It is glorious here in SE Texas today. Temps have been almost unseasonably cool, with bright sunshine, college football is back, and I'm back at my bench. Well, I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time at the bench this year, so only the weather has really changed.
I am going to do a work-in-progress with this build, MPM's big Heinkel He 177A-5 Greif (Griffon is how that translates). In recent years I've built a couple of other Heinkel warbirds - Special Hobby's 1/48 He 115B-1 and Revell's huge 1/32 He 111P-1, and curiously, I did WIP's on those as well. I'm not sure what I find so fascinating about building replicas of Heinkel warbirds that I am compelled to share the building journey with everyone, but I figure I won't get any complaints.
Here is the kit box-top.
This is one of Germany's few heavy bombers. It was probably not considered a successful aircraft, mostly due to its rather unique engineering. It's a 4-engined heavy bomber that scales out to about the same size as an US B-17. Notice, there are only 2 nacelles. Each nacelle was fitted with 2 engines, which apparently was the source of many issues ground crews faced with this bomber. I believe the Greif was used heavily on the Eastern Front, but I know it also saw some action in the West as well. To that point, I first recall seeing the Greif depicted in the movie Enemies at the Gate, and then many years later, there was a great sequence of a Greif dive-bombing a building in the movie Allied.
First impressions of this kit: it's a fairly typical short-run style of kit, with nary a locator pin to be found, and rather thich sprue attachment points on many of the parts. But unlike the typical short-run kit, there is no parts upgrades in PE, and only a small number of resin parts. And the kit features a great amount of detail in the cockpit, mostly in the form of levers that one would typically see represented via PE (so these parts are likely a bit thick, but I like the way they look). Panel lines are thin. The major parts seem good, with no warping that I can detect, but the wings so far have revealed some potential alignment issues when I've test fitted them. The plastic surface feels a bit rough, but a quick pass with sanding pads will take care of that.
So construction has begun in the cockpit. I started by putting down a coat of RLM 02 Grau on all the interior surfaces and parts. I know that at some point the Luftwaffe switched their standards for their aircraft interiors, opting for the darker RLM 66 dunkelgrau, but I've taken a bit of artistic license here by using the RLM 02. My reasoning is that the lighter grey paint will allow for better visibility of the cockpit parts and the various dials and levers than would the RLM 66. As for this particular aircraft, I don't know when it would have rolled out of Heinkel's factory, but I am doing a bomber that belonged to 6/KG 100 out of Toulouse-Blagnac, 1944, so it's likely this one would have featured the darker interior.
The kit does not come with seatbelts, so I used my standard brown grocery paper bag to fashion belts for the 4 seats included in the cockpit. I wired the rear of the tiny IP and ran the wire along the console to the rear of the cockpit, and I added a wire to the backside of the control column.
This wider shot shows my workbench with the first thing I ever purchased from Squadron, a book on German heavy bombers with the 177 featured on the cover. I actually bought the book for its inclusion of the Amerika Bomber, the Me 264 (which I built a few years ago from a 1/72 Special Hobby kit). The book features a good write-up on the Greif, as well as a few photographs that may be of good reference when I get to the exterior painting.
That's it for today. Have some family time for the day planned, as well as listening to the football game from Tuscaloose, Alabama - the Aggies have won there before, but honestly I'm not expecting a victory for my good guys today.