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


Fanes

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Yesterday's wheater was too good for model building, so I did some road cycling.

With some new motivation I hit the engine nacelle again. I spare you the pictures of scraping, sanding, filling and so on. I wasn't even finished when I took the pictures.

 

A quite prominent feature of the 110 is the engine instrument panel. There's two on the inner side of each cowling. Dragon supplies the clear parts surpringsly labelled in a correct way.

But there's always a downside - the dials itself aren't supplied. I used individual dials from MDC, apllied from the inside. Of course the printed side isn't that sticky, so I secured them with some gloss coat.

577273-34859-78.jpg

 

With the cowling in place I did two important dry fits: 1st prop and spinner 2nd Quickboost exhausts.

The former was a bit tricky since there was a huge gap (1.5mm) between spinner and cowling. After some surgery on the Dragon engine everything is fine now.

The Quickboost exhausts are surprisingly a joy to deal with. They look nice and fit the kit parts!

 577274-34859-93.jpg

 

577275-34859-53.jpg

 

Before sttling on glueing the wing halves, I drilled the holes for the drop tanks. Dragon supplies all small parts for the tanks but not the tanks itself :BANGHEAD2:

This quite horribly colourized picture of W.Nr 3454 shows the typical 300l drop tank.

Messerschmitt-Bf-110E3-Zerstorer-2.(H)14

(Source asisbiz.com - not mine, for discussion only)

I went through my stash and found four drop tanks:

577276-34859-10.jpg

 

The upper left is from Revell's Fw 190F-8 (two included) and features in my opinion nice weld seams and okayish detail, but a blunt end. Hasegawa's Bf 109F-4/Trop (right) has a drop tank as well, there are only panel lines, but crisp detail. The Eduard offering (Bf 109E-7), well I don't find anything nice to say..

 

What's your opinion - which drop tanks should I use?
 

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Ahhhh Joachim, if only you had said about the drop tanks I could have sent you some spares that I have from other Dragon kits along with those twiddly handles!  Still yours if you want them, but I'm away in Turkey from tomorrow till 5 March so bit of a long wait I'm afraid.  You may remember from the G4 builds that Andy and I did that we said the engines nacelles are the trickiest part, and that included the modified G4 upper nacelle in resin.  

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20 minutes ago, mozart said:

Ahhhh Joachim, if only you had said about the drop tanks I could have sent you some spares that I have from other Dragon kits along with those twiddly handles!  Still yours if you want them, but I'm away in Turkey from tomorrow till 5 March so bit of a long wait I'm afraid.  You may remember from the G4 builds that Andy and I did that we said the engines nacelles are the trickiest part, and that included the modified G4 upper nacelle in resin.   

I wasn't thinking about the drop tanks and today it was: stupid me, could have asked earlier! If I find nothing until then, you'll get a PM.

I use the (by the way excellent) G4 builds as a reference quite often, but I thought the nacelles were tricky because of the resin parts.
But now I know better :lol:

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2 hours ago, Fanes said:

I wasn't thinking about the drop tanks and today it was: stupid me, could have asked earlier! If I find nothing until then, you'll get a PM.

I use the (by the way excellent) G4 builds as a reference quite often, but I thought the nacelles were tricky because of the resin parts.
But now I know better :lol:

That's fine Joachim, just let me know if you need them. 

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Joachim, nice work so far. 

 

The nacelle instruments are there, just not mentioned in the instructions. They're part G16. They attach to the inner engine cradle so you have to drill a hole in it from the inside. 

 

The nacelles are definitely a fiddly but of work that's for sure. 

 

Carl

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2 hours ago, monthebiff said:

Brilliant work and as Max and I can attest to is that the Dragon nacelles are very difficult, build from the bottom up always!!

Regards. Andy

I started with the lower cowl but couldn't get it to fit properly to the exhaus panel. In the second run I used some (a lot) force and CA to fix the warped lower cowl and fit is indeed a lot better on the other parts, too!

 

1 hour ago, BloorwestSiR said:

Joachim, nice work so far. 

 

The nacelle instruments are there, just not mentioned in the instructions. They're part G16. They attach to the inner engine cradle so you have to drill a hole in it from the inside. 

 

The nacelles are definitely a fiddly but of work that's for sure. 

 

Carl

Thanks Carl - now I found them. In comparison with the decal "solution" I think it's more work to align and paint these dials.

Okay - I have to admit I really like the individual instrument decals :D

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I spent the last weeks on my two Bf 109s and moved on withe landing gear and wheel wells today.
There was an interesting discussion over Shawn's thread on the brake line with a good photo from Mike

So out with the copper wire! I got the first line finished, took a photo and realised that I got it wrong.
Photos of the fixed part will follow later.

 

There's one other thing that I want to tackle in the wheel wells:
The linkage of the door retracting mechanism. In the last group build there was some discussion regarding this thing.

I'll try to do this with my trusted 0.2mm wire and some aluminium foil.

For the springs the wire is coiled up and the eyes of the linkage are done by simply twisting the wire.

I'm not ready for pictures yet, still trying to get the look and the dimensions right - stay tuned for more!

 

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I could spend some time at the bench today and here's the result:

580733-34859-95.jpg

 

The linkage is incredibly fiddly and I get now why you don't see it on most builds.
It's by far not perfect but that's as good as it gets in one afternoon.

Test fit on the wheel well (mounting points on the doors corrected and shortened wires)

580734-34859-97.jpg

 

With some adjustments and cleaning up it may look okayish but this will need a lot of patience!

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