75th Anniversary of 1945 Group Build (World at War)

Made quite a bit of progress on the 262. Here's the cockpit together...

This kit had a lot of fit issues. It took a lot of sanding, filling and filing...

After all that, here it is primed ready for paint...

Next will be the paint. I will be using AK real color RLM 76/81/82.

Here I applied the RLM 76. This is supposed to be a "late War" version that is quite a bit more green than blue...

Next the RLM 82 is applied and masked for the splinter pattern on the wings and upper fuselage...

Now applying the RLM 81 green...

now to add the (gulp), mottled camo...

A few more details to paint then it gets glossed and onto decals.

Hi gents

I've done a few kits for every year on this GB. However, in January Finescale lost track of my account. For some reason known only to Zeus, this GB and British Army reappeared. Hope this will remain the case.

Originally I had plans for a Russian, British and American kit for the year - but considering the schedule change, I'm going to try to finish the Meng 1/48 P-51D Mustang. It'll have 8th AF colors so you can certainly figure 1945.

kit by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr

This is an odd kit and it has its own drummer. In theory it's made to be assembled without glue - hence tight fight and big attachment points. Think Bandai here - this is not a simple kit at all - it has a part count over 100 - twice what the classic Tamiya P-51D has. So far the fit on the kit has been very impressive - it's tight and you have to get used to wiggling major pieces into place - but they get there. (You can see the completed fuselage in the kit pic above.)

Naturally I did the cockpit first. I have to fess up - I've never sweated cockpits. I know you're supposed to, but I don't build for the camera and I've never built an airplane that had much cockpit easily visible. But as you can see I've got one done - there's a lot of detail on the inside. (BTW - my Interior Green is almost a perfect match for AK Real Colors interior green. Figure yellow oxide, a bit of carbon black, some permanent green and a tad of white. All done in Golden High Flow - my standard paint.) The wash is done with Iwata Com.Art transparent smoke. I like Com.Art for interiors - the colors amplify detail adequately (most of which you can't see) and it leaves a nice grime that would be inside any well used fighter.

parts by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr

cockpit by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr

One thing that's attractive is that the modular construction is going to leave me with no major seams - just the thing for natural metal finish. As I'm pretty much confined to using non-solvent paints I'll be using Vallejo's newish Metal Color acrylics. It won't match K-Color or the best of the lacquers, but the Vallejo line is very good. Aside from that I don't want a super shine - we've got a lot of color footage of WWII P-51s & P47s in NMF and it's it's shinny but very soiled. (I've seen some museum planes that shine like glass, but that's not wartime.) So I'm hoping that the Vallejo will do just fine.

This kit - unfortunately like every P-51 kit I know of - has a sting in the tail. The P-51 was famous for it's "laminar flow" wing. (Engineers argue still about how much "laminar effect" was gained by the Mustang wing.) The idea was to have a very even wing surface. This means that all of the top wing (minus control surfaces) and most of the bottom was sprayed with a putty over a primer and then spray painted silver. This means that the panel lines are very indistinct and rivets shouldn't be there at all. The problem is that the Meng kit is new and it's got rivets galore which complicates the process greatly. I was messing around with putty but because it appears that the panel lines don't have to be eliminated, I've decided to carefully sand the rivets off - hope we can get things smooth. Eventually I will be putting on Duplicolor black lacquer primer which is "sandable" and "fillable" so I think things will work. The big question is why hasn't anyone made their P-51 kit to fit reality. Meng, Airfix and Eduard all have new P-51 kits and every one comes with fine surface detail on the wings - just what you don't want. There were no doubt some 51s that didn't get the treatment, but in WWII the number would have been very small - the putty was put on at the factory. One of the makers could have at least put in two sets of wings - one with, one without rivets. It's not like Eduard or Meng are budget brands.

p-51wings by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr

More later.

Eric

Lots of good looking detail there.  Nicely done!

I managed to do some work on the Schwalbe, before I left for holidays (at last).

Radio compartment was assembled & painted. Almost nothing will be visible from the open panel.

IP was installed and the cockpit 'tub' was completed.

The 2 x Jet engines were assembled and their interior painted. Then , after some dry fitting, cockpit and gun compartment were placed in position and fuselage halves were glued together

I did not achieve the best seams, even though the fit was very good. Some sanding will hopefully correct things.

When dry-fitting the bottom fuselage-wings piece, I noticed steps , especially at the front joint.

I will grind off some of the internal details , so that the bottom part can 'sit' a bit deeper into the upper fuselage, and see how it goes.

If anyone has some advice, it is more than welcomed.

Scott, very nice model of a very iconic ship.

Very nice, Scott!  Great looking ship.  Measure 22 camouflage looks really good on her.  I've never built an Academy ship.  Looks like they are pretty good.  

I've added the finished photo to the front page; I did re-orient it so it's horizontal.

