More masking

A temp result

Greatly excited I tore off the tapes to see how my fixing round had gone. Apparently it had gone pretty well.

At this point the main paintjob was done, if you ignore the tiny fixables in the tail and the cockpit's edges. Next I'd tackle the various markings on the plane. As everyone knows, I don't bother with decals.

Taping, taping, taping

Following my customs I sliced and diced shapes off of the decal sheet. Those I used to cut painter's tape stencils. The top wings will get just the corners of the Balkenkreuz while the bottoms will have full ones. Naturally the full ones have to be painted in two steps: first the black base, you can see that area in the pic below. Then I'll apply a new stencil for the corners and shoot the white paint through that.

Funnies at work

For some reason (Germans) my decal sheet had no swastika decals for the tail wing, not even split in two. So I misused my workplace and printed a pic of a decal sheet I found online. That one had swastikas. It happened to be the 1st of April and a coworker of mine just happened to be a target of some oh-so-funny pranks already. He went by the printer (which was offline, for whatever reason), turned it on and immediately the machine churned out my printout. "I was just staring at the nazi markings. Is this some kind of an April Fool's?". No, it wasn't but I was amused anyway.

Cutting off such tiny pieces from tape is damn difficult, you know? I ruined three to get two done succesfully. It could've been worse, it always could, but come on....

The yellow ribbon

My Stuka is not supposed to represent any given plane in a given place, time and with a known pilot. That level of (sometimes insanity-inducing) accuracy is something I'll happily leave for others. I wanted my plane to have a yellow band in the tail section, so that's what I did. For a short while I was pondering on doing those potentially cool-looking  yellow > signs o nthe wings as well, as I had seen in some reference pics. For whatever the reason I chose not to.

While I'm writing this all I think I'm missing are the stencils for the markings on the sides (iirc my decal sheet has at least "T6+BB"). After those are cut and applied, I can proceed to spraying some greyblack and white, before doing the last fixes. And that still untouched canopy piece.

Waiting for the paint to dry again

Last evening I quickly cut some lengths of masking tape to protect the surroundings of those places I had inteded to repaint. Apparently it was only to be done on the left side of the model. If my (horrible) memory serves me correctly, that's where I started painting so I guess it explains a lot.

More greenery means that the spring's coming

As a super surprise move I took the badger in my hand in the afternoon already and did all I could to fix my earlier mistakes. While I was doing that I also painted the gun pods green (they could've been dark grey but looking at the pattern, green suits it better). Then I airbrushed the propeller pieces that were still in the sprue. Those I'll fix up when everything else's out of the way.

That's it?

Almost. There are undoubtedly some small (I hope) pieces that I have to manually fix. The last fortress of paintlessness is the cockpit canopy. And I still haven't found the missing piece!

Now I just have to wait for the paint to dry. I guess that I'll leave it for tomorrow, just in case...

Otherwise it's neat, but...

Just like I bragged last week, I applied the dark grey (VMA 71.056 Panzer Dk Grey) paint on the top surfaces of my plane the same evening and a light grey (VMA 71.103 Grey RLM 84) on the bottom surfaces. The next day I tore off my masks and alas!

A minor setback

The pattern was really good, I thought. I was really pleased.
But then I saw that the green (VMA 71.104 Green RLM62) that I had apparently painted a bit too light-handedly got partially torn off near the left wing's base. My guess is that some residue from the bad painter's tape I had had there before was left behind and that ruined it.

I briefly pondered on my options. Either I reapply masking tape here and there and apply another layer of green where needed or I try to make it look "worn through". For whatever reason the second idea doesn't appeal to me much, so I guess I'll go and airbrush a new layer of green to some places.

So the camo pattern may change a bit, in some places the faded green is a bit too faded. In some places it looks really good to me (more natural, I guess). Maybe that's why it would be a good idea to pick up the airbrush and fix up my mess.

