R14 Me 262 B-1a
Completed: October 2017
My rating: 10/10
Therapy ratting: 10/10
What more can I say.
Well I am certainly very impressed with my first build from Hobby Boss. The fit of the parts was one of the best I have come across. Doing dry runs was a breeze.
Excellent detail in all of the components.
Adding that weighted nose section is a must as the model is definitely tail heavy.
Transfers were very good, especially on the dash which stood up well to some pounding into shape.
As for the painting, well I think I achieved what I was hoping for. As a first attempt at this 'mottling' technique it was a great learning experience.
At this price you cannot go wrong. A great introduction to modelling 1/48 jets.
This will be my first build from the Chinese manufacturer Hobby Boss.
It is also the most ambitious colour scheme I have undertaken to date. German camouflage is far more complex than the solid blocks of colour typically used by most contemporary air forces.
I have seen some superb results from airbrushing of German schemes. Airbrushing lends itself to the fine subtle changes in the swirly surface patterns.
As a brush painter I hope to achieve something similar by developing the 'wash' technique I first used on the Roland CII. This project is more ambitious than the simple one colour wash used for that. It requires a variety of shades and colours all mixed up and laid on top of one another.
And I took up modelling to relax!!
First impressions
Well very good. There is a lot in this kit.
Extremely well packaged with each item having its own plastic bag and foam around the clear perspex parts.
Overall the quality looks excellent with no obvious over spill that you sometimes find and have to remove. Surface detail is also very good with a great deal of detail being provided in the moldings themselves.
The instructions are nicely printed and easy to follow.
The dreaded Me 262
Superb build here by Grant Dazell
With a top speed of 555 miles per hour, three 30mm canons in the nose and an array of 24 x 2.2 inch rockets this plane must have seemed like science fiction to the crews of allied bombers. It must have been a very unwelcome sight. Uncatchable and lethal.
The curious case of the missing swastika
I am curious as to the extent that HobbyBoss have gone to make sure that the swastika/gammadion is not shown. They have even chopped up the decals
Is it a banned image in China ? and is that because of its Buddhist rather than its Nazi connections?
Into the pit
Some vary nice raised detail in the cockpit.
Now shall I use the decals or not ? They will probably work fairly well on the main dash. But on the side panels I am not so sure.
I am very tempted to just paint these in with a fine detail brush. The molding has very nice clean sharp edges so painting these in should be ok with a very steady hand.
I think a mixture of both.
After removal from the sprue and a little cleaning up the main cockpit is starting to take shape. I am very impressed with the extremely tight fit in this dry run. The down side is that painting will have to be as thin as possible.
The basic colour of the cockpit is 'black grey' whatever that means. I will satin varnish this and then add a few stains here and there. That little switch panel with the labels (far right) is going to be tricky.
With the satin varnish on i am pretty happy with the colour and texture as a starting point. Its a fairly close match to that in the 'real' image. It's just a dark grey despite the apparent blue tinge which is just reflections from the surroundings. The satin varnish recreates this quite effectively.
Nice dash
I was in two minds about using the kit cockpit decals. On paper they just look a bit wrong and maybe a bit garish ?
In the end I cut them up into smaller sections and managed to manipulate them into position. They are alittle different to other decals I have used in the past. They take a lot longer in the water to become soft and even then dont slide of the backing that easily. However they are quite tough and survived at least three attempts at getting them in the right place.
With a bit of dry brush squashing they sat around the raised detail very well. One of the best I have attempted. I am very pleased with the overall result. Its almost as good as PE set.
Belt up
There are no decals for the seat belts provided with the model. This was a good oppurtunity to fashion some home made ones from masking tape and folded wire.
I think these have turned out OK. It is difficult to get a consistent size in the buckles when just bending them using tweezers. A former would definitely have helped. Next time.
Nevertheless I think they do add something. That new 1mm masking tape I recently purchased is an ideal size for the belts at this scale. The buckles were just bits of left over PE surround folded over.
Into the belly
The underside of cockpit 'barrel' slots nicely into the rest of the fuselage. From underneath you can see that a lot of detail has been included by Hobby Boss.
Its an unusually wide compartment which is shared by the undercarriage and accounts for the 'fat' overall appearance of the fuselage. I thought it was worth spending a bit of time in here to bring out the detail.
As usual a gloss varnish was applied to the basic grey and light green metal base coats to seal them. Silver was painted over the rivet holes and then quickly wiped off again to just leave a residue in the holes. Then a diluted black wash for dirt and a slightly darker wash of brown for the oil stains.
With the lower wing in place you then cant see an awful lot of this detail, but enough to make it worth while adding it.
Again I am very impressed with the pressing and detail provided in this budget kit.
Canons
Moving onto the machine gun bay continues in the same vain.
The four 30mm canons are a fair representation of the real thing. This whole compartment slots very nicely onto the provided metal nose weight.
Decals are provided for the fuse box covers (altough HB dont tell you this) and I have added a little 'wiring' just to liven things up a bit. The paint melted a bit when fixing with super glue but that can be tidied up later on.
Jumos on
The Jumo 004 engines are a pretty faithful reproduction. HB have gone to some trouble in breaking down the engine components for easy painting. No internal detail is provided however (Certainly like to build one in the future that shows the internal complexity of this early jet engine design).
With the engines offered up in a dry run you can see just how big they were. They are unusually placed forward of the wing which makes the 262 so distinctive from just about every other early jet.
Again the fit is superb. This is one of the best kits i have built for a tight fit.
The wings and engines clicked into place very nicely for a dry run. So good in fact that I painted the whole thing without needing to glue the parts together. This is such an advantage for panel wiping later on.
The underside was painted using a dilute 50/50 wash of white/thinner plus a little black to produce a very light grey.
'This was the first Me 262 to come into Allied hands after Messerschmitt test pilot Hans Fay defected on March 30, 1945'.
The real deal
'the world's first production turbojet engine in operational use, and the first successful axial compressor turbojet engine'
R4M rockets
Then the dark green was applied on the wings I using ‘Dark Green RAF’ (68) and a little ‘Dark Earth RAF’ (82) again a 50/50 thinners mix which produced a pretty solid colour. (Not really a suitable colour for a German aircraft but all I have in stock).
The lighter green was also mixed up using ‘Dark Green RAF’ and adding a fair bit of yellow. This didn’t cover as well as the darker green and required a second coat to increase the colour density. After drying I still thought it was a bit too dark and not creating much contrast with the darker green.
So I mixed up a third pale green using a blue/yellow mix which got closer to what I had in mind.
Happy with this lighter green I put a few splodges onto the mid fuselage to start the mottling effect so characteristic of the period. After drying off a little I then ran a broad brush across them with a small amount of thinner. This softened off the ‘spots’ and provided the delicate light green background colour. Two for the price of one!!
The downside to now having applied three coats of paint and a layer of varnish is that the surface detail really was starting to disappear. With a little re-scribing using a needle I managed to at least pull back the main panel lines but the smaller rivet detail has virtually gone.
Oh well, should get the colour right in the first place. Lesson learnt.
Scuff it up
The main painting was inspired by Arkady72 at FindModelKit. This is my attempt at recreating some of the masterful effects in that example.
After running in the panel lines with a dilute black it was then a case of adding in the 'bleaching' effect of the worn away paint due to exposure to the elements.
Generally I just painted in the same green/brown but with a little white added to lighten it and give a more 'washed out' colour look.. This actually works quite well and has the added bonus off highlighting the darker underpaint around the panel lines. Such a cool technique and one I will definitely use in the future.
With the main decals in place things are coming together.
The Masters Work
