Brickie's Shrike ***Finished***

[Brickie]

OK, here we go with my first GB (and I think my first build of any description on this forum).

The whole point of the exercise from my point of view is to learn some tips and tricks, find out what I'm doing wrong and so on. So I'm hoping to try and be pretty blow-by-blow with my account of what I'm doing and why, and hope you'll all jump in and offer assistance.

I'm going to do it wheels-up and probably end up hanging it from my daughter's ceiling - she likes "daddy's aeroplanes" - and for that reason as much as anything else I'm going to do the base-defence option with the red underside. It'll look cool next to the silver He-70 and the grey Spitfire Vb.

Something I just read on Wikipedia while looking up more info about the Fw190 is that it is described as the Focke-Wulf Fw190 Würger (Shrike). I've never heard that name before, except in conjunction with the Würger-Staffel base defence unit - does anyone know if it was official, or even widely used? Most German aircraft didn't have names, did they, with a few exceptions?

[Brickie]

Yes, a Shrike is a Butcher Bird is a Würger, it's just odd if the Dora doesn't seem to have been known by that name, even though the base-defence squadrons covering the Me262s landing and taking off - equipped with Doras - were called "Würger-Staffel".

It may have been a late-war thing - you get things like the Me163 Komet, the He162 Volksjäger (Peoples' Fighter), the Me262 Schwalbe (Swallow) and Sturmvogel (Stormbird) and the Me410 Hornisse (Hornet), but the earlier planes like the 109, Ju88, Heinkel He111 and so on don't have official names, just numbers.

[Brickie]

Anyway, naming issues aside, I've got exactly the same kit as everyone else so there doesn't seem to be much point in sprue shots.

Looking over the instructions and Ultimate Paint Conversion Chart last night, it looks like Citadel Blood Red is about right for the underside, and the top camo is two-tone green ("Cockpit green" and XF61 Dark Green). The one that I'm not entirely sure on is the side colour which apparently is supposed to be a mix of 60:40 of Humbrols 65 and 28 respectively. As far as I can tell, this should give a light bluish grey. Lacking the proper equipment to start mixing paints, any suggestions as to a single paint colour I can use there?

[Brickie]

Ah, that's the famous RLM 76, is it?

Will look at those suggestions, thanks! It occurs to me there must be at least a bit of money in some paint manufacturer somewhere releasing a set of standard WW2 colours - there seem to be a lot of common ones like this and RAF Dark Earth that you have to either approximate or mix up...

[Brickie]

Thanks for the tip. Don't really do enamels if I can avoid it, but I think I've got some turps somewhere...

[Brickie]

Will hopefully be able to get cracking this evening in while waiting for the putty on my Hampden to dry...

[Brickie]

So much for the blow-by-blow account. You know how you just get on a roll?

Here's the results of a couple of hours' modelling this morning...

This is actually a lovely kit, everything just falls together. There was a shedload of flash on the supercharger intake, but it filed off with no problems, any seams were small enough to be filled with Tipp-Ex and I'm even hoping to make the prop spin!

[Dirkpitt289]

Nice work so far

[Brickie]

Now I know what you guys mean by a "Shake & Bake" kit - I've had very little fettling to do.

[Brickie]

Let's hope I don't blast it up in the paint shop...

[Brickie]

I've primed it with Halford's Plastic Primer and sorted out a couple of minor burrs. Just trying to work out what to do paint-wise. As discussed earlier, the instructions call for RLM 76 on the fuselage but this requires mixing which I don't really have the capacity to do properly. I was wondering as an alternative about doing an NMF for the fuselage, with the light/dark green upper surfaces and the candystripe underside.

At any rate, my next step is to spray the underside with a coat of Skull White and start masking for the stripes.

[Brickie]

Actually, a question occurs. Would it be appropriate for the aircraft to be heavily weathered, chipped etc or did they not really get much wear & tear?

[jssel]

Just a personal opinion here but looking at period photos shows not so much paint chipping but some very rough camo paint work over factory finishes. The D9 featured heavy exhaust streaking due to the type of fuel burned.

[Brickie]

Damn I love fast-drying acrylics - got all the camo on last night and masked up the stripes on the bottom (the white may be nice and solid but I absolutely hate long thin strips of decal...). Not as fiddly as I thought it was going to be, actually.

I'd have put the red on as well, but I opened my pot of Citadel Blood Red only to find it had completely dried out. So it's back down the LHS today to get a pot of Humbrol acrylic 174.

I took a couple of photos but the camera's batteries died before I could upload them, so I'll hopefully get them up tonight.

For the RLM 76, by the way, I just went for Tamiya Royal Light Grey (I forget the number), which looked about right. It's mostly covered by the hand-painted camo extensions anyway.

Then it's a bit of detailing, a bit of weathering and I reckon I'll be done by the end of the week...

[TimJ]

I look forward to seing the pics of it painted.