At least the beast's belly wasn't troublesome at all. While I painted the bottom I also painted the gun pods with the same grey. When I mask the fixables, I'll mask off the main bodies of the guns so I can apply a green on their front-top subsections while fixing the rest of the plane.

Starting on the splintery camo pattern

Redo

The first thing I did was to tear off the (bad) masking tape I had applied the last time. Then I painted the tail, the hull and parts of the wings with green so widely that all and more that I wanted to be green was green. After this one dried properly, it was easy to pick up the lines-to-be for the camo pattern I intended to have on my Kanonenvogel.

Going on with the tape-mess

Last evening I spent about half an hour by attaching strips of masking tape here and there. Because my idea was that I'd paint accurately, not all the green surfaces needed to be totally blocked. Of course the tiniest green bits were covered to avoid accidental spillage.
If I got the colour #2 airbrushed on the top and side surfaces today, I'd be quite content. After that I'd do the light belly side and later on the decorations like country insignias and the yellow stripes.

Holding my breath

I have to admit that I had postponed and delayed with the painting part of my Stuka project this far. Why did I do that? Because I really wasn't sure if my new Badger would work just like that - plug and play -  with my current setup. To my great (and happy) suprise I found myself sorely mistaken. I didn't have to postpone it any longer, I didn't need to go and buy more crap to get my airbrush running.
So once again we found out that I was worried for nothing. Once again.

The first attempt

Of course using that device differs quite a lot from the old one and the result was obviously "I'm new to this"-like. Maybe I'll do better when I apply some real paint on it. My only excuse for a sucky priming job is that light gray plastic + light gray primer provides quite a bad contrast for someone equipped with as bad eyes as I do.
I trust that my plane's going to look decent at least, in the end.

I started the masking for the camo already, as the photo shows. This time I wasn't going to first coat the whole model with one colour, apply a mask and then recoat the remaining surface area with another colour. I may end up approaching the paintjob a bit differently from this, though.

...errrrwhat?

Oh yes. The canopy. I had finished applying the self-cut masks on the last piece of the canopy and I was just attaching it for painting, when my fingers said sssslip! Then the foremost piece fell somewhere. Even today I've no clue where it ended, as despite my attempts to find it failed miserably.
Everybody knows the legendary carpet monster but my workspace has no carpets, the piece I lost wasn't a sub-millimetre photoetched piece but a damn chunk of the canopy! In the end I gave up my hopes of finding it anymore and moved on to the one-piece part.

Guns and tape

Bordkanone BK 3,7

There's not really much to say about the autocannon assembly, these six-piece units were so simple. Perhaps the most essential deviation from my previous plans was that I glued the pylons into the guns instead of following my earlier plan of gluing them onto the wings. I just thought that in case something goes wrong, it'd be easier to make the studs fit the wings instead of fighting the potentially offset pylons to where the attachment points are in the pods.

Masking tape chaos

Yesterday evening I finally sat down to work on the canopy pieces with some masking tape. After a bit less than 45 mins I had accomplished this much. Three pieces out of four, mostly as nice as they're going to get. There's some potential for fine-tuning still, but as I had feared this would take many painful hours, things have been rolling pretty well so far!

In case this masking doesn't hold or the result ends up sucking in other ways, I still have the one-piece closed canopy as a backup. Though, if I have to revert to it, I'll paint it by hand, for I don't have a third piece to fall back to if that fails as well. Anyway, I do trust that this ends up just fine and all this work on slicing down pieces of tape to one or to millimeter lengths hasn't been in vain.

Wings and tiny bits

Slapping the wing halves together was naturally followed by attaching them in the hull, where they belong. With the tail wing my biggest and most typical problem was getting them level (of course I didn't remember that I could and should have glued the diagonal support pieces in at that time).

