Revell 1/32 Ju88 German Bomber

I never had much of an interest in German bombers from World War II, although I do have a fascination for anything aviation during World War II, but I saw this kit in a hobby and it immediately caught my interest. I had built Skill Level 2 and Skill Level 3 models before, but this one was a Skill Level 5. I was curious what made the skill level 5 different than the skill level 3 so I had to check it out. There wasn't much of a difference except the skill level 5 has more detail which makes it a little more complex, but all in all, it was just another really good model. And I think it turned out well.

 

The cockpit was fairly straight forward with a good amount of detail. Looking back I probably wouldn't have used so much of one shade of gray or so many "bright" colors such as on the green bomb sight, but it still looks ok. I dry brushed the streaks of silver to give the surfaces more of a scratched look. If you don't know what dry brushing is, I'll have to write an article about it. It works well.

 

Even the pilot's seat had some impressive details on it. Unfortunately once it's installed, you can't see any of it.

 

 

 

I chose to display the model with the ailerons positioned in a slight left turn as if the pilot had pushed against the yoke when he left the airplane. Thats why the control yoke is slightly tilted. I like the little details of this assembly, such as the little bit of piston protruding from the the brake cylinder behind the pedals.

 

 

 

This picture shows the difference between two methods of creating shining Oleo pistons. The piston on the left is simply painted silver. If you look close you can see the texture of the plastic underneath the paint and this doesn't have nearly the amount of shine that an Oleo piston would have. The piston on the right is actually aluminum foil wrapped around the plastic glued in place with CA. This results in a very realistic appearance, basically because it is in fact shiny aluminum. You can see a lot more of the dry brushing technique here again, assuming that this aircraft would have taken off from grass fields and may have had rocks and dirt fly up into the wheel well that would scratch it up.

 







One thing that did greatly impress me was the instrument panel. The kit came with pretty good decals for the instruments and they fit in their proper positions well. Handling decals this small takes some patience, but the result was well worth it. Again, unfortunately they can barely be seen in the assembled model.

 

 

And now for the biggest pain in any model airplane, and this one had plenty of pains involved. The multi-paned canopy and nose bubble led to many many hours of cutting small strips of tape and masking them off. Total I think it took about 16 hours of masking to cover all the panes. To do this, I laid a piece of masking tape on a piece of glass and used a straight edge to cut it into small strips. I started masking these panels with fancy expensive skinny tape (the blue panel at the bottom) but I found the adhesive didn't like to stick to the clear plastic and the strips liked to slide around. Good old cheap masking tape worked the best. This just goes to show that spending a lot of money doesn't always mean that it will work. 

 

Final assembly and seam filling. I read something online about how some modelers will fill and sand the seams and then paint over the seam with silver paint and this will show it the seam is completely filled. This is why there are silver streaks on the model. I didn't find any advantage to doing this because if the seam is still visible and you go to apply more filler, the filler won't stick to the paint, it mixes with it, and when you go to sand it, you end up sanding a blob of paint and filler. Primer would be a better paint to use than silver.

 

 

I had never painted a Dazzle paint scheme before, but always wanted to try. You can't tell by these pictures, but I first painted the light blue color on the bottom of the aircraft. Then I masked it off and painted the light green color. Then by cutting various angled shapes into the tape, I masked off the Dazzled dark green.

 

 

The Dazzle turned out very well. The light blue paint on the bottom is mostly white with a few drops of Floquil Jade (and I do mean a few drops, like with a toothpick) Jade is more of a green color, but when it is diluted with white it makes a really pretty light blue, which goes perfectly with the other colors. Note how I did not take the masking off the clear parts yet. This was in fact the very last step I did on the model. As tempting as it was to pull off all the tape and see how it turned out, I decided it was best to leave in during final assembly and decals to protect it. The last thing you need is to be right at the end and have a stray knife scratch or drop of glue (or accelerator) damage your clear parts.

 

 

These last few pictures show the completed model in all its grandeur. My only regret is that the decal solution I was using was old and didn't really act how it was supposed to. The weathering I added covered it a little, and of course, more silver dry brushing that really added a lot to the finished model.

  Feel free to post comments or ask questions.