"Tante Ju"
on skies and floats
I always buy multiple
copies of anything I want to build. This is a simple recognition of reality,
experience, and Murphy’s Law as applied to modeling. If I don’t get at least
one extra donor kit, I’ll find myself with a broken or lost part at a critical
moment, and, upon trying to obtain the belated back-up copy, discover that the
kit has been discontinued or has, amazingly, become one of the few items on Ebay
that really and truly IS rare and hard to find.
Leaving nothing to
chance, I picked up four copies of this inexpensive little gem from Eduard back
in 2006; two floatplanes, and two troop transports with conventional landing
gears or skis. As expected, my first attempt was a total loss, and chalked up to
experience. A few parts were salvaged and set aside for later. The second copy
was completed to what I would call a satisfactory if not ARC-homepage-worthy
standard, but I had to cannibalize a third kit to finish it.
The two planes
featured in this article were more or less cobbled together from the last
remaining complete kit and the leftover spare parts from the other three copies.
By the time I got around to them, I’d graduated from hand-brushing everything
on a regular basis to air-brushing as SOP, and my modeling skills had generally
improved. These were also the last two models I finished before undergoing eye
surgery (cataract removal and lens replacement) in April of 2010. I would no
longer be able to build anything so small afterwards, as the extreme
near-sightedness that allowed me to use my naked eyes as natural magnifying
glasses was “corrected,” to where I must now use some sort of optical aid
for any type of close work.
Click on
images below to see larger images
The troop transport on skies represents a JU 52 3m KG.r 500 from the Russian front during the winter of 1942/3, such as those employed to help relieve the besieged Kessel at Stalingrad. Tamiya AS 5 Luftwaffe Light Blue was sprayed directly from the rattle can for the undersides, with Tamiya Fine White Surface Primer on top, glossed with Polly Scale Clear Gloss before and after decaling, followed up with a light coat of PS Clear Flat. Markings come from the superlative Propagteam sheet included with the kit.
The float plane is a JU-52 3m g5e of the Luftstransportstaffel (See) 1, which saw service on the Black Sea in 1943/44. Kit-supplied Propagteam decals were used, and went on without any trouble. I used Polly Scale RLM 71 (green) and 70 (black green) for the “splinter camo” over Tamiya AS 5 underside. Note the photo-etched ladder at the port side door. By the time I got around to this one, I was out of clean clear-plastic parts, and had to struggle to mask the 18 tiny panels on the canopy. (Technically, there are 20 discreet panels, but in this scale, whose counting?) I found it useful to black out the clear parts from the inside, which made masking much easier, and allowed for a more realistic scale effect.
So, now you know the extent of my adventures in 1/144 scale. While I’ll never be able to work on anything so small again, I figure if I could wrestle these Lilliputian beasts to a draw, I should be able to do anything in the larger scales. Hope you like ‘em!
Jerry Hawhee (Old Blind Dog)
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