Tons of tiny add-ons

There's a load of weird dangly bits in the wings of a Stuka. Especially I was wondering the function of those drop-shaped things, but I guess their names aren't important as long as they get where they ought to be. The long pointy thing on the right wing I assume to be a pitot tube because I couldn't come up with a better guess. The landing gear was assembled before and I glued the tires in their position (this isn't for taxiing aroudn tables or anything *cough*) so I could file them for a standing pose later.

This week's agenda

I almost got to start working on the guns, but didn't quite make it in the end. At the moment they're the only parts missing from the bottom of the plane, I believe. I was thinking if I should paint them and the plane separately because otherwise they block and shadow each other and that only leads into missing spots and messiness. Their attachments I could glue in, though.

Another large question remaining is the cockpit canopy. Open or closed? Right now I am much more interested in the open one, but whichever I end up doing, masking it up is the big issue. It'd be so much easier with a closed one, because the open canopy adds a requirement for protecting the insides as well. Maybe it'd be worth the hassle and effort?

Assembling the airframe

I decided to stick by the potentially debatable choices I made the last time and went on with the show. First I glued the cockpit in the hull and then both hull halves together. Then I slapped the instrument panel (and that thing that goes with it) on its place as well. Last missing piece was that thingie just in front of the gunner's nose.


To simplify my own painting tasks I chose not to attach the propeller in the engine unit yet. I guess it's hardly a surprise that this simple subunit didn't really give problems and after gluing it in its place the setup has started to look more like a plane already.

Gotta hang them guns somewhere

Stuka's instructions pointed next towards the wings so that's what I started on. Apparently the bottom wing piece required some drillig, for the guns I assumed. Pleasantly enough I only got to drill those holes open but I didn't get to clean it up yet. So next I'll do that and work more on the wings.

The arms race goes on and the cockpit gets some decoration

Popping by the toy store

Finally I got around to invest in a new airbrush. Call me mad, if you well, but I got a Badger's Renegade R1V-Velocity. A two-action top-cup thingamagick. It felt pretty nice and sturdy - and it even seemed to accept my existing air hose. Of course I didn't have the time to actually try it out, but what's the hurry anyway?

Fasten the seat belts

Once again I cut a few strips of masking tape to give the pilot and the gunner their seatbelts. All those that go over their laps do seem a bit too wide compared to the last ones I made, those being the shoulder belts for the pilot.  Yeah... Maybe I have to cut those fatties in halves or something to avoid this looking way too ridiculous.

The instrument panel

My approach to the dials was simple: I painted the dial faces black. Originally I had planned to paint some thin white lines to represent various dial needles, but this piece might be a tad small for that... I will be pondering on this before I seal the cockpit, but I doubt that I'll risk ruining it.

Cockpit paintage

From empty promises to actual action

When a model is waiting for some paint on its surface, it needs to get it. Therefore I applied the primer on all the cockpit surfaces so that I shouldn't encounter any "ha ha, funny!" surprises later on. Supposedly.

Primed grey

According to the instructions the cockpit should be painted grey-black. I still had some of that left in my Model Air bottle (note to self: acquire more asap). After it had dried properly, I drybrushed the mg and just about everything else with Vallejo's gunmetal - more or less carefully.

These last two photos from last evening are horrendous as they were taken in a rush and with bad light. My deepest and humblest apologies yet again.

Grey-black

After some serious gunmetalizing

Further development

I was thinking that all those radios, dials, indicators and whatnots could be highlighted a bit. The stick can also be whitish, according to my image search.
Following my weird ways of working, I'm once again going to omit the decals and do everything myself. That means that the dashboard will be done next. The dial faces with black and then some white lines on them, pointing at semirandom directions. It may sound a bit hazardous, but that's how I like to do things.

Also, before I'm going to seal the cockpit inside the hull halves, I'm definitely going to attempt some sort of seat belts for the crew. I'm not going for a "himmel!" effect this time, either, but a "hey, there's seat belts as well!" kind of a reaction instead. All in all: tiny improvements with a small effort, improvements that would annoy me to no end if they were missing. Once again following the finest traditions of the Project Mumblings.