1/32 Hasegawa Fw190D-9 Black One

[Fermis]

Your work is amazing, John!

...flabbergasting, even!

[BlackSheep214]

In awe and speechless.... Well done!!

[tempestjohnny]

[jkim]

Thanks for checking fellow SPAMers! The Black 1 build is on the downhill now and I see the finish line in sight on my longest build. I hope you enjoyed the journey as much as I've had in sharing it.

When I last posted, I was waffling between doing an oil filter or not. I don't think it needed it from a tonal variation standpoint but went and did it anyway. Mostly to try and tone down some of the "white frost" appearance from my flat coat applications.


It was a messy affair and I really don't have any confidence that I'm doing it correctly so I'm not going to document the process step-by-step. So let's fast forward to Black 1 after the oil filter treatment and then another flat coat to even it all out.


The treatment did tone down that frost a bit and it didn't do anything crazy to the paint job. There is a little bit of color variation but it is very subtle. You'll note some after-the-fact post shading of the panel lines near the wing root that I need to tone down.




Ok... so the paint stage on Black is essentially done. All that remains is to add all of the external bits and pieces. The exhaust stacks are the first to glued into place.




The landing gear legs are glued onto the landing gear doors before attachment to the aircraft. The wheels will be glued on last to ensure that the flat spots in the tires are in the correct orientation.


The legs are then glued into the wheel wells.


There is a small wire that goes from the retracting arm towards the base of the starboard landing gear leg. Hardly noticeable but it is the tail wheel retraction wire.



Finally, the wheels are attached to the landing gear legs. I use a gel CA glue here to give me time to fix the flat spots on the ground. Black 1 sits on her own legs for the first time!

[BlackSheep214]

Awaiting for the climatic finish!

[speedgraflex]

Hi John,

Nice to see you back in the workshop! How are the Welch's Fruit Snacks? I am trying to find a snack food that won't leave my fingers coated during work, but no luck so far! Everything I try leaves my fingers sticky or salty! Oh, well. I looked at your first three photographs, then I enlarged the third photo! So much was going on!! It was beautiful. I was also happy to have the pixel depth, too!! Did you change your camera rig or are you uploading larger files for these beauty shots of your beautiful work. Then, then I realized that there were more photos! I started clicking through to look at these beautiful images... I think my mind is somewhere else right now... in some kind of modeling bliss. Beautiful is the right word; although at first blush this may seem the wrong word to describe this aircraft. This is just superb. Exquisite! Another word like "beautiful" that may not be quite the right word at first blush but John! WOW! I look at this aircraft—those landing gear—WOW! Superb! Exquisite! Beautiful! Clapping!

[mostrich]

What a moment! Like Lyle I'm out of words to describe what I'm feeling while looking at the pics of this marvelous model.

Regarding the jig, I was thinking a long time about getting me one. I opted for an acrylic one from Vertigo Miniatures.

http://www.vertigo-miniatures.com/verti ... RTIGO-JIGS

[jkim]

Thank you so much for the nice comments! Very much appreciated!

Bruce... the Welch's Fruit Snacks remain uneaten! I grabbed them from the Halloween leftovers, opened them on the workbench and never ate them. I think I get so "consumed" in what I am doing when I am in modeling mode that it's hard to "consume" anything else. The photo routine is unchanged for me... Canon S100 for my in-progress shots and then a DSLR for my finished shots. (pssst... I'm getting a little b-day upgrade soon!) It's interesting how much attention and time I've spent on individual components of the model. I try to treat each piece as a separate, stand-alone model. But when I finally attach them to the model, they seem to kind of... disappear. Or maybe they are blending into the model as a whole, which is probably a good thing. I just noticed that when I added the landing gear and exhaust stubs.

Torben... the jig purchase was spur-of-the-moment. I was looking through a model supply website (UMM-USA) and saw that these wooden jigs were discounted so I bought one. I assume the acrylic ones will last longer than these light wood jigs.

Doing a few things on the Dora as this build winds down. I've removed some of the masking to check the fit and finish of the canopy. Looks a-ok open or closed.




I'm checking the look of the underside add-ons but have not yet glued them into place.


The wing lights are clear pieces supplied as part of the kit. They have been painted in clear red and clear blue and are ready to be glued into the end of the wings using Elmer's White Glue.



Note the rough patch on the tip of the wing just forward of the red light. That... is a fingerprint. One of the many tiny flaws that I have to catch and correct before I'm done. I think I can just buff this out with some Micromesh.


Over at LSP, I was informed by someone that the ETC504 rack was usually RLM66 Dark Grey not RLM76 Light Blue. Crandall's Dora books nor the EagleCal decal instructions mention anything about this, that I recall. So I leafed through my Dora books and lo and behold, I did find a few examples where the rack is clearly a darker color than the underside color. So I'm going to make that change.


I wiped off the paint using a paper towel moistened with iso alcohol. Interestingly, I was able to wash off all of the RLM76, black pres-shade, hairspray but retained the original Alclad metal color. This makes it that much easier to change. I'll spray some more hairspray on this and then put on a RLM66 coat.


Some more views of the bottom with the landing gear firmly attached. A note about photography... I find it very important to take good quality photos during the build. Not only for purpose of sharing the build with others but for self-review. At first, it is pretty sobering to see high resolution photos of your work close-up. But it will definitely push you to improve. At least it does that for me. I know that if it looks good through the magnifier or through these unforgiving digital photos, it's going to look good in person.




Time to attach the flaps. The flap attachment is via three hinges. The joint, while not the strongest, is good enough to friction hold the flaps in place without glue. I want to pose the flaps at the maximum 60 degree angle and I'm afraid that CA glue will set up too fast for me. So I used 2-part epoxy for this attachment.



Pull back status check # 153... getting there!

[speedgraflex]

Nice work. I read through your build thread on Large Scale Planes to see who made the comment about the racks just to see how that was presented, but I found Martin's comments about the landing gear "undercarriage cover" to be quite interesting. I was wondering about this because my little Trimaster Dora covers were a "smidge" too long when I test fitted them and I made adjustments (I also believe someone in a build on Finescale stated, "landing covers never fit inside the openings" which may be true but I decided any landing gear I build will). Perhaps Hasegawa's 1/32 version is not the only model of the Dora with slightly over-extended covers. It's also interesting to see how modelers on a larger forum respond, and how larger photo display size on the forum makes your already impressive photography that much more formidable.

[BlackSheep214]

Are the ETC504 racks always designated RLM 66 regardless of Fw-190 model (A-6, A-8, etc...) ?