Me-262 is one of my favourite airplanes – for its smooth shapes, elegant construction and allover supertemporal design too. I made several shots of my older “262”. This kit was very nice in the box – but really not simple to build – especially that very thin edges of the upper wing sections connecting to the fuselage. These places swallowed a lot of patiency, but were really the only issue I remember.
1. Construction
The EDUARD photoetched parts were used mainly in cockpit, then some thin wires as tubing and wiring – inside the fuselage center section, nose armament section and the added radio compartment too. Two small air-inlets were added on the upper-front engine nacelles – made of very thin metal foil (from the old capacitor inside rolled plates).
Schwalbe has many draw-bars as part of its control mechanizm – well visible through the relatively large openings for the main undercarriage wheels. All those thin rods had to be added into nearly empty fuselage inner space – just under the cylindrical cockpit tub. The draw-bars were made of proper injection needles. I omitted the radio compartment hatch cover and the forward guiding chute for spent 30mm gun cartridges – to make it feel like the maintenance is under way.
2. Painting and Finish
No decalling was used – all the German crosses, swastikas (covered on my photographs) and characters were airbrushed – all the shapes were drawn on the PC via Adobe Illustrator software, then plotted/cut into masking foil. The B3 letters were hand-drawn with a thin drawing-ink (black) pen. The red walkway lines were masked using TAMIYA masking tape and airbrushed red. All the surface was very lightly water-sanded and oversprayed using the matt varnish. All the position lights are the 5-minute epoxy “drops”.
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Model, Images and Text Copyright © 2011 by Marcel Meres