Hello everyone, these are a few preliminary pictures of a build that might finally go to the end some day...

It has been going on and off for over 11 years (but only two off years maybe...), this cockpit actually traveling through 7 + fuselages, if not more... The problems have been mainly the multiple cross-sectional errors of all the previously best-made Me-109Gs, mostly the Hasegawa series(the Revell G-10 was much sounder overall, but also much cruder-looking, especially in the clear parts).

Here the Otaki nose does not have its current more correct shape, but the Hasegawa rear fuselage and clear parts have been altered to the correct 27 mm depth and 13 mm width, in addition to the spine being sharpened from the inside by taking out a curving peak of 0.6 mm per inside mating surface at frame #4, as I measured on CAM's Me-109F... (The error in spine thickness peaked there at nearly 30%...)

It looks very rough still but it illustrates all the nightmare that needed to be dealt with before the Zvezda Me-109 came about... (ICM wingtips were used here, and note that the Eduard's Me-110G very good spinner (the best until then) has been utterly defeated by the far better Zvezda part which will replace it: The Eduard G spinner prop slots are FAR too large and carry way too much forward!)

Note my Otaki nose now has quite a bit more top profile downslope, and a better undernose shape to what is here...

http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj284/gaston11_2008/0052.jpg?t=1276143400

http://www.warbirdphotographs.com/LCBW7/Me109-135f.jpg

It is difficult to see because of the poor photos and the tape, but the fuselage height added is about 0.5 mm at canopy front and 1 mm at the canopy rear: There is this needed "tapering", which forced adding to the wing leading edges to keep the belly from "climbing" too much: This seems to match the actual aircraft which may have a thicker main wingspar than the Hasegawa kit, and FAR thicker than the Revell G-10!

The wing leading edges had to be sharpened after adding 0.5 mm from the wingroot tapering to 0 about mid-way into the slats. Overall the more pronounced "curvature" effect does look correct...


http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj284/gaston11_2008/0043.jpg

Note the off-center radiator has been mostly fixed...:

http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj284/gaston11_2008/0068.jpg?t=1276491687

You can see the cut "doglegging" into the widshield's side frame, which allowed narrowing the canopy symmetrically without really narrowing the Hasegawa windshield portion itself:

http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj284/gaston11_2008/0065.jpg

A few more details in this thread:

http://www.swannysmodels.com/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1261789178

The Zvezda kit does look to be everything we expect, and no quality control issues at all on mine (the props are amazingly thin and properly twisted, and the wheels are super-crisp despite photos seemingly suggesting otherwise): The undernose area is viciously hard to get "right", so we will have to wait for built models to see...

Hopefully I will get futher ahead later...

Gaston

Hi Gaston

11 years! I think everyone will admire your patience on this one...

Did the old Airfix Bf 109F ever figure in your plans for constructing an accurate airframe? I've aften read that it's dimensionally more accurate than the Hasegawa kits and, by comparison with the amount of surgery you're doing, rescribing the predominently raised panel lines would be a cinch.

All the best

Rowan

Thanks Rowan!

I inspected the Airfix kit in the box and I did not find it encouraging: I might have been wrong, as Konrad Shreier did a very impressive build of the Airfix kit, visible in the "the assembly line" in the "Track 48" site of all places...

Here's a link:

http://www.network54.com/Forum/433828/thread/1272380647/last-1273944009/Armor%27s+Nemesis+-+Warning+AC+Content

And a photo of it if the link doesn't work:

http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j132/koschrei/ClearProp007CC.jpg

I think I found the prospect of rescribing all those vertical joints in the tail too daunting to do on something so small... Re-scribing is easy on large bombers, but 1/48th fighters are too much for me, especially a small one like this!... Without the Hasegawa kit option, or with the full knowledge of all its terrible cross-section problems, I would have gone for the somewhat workable Revell G-10 instead, which is at least engraved, but it has some huge problems of its own...

The new Zvezda kit is really the first plausibly accurate, and buildable as such, model of the Me-109 in any scale ever offered: Quite a delayed feat I would think, but then most mid/late-war 1/48th US fighters, F4U Corsair excepted, have severe problems no one has tried to fix in any builds yet: The P-38J/L's engine cowls, the P-51B/D's and P-47D's canopies, the P-40's nose/prop/spinner/intake, the Eduard Hellcat's unfixable windshield and nose slope profile issues, not to mention the still poor cowl face... And we are still short of an accurate 1/48th Spitfire, especially the later ones which are truly abyssmal... So, from my point of view, the build options in 1/48th fighters are very limited compared to even older bomber kits in the same scale, or the excellent 1/32 scale fighters that have come out in rapid succession recently...

The best 1/48th scale fighter-sized (besides the Tamiya F4U, Hasegawa FW-190A-5+ and Zvezda's new Me-109F) aircraft kit I have ever seen is a kit of something called the C6N "Saiun" by Hasegawa...

Weird choice of priority in accuracy excellence, but so it goes...

At least with the recent Hasegawa 190s and Zvezda 109s, things are finally improving in the right direction on the basic 1/48th scale WWII stuff...

Gaston

More progress on the Me-109G-2 kitbash here:

http://www.swannysmodels.com/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1261789178

Gaston