The Little World

Approaching an aircraft build with trepidation is always disheartening.

But some kits beg it – the Czech short-run ones or the Russian re-pops often have too much inside or nothing at all. We have all seen the pilot figure stuck to a post from one side of the fuselage – or worse; nothing whatsoever under a clear-ish canopy.

Or the Czech resin monster that asks you to make a six-sided box of delicate detail and then squish it between two thick fuselage walls. All that resin and you with a rough file…

Airfix have made a good compromise with this Junkers. There are precise parts that lock into slots and give a decent representation of a cockpit. But beware…

If you enjoy yourself grinding down ejector pin posts, this is the kit for you. I use a hanging motor with flexible drive and a large round bur to skim off these interior blockages. There are a lot of them…

That done, the idea of an internal framework to keep the cranked wing of Ju 87 correct is a good one. Once things finally seat the geometry is fine.

Fortunately the Germans painted the inside grey – unfortunately everyone else cannot agree on which shade. I chose RLM 02, which may be wrong but I own a bottle of it. Sue me.

I did appreciate the side detail on the fuselage walls being moulded as two separate parts and locating pins meant it harmonised with the rest of the seating. Awful lot of machine gun ammunition for the popgun in the back and the gunner would have been changing more than shooting. That, and sitting on a tractor seat backwards for 800 miles, punctuated by the occasional screaming dive and blackout – man, those guys had all the fun…