It's not that I ever intended for a break from building this model but the break was, in some ways, forced upon me. I started the model in July last year, my first kit after my delirium inspired return to "proper" modelling brought on by a bout of chicken pox. I had vowed to stick to building 48th scale kits, for aircraft at least, as my favourite part of building aircraft is interiors and in the larger scale brilliantly detailed cockpits are possible (and easier on the failing eyesight). As anyone familiar with my more recent kits will know, this plan didn't quite work out and I seem to be hooked on the terrific new 72nd kits on the market. Anyway, back to the Stuka.
Like I said, I started this in July 2011 and it went together as you'd expect from a Hasegawa kit of this vintage, excellent fit and detail with easy assembly. I added some etched seatbelts from an Eduard set of pre-coloured Luftwaffe items. Otherwise the cockpit is standard but with carefully referenced painting. I got everything up to the painting stage. Mrs Dazzled thought that the Scottie dog emblem of St. G2 Immelmann was cute, so that decided the colour scheme, rather than the quick and easy winter scheme I had in mind although, after looking up some references, I became quite taken with the classic yellow-nosed look of the machine.
So, I got to painting the yellow and the undersides and then masked for the upper surface colours. Unfortunately my Tamiya XF-27 (RLM70) was well past it's best so some more had to be sourced. Unbelievably, at this point, there was an international shortage of XF-27. I tried all sorts of places on line and even phoned several hobby shops on the offchance but with no luck. In the meantime I got into other kits and joined this esteemed forum, getting involved in GBs. The Stuka was further sidelined, but now I'm determined that this will be finished. To this end I've started back in on it with a masking experiment.
Even Tamiya tape was too fiddly to try and cover the cockpit with and soggy tissue seemed too likely to damage the delicate interior detail so I thought I'd give foam a try. It's quite a high density foam, cut to shpe and size and squeezed into the gaps where it expands to fill them. I actually have quite a good supply of it as it's something we use in work to seal up interior parts of 747 cabins. Anything under a couple of feet long is useless to us and we generate a lot of unuseable offcuts. I have a very understanding line manager
so I can have as much as I want becasue they're only going into the bin in any case.I've already given the model a first coat of it's lighter green (XF-13) and all seems well. I'll post more pics as the model progresses.
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