Master "German Silver".  After doing some research, I found out that the flaps should be lowered when the plane is landed; Tamiya provides its model with fixed "in-flight" flaps, and this issue can be addressed by several aftermarket sets.  I decided to just carefully cut out the wing flaps and re-attach them in a lowered position later. S ome seams were present between the nose panels, in under-wing and under-fuselage areas, as well as around the engine nacelles, and were quickly mended with Tamiya putty.  The gun bay was painted with ALCLAD Gun Metal. The landing gear doors are instructed to be painted with Aluminum, however I decided to paint them with RLM 02, after consulting my references.  The main camouflage scheme is RLM 81/83 on top of RLM 76, with RLM 23 for the nose.  The tail mottling was one of my best achievements with an airbrush so far (well, I've done it with my brand-new Iwata, what can I say?).  Finally, the plane was given the "dirty" look along the panel lines using a normal pencil and then rubbing the marks along the lines.

Unfortunately, the decaling session proved to be quite the nightmare. Several stencils broke, including the small "Red 13" that was supposed to go on the front landing gear strut door. The white Luftwaffe cross on the right-hand side also broke, but I managed to "float" all the pieces back together, re-building the cross (I could not find any spare ones, so I had to persevere and work with it).  I am sure critiques will find missing stencils on this plane, however, being my 6th airbrushed model, I think the painting has improved compared to my other models.  I hope you like it as much as I do, and I will continue building more models (and having a hell of a time with that Iwata).

Happy modeling!

Tudor Gheorghiu

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Photos and text © by Tudor Gheorghiu