So, I had this model kit lying around for years but never had the time to get it done after moving away from home. This summer, though, I didn't manage to get any summer job so I ended up back north at my parents', building a bit of a shed and on my free time loitering in the internets and... painting and assembling this Messerschmitt model kit.
It's a Revell model from the 90's, and it has quite nice mold job - no badly malformed parts, the fuselage fits the wing root, wings glued together quite nicely (with the help of clothespins) and it has two sets of decals. The only neglected thing is historical accuracy - it does not come with swastikas for the vertical stabilizer, which were a part of Luftwaffe markings...
I also decided to add a little modification by spreading the radiator flaps apart from each other instead of having them closed shut. Here are a few images of this process - I basically cut the wing flaps to their bending point, then carefully bent the parts apart from the center line:
As far as paint goes, I decided to imitate reality as much as I could, so seeing how these planes had an aluminium coating behind the paint I first put an layer of aluminium paint on the wings, fuselage, control surfaces, prop spinner and other parts like that. This will give me an option of weathering these surfaces by scratching on them gently, making the underlying aluminium layer shine through...
Cockpit in this plane does not have too much detail (not much you can cram on to 1/72 scale...), and I didn't concentrate on it very much as even a slightly messy end result will look just fine through the distorting plastic canopy. Nevertheless, here's how the cockpit:
Regarding the cockpit, I also modified the model a bit; On the box cover art (and in history I think) these models were equipped with the transparent head armour glass, but on this model that piece was a solid plastic plate, so I cut that away in preparation for gluing in a transparent small piece of plastic, which should hopefully look better... Here's the still clear Erla canopy and the panzer glass piece.
After the aluminium coat was dried up, it was time to mix up the grayish-blue RLM-75 colour for the undersides of the wings and fuselage. I decided to give the plane an overall coating in this colour though before adding in the greenish brown and grayish green colours for the upper side camouflage, so here are a few shots of this phase of work.
At this point it was time to mix the greenish-brown general upper camouflage colour. Came out quite nicely; after the paint layer at this point had dried up, I detached the wings and the fuselage from the plastic frame, since I need to fit the fuselage together to match the grayish green camouflage patches on the seam, not to mention I need to smooth out and paint over the locations where the pieces were connected to their frame. Anyway, at this point it's already possible to fit the parts together to see how well they fit; here are the latest pictures of current stage of progress.
Here's a close-up shot of the canopy as it is right now. The clear sections are covered with tape - and it was a huge pain in the ass to get the tape cut well and proper so that it fits the canopy frames. This is always sort of critical phase on model making... when you get paint or thinner on clear plastic part, it won't be so clear any more.
Thread will be updated as the project progresses.