Thanks for being part of the GB.  It's always rewarding to see the ships coming out of your naval yard.  

I missed VJ day be a few days, but 75 years ago today the USS Missouri did pull up anchor from Tokyo Bay.  I am going to call this build finished.  Check please use the last picture for the cover page.

Thanks, Scott

That will probably keep you busy for a while, Scott.  Lots of railings there!

I wanted to have my Missouri done by this date, but it didn't happen.  Almost done though, just needing to add all the PE railings.

CMK's US Navy pilots in 1/72.  I used various Vallejo khaki-like shades for the uniforms; bases are painted with Colorcoats 20-B deck blue.

2 September 1945

Robert, Zvezda, some nice looking work there.

It might be slow, Zvezda, but you certainly achieved a fantastically detailed cockpit.  What great work!

I try to break a record in slow model building. All these days I managed to add/paint seat belts from a PE set and attach the control column and rudder pedals.

Robert, very nice camo painting. Now I also want to build one of these babies.

Very nice, Robert.   The first photo shows how well the camo blends in with the terrain.

I made great progress on the base this weekend, picked up static grass from the LHS adusted it on over some ballast I had laying around.  Still looks too spartan, i think I will order some light greeen premade bushes to match the grass.  Or maybe a stone fence in front of the vehicle.  I was going for a late winter, early spring look, though it really needs more mud for that!

Off to a good start there Zvezda.

Nicely detailed work, Zvezda.  Looking fine!

I started some work on the HB kit.

Cockpit was assembled and painted RLM66.

I did not want to grind-off the relief detail of the IP, so I applied the kit decal on top of it. With some MicroSol they settled just fine.

Some small bits of kit decals were applied on the side panels, for the same reason. Rest details were painted with a thin brush.

After a last gloss coat, they were left to dry.

The camera compartment was then assembled and some cabling and junction boxes were added to make it look less empty. HB forgot to add the 2 x tubular struts. These were added from brass tubing.

Thank you Zvezda, much appreciated.

Bish: I was about to say excellent builds, then I realized these are 1/72 . So these are amazing builds! The camo work on the Dora is perfect.

The current crop of CMK figures seem to be better than years ago.  The faces used to be ghastly!  I had an older set of a Navy pilot and two deck crew.  I thought I'd paint them up, too, but the faces were hideous and the detail (like parachute harness) was so soft, it was hard to see that it was even there.

O yes, i like to be prepared.

Nice work on those figures, i do find them delicate but they come up nicely.

You do plan ahead, Bish!  Usually I don't know what I'm going to do next week, let alone next year!

Back to my project for '45:  CMK's US Navy pilots.  I got them all put together.  Had a little set-back when I broke the foot off of one and had to perform orthopedic surgery.

I used superglue to put the parts together; thought I'd have trouble getting rid of join seams, but they didn't take too much effort to eliminate.

I primed them with Testor MM white.  Used poster ticky-tak to stick them to bottle caps for painting.

Went through my Vallejo paint, and picked out some bottles that seem likely for the khaki uniforms--numbers 837, 917, 916 and 72.034.

Thanks check. I already have next years line up pretty much sorted, but i'll see how the U-Boat goes.

Great planes, Bish.  Very effective weathering, and the figures and bases really set them off nicely.

Thanks for being part of the GB.  Don't worry about time if you want to do some armor; I'll just leave things up and running to give everyone time to finish if they want.

And now the 109. Again, a light Flory was and some exhaust staining to weather and the last bits were fitted.

And then to the base. The ground crew man is Airfix and the pilots, one is a CMK resin piece and the other 2 preiser figures.

Another nice kit from Fine Molds, i have another G-10 in the stash to do another NJG 11 NF from the same decal sheet as well as their K-4. I can deffinetly recomend them.

Thanks again for the running the GB check, please use which ever pics you like. After doing both naval and airforce subjects, i was hoping to get in an armour build, but i am not sure i will have time for that, but i will be follwing.

Robert, Zvezda is correct. These Fw 190's were assigned to JV 44 to protect the Me 262's during landing and take off. Because the AA gun crews at this point in the war were not very experianced and the escorting 190's would be coming in behind the 262's, the gun drews would likely fire on any propeller driven aircraft thinking it was enemy. So this underside scheme was to distinguish the escorts.

Time to wrap both builds up. First, the 190. It was weathered with a flory wash and some exhaist stains. For the guns i used resin MG 151 barrels for the inner weapons and some bras tube for the outer 30mm MK 108's.

The rubber mat used to protect the surface of the wing is a PE part from Airmodel.

I finishe it off by attaching it to the base and adding a couple of altered Airfix figures and the oil drum is also from Airmodel.

I really liked this kit. I will lok forward to building the other one and hopefully picking up their D-13 at some point.

Zvezda1980

Hello Check. Lots of nice builds going in here. I would like to join with this. It has been sitting on the shelf for some time now, screaming 'build me'.