Okay, guys, here are the gallery shots of Rudel's bird. This is Fujimi's 1:72 kit of the G-2 model, with guns and cockpit details from the Academy kit transplanted, courtesy of Bish. Painted in MM Acryls and Tamiya Acrylics with a Paasche VL airbrush, using Eduard masks, Promodeler panel wash, oil wash grime streaking, MiG pigments and Microscale clear.
There are a few omissions: Rudel's yellow wing stripes -- I did not trust the decals in the end to be anything but heartache, and I should have sprayed and masked them, but we all have twenty-twenty hindsight... The spiralschnauze likewise, was impossible to mask and not supplied as a decal. The wing walks should be solid black but they look a damn sight better outlined with panel wash here. There is no attempt at this point to rig a radio wire, I just don't trust the mast to stay solid against the tension of the elastic line -- I might attempt to rig it at a later date. And lastly, the small antennas low on the fuselage and the flap actuators were painfully small parts for which there were no positive location devices, not so much as a hole to slot into, and they would have been falling off every time I touched the thing (one of the tailplane braces was remounted three times, and it had a locator hole. So in the end, I let those details slide. I'll do the Academy kit at some point and see how sharp that one builds; I'm also looking at doing Hasegawa's 1:48 Stuka in the not too distant future -- I'm happier working at larger size.
So, here's the evidence, all comments welcome!
Cheers, and it's been fun contributing to this GB! I hope there'll be plenty more completions, there's still three or four months to go.
Mike/TB379
