¹⁄48

Junkers Ju 87B

Here’s my Stuka 1/48 diorama which I finished in April 2008.

The kit is of typical Hasegawa quality apart from some slight fitting problems in the horizontal tails.The thick triangles Hasegawa provided as wing control surface actuators didn”t appeal to me at all, so I replaced them with styrene rod.I also cut off all the control surfaces in the tail and changed them direction for greater realism.Some other tiny changes involved the reconstruction of the bomb release trapese and the aileron mass balance with photo-etched.In addition,instead of masking and painting the canopy, I chose to paint thin strips of black adhesive tape and it showed much better this way!The cockpit was painted RLM 02 and was weathered accordingly.Painting the Stuka in its marvelous Northern Africa camo (also adopted by 1./STG3 for some of its planes which saw action there)with my freshly bought Badger 150 airbrush, was both a challenging and enjoyable task.Trying to achieve these dots with a free hand, brought my nerves to their limits though!!The decals from the kit fitted nicely except for the “7” and the swastikas which were airbrushed with masks.At this point I should mention that Gunze colors have always been my favorite.

As for the diorama itself it involves a Hasegawa bomb loading cart and two figures,some barrels from the spares and some unused…pens.Almost all sand bags were made of epoxy putty.Last but not least, the table and boxes were made out of balsa wood.Finally the base was painted mixing different sand and yellow shades and ….and that”s all!!!A depressing black and white photo taken in a plane cemetery in summer 1945(?)showing this very ugly bird almost in ruins, gave me the motive to give life to it,at least in plastic reality…Panagiotis.

(P.S.The idea of how to achieve this troublesome but also spectacular paint pattern was given to me by N. Kavathas in his 1/24 Airfix Stuka kit building back in 1988! It was also to him that I devoted my gold medal for this diorama in the IPMS exhibition last year).