JG 2 Schwarm

These have been almost done for the longest time.  I finished them up this evening.  These four planes are from JG 2 Richtofen, more specifically the 3rd squadron.

The two models on the right are Airfix kits.  The two on the left are Tamiya kits.  I did the first couple of Airfix kits and struggled with a lot of fit issues, so tried a Tamiya kit and it fulfilled the Tamiya reputation of excellent engineering and went together like a dream.  So the rest of my 109s are the Tamiya kit.  In addition, the Tamiya kit comes with a bomb attachment which I make use of in the ErPro 210 schwarm I am working on.

These all have unit insignia from the Tamiya kit decals.  The crosses come from Airfix models are from the Airfix kits.  The Airfix decals go on much nicer.  The numbers are from a set of Printscale decals for JG 52.  Those decals are the best of all.  The Tamiya kits come with tail swastikas, which I used.  I got a separate sheet of them initially because the Airfix kits don’t come with them.

These all have magnets underneath and are mounted again on my custom made stands for Blood Red Skies.

Some day perhaps I’ll figure out how to do decent photographs.

One more thing on the subject of kits.  The Tamiya 109 kit really is a dream – the only issue is that there is a piece of plastic behind the instrument panel that needs to be trimmed to allow the instrument panel to fit flush.  It hardly matters with the canopy closed up as you can barely see it anyway.  I put the instrument panel decals on the first few but on the rest of them and going forward I am just painting the relevant instruments by dry-brushing them silver (which picks up the outline of the dial) and the bit of white.  I just looked at the decal and painted the relevant bits.  It’s a lot easier than applying the decal and it’s barely visible anyway.   The airfix kit comes with a pilot which is nice.   For the Tamiya 109s I sourced some resin pilots that were fine, but not great.  They were nice sculpts but very fragile.  I raided another kit for some more plastic pilots.  I haven’t figured out what to do long term.  I wish someone made a box of plastic luftwaffe pilots.

While I’m on the subject of kits and comparing Airfix and Tamiya, I’ll refer back to my post on the Spitfires.  The Airfix Spitfire kit is wonderful.  I had a lot of fit issues on the first one I put together.  On the second I examined it closer to see why things were not lining up and realized that the locating pins/holes are not aligned correctly for the fuselage, so I clipped all the locating pins on the fuselage and the alignment became perfectly (although you have to line it up by hand and eye).  I have purchased Airfix kits for 6 Hurricanes and completed one.  It is fine, but I was sorely tempted to just do 6 more Spitfires I enjoyed that kit so much.

I’ll do a separate post on decals.

Ground support

When I started working on 1/72 planes for the Battle of Britain, I saw the Academy P-47 bubbletop kit and had to have it.  I bought it, built it and the kit was a dream to put together.  But the decals silvered up something awful and it doesn’t look that great as a result.    So I bought another one.  Second copy of the same kit didn’t go together as well as the first, but it was fine, just more sanding and filling, and not much at that really.  But this time I used after market decals from Barracudacals.  This was an awesome set of decals.  They went on like a dream.

Anyway, I still need to add the prop.  It’s done and I was about to stick it on when I realized I still need to do and add the tailwheel and the antenna.  I don’t want the prop on when I’m doing that in case there is any fiddling required.  But here it is: