Axis Aces Sep 2006 - Jun 2007

The gloss coat (Future) has been sprayed, decals are next! 

Scott the 109 is looking great so please keep the progress pics coming as I'm really enjoying seeing the build come together.

As far as active builders go I think you might be it.

Cheers 

Figures I'm the last one...   Those three weeks of no building really set back all my projects.  Oh wait, did Jboutin finish his?  I know he was close to being done recently.

Major progress today.  It's amazing how much time I can get at my workbench when my wife is at a friends house helping her paint! 

The landing gear are finished, the exhausts have been sprayed and about half of the decals are on.  Decal #15, the one with three of the black tulip triangles that goes on the left cowling was brutal!  It ended up splitting up on me while I was holding the model positioning another decal.  Three random sized pieces got on my fingers, the rest were majorly tweaked.  I spent close to thirty minutes trying to get that mess straightened out. But at least now it's fixed.... mostly.  Whew!  

All that's left now is to spray the props black green, install the landing gear sub-assemblies, prop assembly, put on the last remain decals and flat coat. 

Scott IMHO decaling can be one of the most stressful activities that you can undertake period.  Glad to hear that you made it and by the way you could never tell you had a problem with any of the decals as 109 looks great.

Thanks Darren.  I need to get them to hunker down a little bit over a couple of the vents but I'm afraid to even attempt to put any Microset on them. 

Another GB needing to be brought back to the front page.    I think I'm a bit late getting moving on these GBs I guess, lol.  Nice work on that 109, espins!!  Your doing Hartmann's winter camo justice. 

Here is my cockpit progress on my 109.  I'm still trying to decide what ace I'm going to do.  I want to do a desert camo scheme.  The kit comes with decals for a desert camo ace, but it requires you to simulate a painted over aircraft number.  I'm not sure I want that.  However, finding AM decals for a desert camo ace in a Bf-109G-4 hasn't been easy and I'm not sure I want to spend the extra $ for them.  We shall see.

Thanks guys, I appreciate the kind words. 

Your cockpit looks great Dave! 

Well, the final bits and pieces have been installed (except the propeller assembly, I'm waiting to stick that on last after the landing gear are nice and solidly attached) and all the decals are on. 

I may end up having to strip some of the decals and painting some of the markings as the Micro Set didn't agree with the Hasegawa decals and a few of them wrinkled up something fierce....  

I'm going to take a look at the decals again tonight after work.  I'll probably have to strip the decals that have the issues and will just mask and spray them.  It appears that only the Balkenkreuz markings on the upper wings and fuselage sides, along with the yellow band around the rear fuselage are affected.  Should be no big deal to paint, it just irritates me that it's going to add a few more days to the build when I thought I was sliding into home plate..... 

Do any of you have any suggestions as to the easiest way to strip those decals?  Should I just get them really wet, let them soak for a minute then and try to peel/rub them off?

p.s. note to self, don't use Micro Set on very thin Hasegawa decals...... 

TryintoModel wrote:

espins1 - what happened?  the previous pictures looked fine.  Your next pictures seem to have been taken well after you originally put the decals on.

I was only about halfway done with the decals, then finished them up last night.  I put some micro set on the fuselage band to get it to settle down a bit, and noticed the balkenkreuzes needed a bit of settling as well.... well, the very thin Hasegawa decals didn't react well.

No biggie, as long as I can get them off I have replacements, or I'll just mask and spray.  I could use the practice anyway with spraying markings. 

Ya, I always use a coat of Future before decaling, even on tanks. 

Well guys, I finally managed to overcome my extreme discouragement after the decal fiasco on the upper wings and fuselage sides. 

I tried using a combination of almost hot water, q-tips and even some decal softener.... no dice, they were still extremely reluctant to be scraped, rubbed or pealed off.  I finally resorted to about an hour and a half of very delicate sanding with sanding sticks to gently remove them.    Thank goodness I have lots of great History and Military channel stuff recorded on the DVR that I've been meaning to get to. 

I'm getting ready to do a light spray of the white (mixed with a drop or two of gray) to repair the paint job.  I'll have to to a light spray of the RLM76 on the underside where the yellow fuselage band was removed.

I have a couple of sprare decals which I think should be ok to lay down on the wings and fuselage.  I'll have to do a very light mist coat of white over them though as the original decals had a faded look to them.  

I re-sprayed the stripped and sanded areas. 

First I covered the spots with some Tamiya XF-2 Flat white with a bit of XF-24 Dark Grey and XF-50 Field Blue.  I used about a 3 to 1 ratio of paint to X-20A Thinner.  This gave me a bit of a darker white color, which is fine, as a sort of pre-shade.  I sprayed each spot and made sure it was thouroughly covered by that off white mix.

Then I did a 50/50 mix of XF-2 Flat White with X-20A Thinner, with just a drop or two of the Dark Grey and Field Blue added to slightly tint the white.  I sprayed it in the same type of random spaghetti pattern just like I did originally, and sprayed some of the mix in other open areas (had to be careful not to paint the existing decals or other painted parts) so as to blend the patched areas in with the rest of the paint job. 

I think I did a really good job patching up that paint as you almost can't even tell there was ever any problem!  Whew! 

Thanks Darren.  I must say I'm very relieved.  I was so discouraged after the decals freaked on me that I was ready to chuck the whole thing in the trash.  I'm glad I just walked away from it for a week or two.  I finally figured, what have I got to lose?  Worst case scenario I'll still learn a lot trying to strip the decals and how to blend together and patch up the paintwork and I can still chuck it in the trash after that.  Well, it turned out pretty good actually and looks pretty much as good as new. 

I have some extra decals that came with the kit for the non-winterized version, but the balkenkreuz decals are a bit darker than the lighter ones that go with this version.  I'm going to stop my LHS just in the off chance they have a replacement set, otherwise I'm either going to go with the other kit decals and just lightly fade them with a very light misting of some heavily thinned white or mask and spray them myself just for the learning experience, know what I mean? 

Here are three shots right after I sprayed the fuselage tail band. 

I use Tamiya Acrylics, so as usual I had to mix the color I needed.  I used 10 parts XF-3 Flat Yellow, 5 parts X-20A Thinner, 1 part XF-2 Flat White and 1 part X-6 Orange.  I think it looks way better than the decal, even before it wrinkled like a 200 year old woman. 

And here we are the replacement balkenkreuz decals in place.  I got these off the EagleCals EC#36 1/32 "The Blond Knight" set.  Almost finished! 

doh, just noticed I have a bit of finishing work to do on the black "tulip" decal work, particularly around the exhaust area.  There are several little black decals that go over those ducts.  I'm half tempted to just paint those spots since I seriously doubt those little decals will conform to the curves properly and I'm NOT even going to attempt to put any decal solutions on them.

I'm just about done with this puppy.  The machine guns have been painted, but late last night I was looking at them and have decided to drill out the ends of the gun barrels as it just look odd with solid ends in this scale.    So I'm going to attempt that this evening.  Anyone have any tips on the safest way to do that?

On another note, I had spent a lot of time trying to find pictures of white-washed Bf109 aircraft (man, there aren't many out there, seems cameras don't work to well in 20 below zero temperatures  :shock: ).  Anyway, that EagleCals decal set that I got the balkenkreuzes from had a nice 3 page fold out flyer (6 if you count front and back) which had two pictures of Hartmann's white washed 109s!