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.
Click on
images below to see larger images
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
Click on
images below to see larger images
|
|