1/48 Hasegawa Ju-87 B-2 Stuka

[mustang1989]

I've been itchin' to build a Stuka for going on 12 years now and finally have my chance. I had a fellow friend in the modelling community give me one of these for my Christmas present this past year and what better opportunity to build it than here. I'll be going with a straight up B-2 w/ no skis though.



My original kit will now become the "spares" box as there have been some things crushed in there throughout my familiy's moving career.(Which thank God is over for a while now!) Pictured below is the original kit with all the goodies



The scheme will be from a bird in the Meditterenean theatre thats popular with alot of folks to include me. I've had this scheme on the list for a long while........



Pictures of the guts:



and lets get started shall we?

[mustang1989]

Ok since most of us are quite familiar with each other around here I'll blow through the build to about where I was when the other site went "kaput"

Well I was going to use my Aires flooring but as you can see in the picture below it really fall short in the too short lengthwise category. And then it fails in the width part by enough margin where it will not touch both sides of the fuselage. Aires flooring is shown on the left (although this is really obvious to see)



The next step was to take the detail from the Aires flooring and transfer it to the Hasegawa flooring by sanding the flooring out from underneath the pilots floor area:



After that we are stuck with this:



Then we sand all of the detail from the top of the Hasegawa kit flooring to look something like this:



Lastly, at least for the pilots floor detail, here it is all installed onto the Hasegawa flooring:



more coming..............

[mustang1989]

I managed to transfer the rear gunners foot pedal (which from all the research that I can dig up is the rear gunners seat elevation lever) over to the Hasegawa flooring. I also started painting on the flooring and cockpit sidewalls which I initially treated to a coat of "rattle can" silver , allowed that to dry over night and hit that and the flooring with a coat of RLM 02. The following morning I lifted some of the 02 with a toothpick to reveal the "aluminum" fromt the flooring and sidewalls.I also started picking out some of the details on the side with a little black downtoned a bit with a couple of drops of 02. After that dried I applied a Mig Productions dark wash to all surfaces. I added the oxygen bottles and containers, ammo drums and release lever to the R/H wall as well and picked out final details with a silver lead pencil. This is largely apparent on the ammo drums.



I did the same thing with the L/H wall. The only difference being that there wasn't as much detail to add as most of it was already molded there. Only additions were the dive flap control levers and the release lever at the top of the wall in the pilots area. There's still a little work to do on that L/H wall but we'll be getting to that.

After that we start on seatbelts which got treated to a coat of Humbrol "linen" . We'll get back to that.......

[KSaarni]

Very interesting build there Mustang!

Love the way you "optimized off" the unsable parts of the Aires piece and added it into the original piece.
Very smart idea and smartly done!

- Kari

[mostrich]

Nice surgery, doc.

Watching...

[mustang1989]

Thanks guys! I'm merely catching up on where I'm currently at due to the lapse between forums. This thing is full of fit issues it seems like. Definitely more surgery on the way!!!!

[mustang1989]

Got this far with the pilots seat, rear gunners seat and the seat belts. Both seats were, again, treated to a silver base coat followed by 02, scraping back down to bare aluminum in the usual wear points and then a wash over all of that. The seat belt details were picked out with MM aluminum and all belts were dry brushed with ground up black pastel to "dirty" them up a bit. It seems to have worked in the past and it looks like it may work here:



Now here's the irony in all of this modification I have done up to this point. Even if I HAD used the Aires floor I still couldn't have gotten away with leaving the floor detail just aft of the pilots seat in place. The pilots oxygen bottle goes right where the detail is on the R/H side and the wall detail goes right where the detail is on the L/H side. Friggin' wow!!!! Well that's that I guess. I should know by now that regardless of how much money a person pays for this AM stuff that it all comes with a further price if extra detail is wanted. The good news is that the cut off sections will not be visible due to the side detail covering that section of flooring.
The oxygen bottle will be covering the cut out on the R/H side there like the radio boxes do on the L/H side. Here's a topside view of it all:



More on the way.................

[Handiabled]

Flying along as usual Joe ! Lookin great sir!

[mostrich]

What a pit! It looks so busy your eyes can't find a point to rest on.

[KSaarni]

Very enjoyable to follow this high-end build!

A nice number of pics and all the steps so follow each other so smoothly!

- Kari