Bf 110E-3/trop 2.(H)/14 North Africa - almost done

[Fanes]

It's not over yet. I shot some primer today and it unforgivingly revealed all the flaws:

 

So there will be a lot of careful scraping and sanding tomorrow.

And there's another issue to fix: The installed camera fits the cockpit floor quite well but collides with a box on the upper left sidewall (picture will follow).
I have no idea if that box was fitted to the recon 110s and if it maybe had been relocated.

 

[LSP_Ray]

That does NOT look too bad at all, especially considering what the size really is!

I think it will turn out great.

[mozart]

Don't be too hard on yourself Joachim, it looks absolutely fine and, let's face it, will not be that easily seen once fitted in the cockpit. As for it fouling the other item of kit, be practical about it - position the camera as a priority and either move or better still, bin the other bit, who's to know!!? 

[Shawn M]

looks great!

If I were to hazard a guess, the box its colliding with would be the morese code box

[Fanes]

Picture delivery as promised:

 

From behind:

 

And here's the one and only picture from the original I could find:

 

(source: bundesarchiv.de)

 

The height of the camera seems perfectly good to me, but there's certainly not enough space to the sides.

[mozart]

A question of scale build up I suspect creating a lack of space in the model that wasn't there in the real thing.

Edited April 11, 2019 by mozart

[LSP_Ray]

Probably camera to scale, problem is over thick cockpit walls do to molding constraints. Maybe make the box thinner?

[Fanes]

4 hours ago, LSP_Ray said:

Probably camera to scale, problem is over thick cockpit walls do to molding constraints. Maybe make the box thinner?

I ripped the box of after my post and it'll be thinned down 1-2mm.

The overly thick cockpit walls will for sure lead to more problems with the auxillary Units for the camera.

Especially the Motor which is located on the floor between the camera and the sidewall.

[Fanes]

After sorting out the fit issue I went on to painting the whole thing. Well beforehand I wanted to clean up some flaws and cracked the whole thing.

With a lot of patience and silent screaming the reconstruction was once again succesful! But I'm not gonna touch any flaws again on this beast!

On to the better news:

The frame itself recieved a coat with Gunze off-white. and I started the detail painting. While the frames are a light cream colour on all pictures, the cameras vary a bit.

There are pictures of grey-green (maybe RLM02) cameras, dark grey with a RLM02 lens and somewhere I read something about a blue-grey camera colour. That's what I went with:

 

Well I'm not 100% sure/happy about it. Has anyone more information regarding RB50/30 camera colours?

[mozart]

It looks very effective and business-like Joachim, go with it as is and don't sweat about if it's "right" or "wrong" cos nobody knows!!  

[Fanes]

The cockpit arrived at the painting stage.

I started with a black base (Tamiya X-18) but didn't take any pictures - well it was black.

Then I went on to the interior base colour. There are several possibilities for the Bf 110 with various combinations of RLM02 and 66.

I 'm heading for an overall RLM02 to avoid the typical black hole aka RLM66.

 

As you can see - it's not an uniform coat because I wanted to show the structures inside a little more. This wil be further enhanced with detail painting and adding some lights to the upper surfaces.

Here's a little teaser with the cockpit floor:

 

The next step will be painting all the small and not so small things in the cockpit. Finding the "right" colour for each part will take some time.

I'll check all my references and the WiPs on this forum, too.

[LSP_Ray]

The color variance looks good!

[Fanes]

I've started with painiting the details - mostly the easy stuff like the MG15 and the rear seat. More of that later today.

But I'm really struggling to find good pictures of the interior showing which box/part was in RLM02, black, or grey.

Has anyone useful pictures and is willing to share them?

[dodgem37]

Nice effect.

 

Sincerely,

Mark

[Fanes]

I'm back from my vacation and started to add more colour to the cockpit.

I looked at every picture of the interior I could find and I'll try to keep it as realistic as possible.

First contrast to the RLM02 is RLM66. I decided to paint the IP, the morse code box (hardly visible in pictures but maybe darker than the surrounding) and the instrument panel above the radios (quite sure about this one) in RLM66.

 

The camera and the radio equipment recieved a blue grey similar to RAL7032 mixed from Tamiya XF23 and XF63. I finally found the reference to that colour in the late war RLM colour thread. The radio equipment appears in some b/w pictures in a different colour than the quite bright RLM02. The rear seat was painted in three stages with Vallejo colours:

First dark brown base, followed by a very thin coat of beige on the "mountains" of the surface and finally blending with beige via drybrushing.

 

Since I'm still pushing the painting of the instrument faces along, I turned my attention to the MG15. The black base was followed by dark brown for the rear end which was made of bakelite. I added some structure to the brown with a light brown pencil. The barrel cover recieved three coats of brown to show the wrinkles but the rear still needs paint.

The shell collector bag needs some colour, too. I'm not sure wheter it'll be brown or something like field-grey. The metal parts were carefully polished with graphite from a soft pencil.

Unfortunately the effect disappears in the picture. I'll try to shoot a better one later on.