Category: German aircraft
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Heinkel He 177 – Part Two – Riveting Detail
There are those in the world who would have me sand down the rivet detail of the 1967 Airfix Heinkel Greif, scribe lines between the panels, and re-mark sunken rivets. There are also people who would have me eat rutabagas and ground cockroaches…and I am here to tell you that I am as likely to…
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Heinkel He 177 – Part One – The Griffon Again
This model is a gift from my friend Paul, but it is not the first time I’ve built one. I purchased the same model from a small hobby shop located underneath Trinity Arcade in Perth in the 1960’s – a last gasp of plastic modelling before academic pressures took all my spare time away. I…
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Junkers Ju 87 – Part Five – Temporary Transport
And apparently that was all it was. They captured this one on a Tunisian airfield when the Germans retreated, gave it a quick desert pink and grey spray job, and stencilled it for USAAF and RAF markings. Then they flew it as a unit hack – until someone wrote it off. Bad airplane? Bad pilot?…
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Junkers Ju 87 – Part Four – When You Don’t Have To Land On A Boat
I am led to this line of thought by the glued-together Stuka – devoid of filler, undercoat, paint, wheels or any other signs of civilisation. As luck would have it it sat next to a completed model of a Northrop BT-1 for a while and the differences in the ships was marked: a. The Stuka…
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Junkers Ju 87 – Part Three – Fuselage
If ever the doctors start looking at radiographs of me and wondering why there are ulcers in my stomach and gaps in my brain, I am going to show them the business of fitting two fuselage halves together. I expect sympathy and understanding. Remember this is 1975, this kit. Margaret Thatcher has been elected Prime…
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Junkers Ju 87 – Part Two – Dry Fit
After learning how to correctly cut parts from sprue trees ( learned last year… ) the next most important thing I’ve discovered is the importance of the dry fit stage. And the more of the kit you can get to hang onto itself in this preliminary exercise, the better idea you’ll have of how to…
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Junkers Ju 87 – Part One – Hoping For A Revellation…
My first ever plastic model kit was by Revell – made when they were located in California. Now that they are a German firm, things may have changed. I see reports from the British modelling press that they are a curate’s egg – some kits fine and some foul. I also see cries of derision…
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Junkers Ju52 – Part Three – Hugo’s Ghost
Hugo Junkers died in 1935. May he rest in peace. What I am left speculating about is; was he buried in a corrugated coffin? All the Junkers planes I have built so far have featured this form of sheet metal and I am starting to think it would have been a nice touch if he…
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Junkers Ju52 – Part Two – The Four-part Fuselage
The Potez bomber that Mister Craft boxed up from a Heller mould had a distinctive four-sided fuselage that lent itself to IKEA construction. So does the Junkers 52 – as long as you get the elements in registration it all goes very well. But that doesn’t mean that you can wipe round the edges, clap…
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Junkers Ju52 – Part One – Vanilla, Please…
What? Straight out of the box? No complicated build? No sheet of arcane decals? No aftermarket resin kit? Just the thing you bought off the shelf? What sort of a monster are you? A tired one. Tired of the bullshit of trying to re-make every single kit into something weird. Tired of having to second-guess…
The Little World 