Ok there's probably been a lot of discussion about this already but when I did my search I could find nothing conclusive. Since I have both the Trimaster and Tamiya kits I wanted an answer as to which kit had the most accurate horizontal stabilisers so here's what I did. I took my trusty vernier callipers and measured along the trailing edge of a single side of both stabilisers. The Trimaster kit stabiliser is 35.7mm in width and the Tamiya kit stabiliser is 27.5mm in width. So the implied difference in width on the real aircraft is about 380mm on each side.

Now, as has been noted in other posts on other forums the Trimaster stabiliser matches the 1/48 scale drawings in Aero Detail 10 reasonably closely, but I did not see anybody asking if the drawings themselves were correct. What I wanted were drawings with written dimensions on them but since I didn't have any with this I needed to get creative. The question I asked myself was are there any observations that I can make which I can trust. Now, both of the vertical tails in each kit are pretty close in height, and, to the extent that I could trust them, they both matched the Aerodetail drawings, so I decided to use this as reference. The Trimaster vertical stabiliser height is 30.3mm and the Tamiya kit is 29.8mm. I could then calculate the ratio of the horizontal stabiliser to the height of the vertical stabiliser. Making this calculation on the Trimaster kit i got a ratio of 1.17, and on the Tamiya kit I got 0.92.

Armed with this information I then sought out other drawings I had in my reference material and made the same calculation. Here's what I found:

* Aero Detail 10, page 87, front elevation gives a ratio of 1.16
* Forsyth and Creek, He 162 Spatz, Page 34 gives a ratio of 1.18
* Forsyth and Creek, He 162 Spatz, Page 136 gives a ratio of 1.18

One would tend to think that the Trimaster kit, being consistent with several drawings, is closer to the mark. But I did not stop there. The final arbiter of this must be the aircraft itself. So I looked for photos where I could make a similar comparison being mindful that parallax could cause the ratio to be overstated slightly. Here's what I found:

* Aero Detail 10, page 69, image 112 shows a rear view of the aircraft in the Imperial War Museum in London. Using this photo I got a ratio of 1.06
* Forsyth and Creek, He 162 Spatz, Page 100 shows a rear view of a 3/JG1 aircraft. Using this photo I got a ratio of 1.06

* Forsyth and Creek, He 162 Spatz, Page 1117 shows a rear view of W.Nr 120095. Using this photo I got a ratio of 1.05. Now, this is a good photo as it's taken from a greater distance so the parallax effect is reduced.


So from an examination of the photos one would conclude that the drawings are wrong.

Bringing all of this together my conclusion is that in 1/48 scale the length of a single side of the horizontal stabiliser should be about to 31.7mm Therefore both kits are wrong. The Trimaster kit, while it seems to match the drawings I have does not agree with the photographic evidence. It's about 4.0mm too long on each side. The Tamiya kit does not match any of the drawings I have, nor does it match the photographic evidence and is about 4.2mm too short. It looks like when I get around to building these kits, I'll have to correct both.

I agree there seems to be a lot of strage things going on with the tailplane chord... I planned on avoiding these trouble by using the what-if intended V tail of the Dragon on the Tamiya kit...

For the rest of the fuselage, the Tamiya is far superior in cross-section to the Dragon kit, with far better canopy/fuselage cross-section proportions, especially for the canopy, despite a slightly too wide radius on top of the Tamiya kit canopy (no big deal).

Here is a thread with some photos of this issue:

http://www.network54.com/Forum/149674/thread/1270258155/1270413927/If+you+had+to+choose+in+1-48th%2C........the+Dragon+OR+Tamiya+HE-162........and+why------

This is the Dragon kit with Squadron canopy and another photo:

http://hyperscale.com/features/2002/images/he162air_3.jpg
http://www.warbirdphotographs.com/LCBW11/He162-31af+s.jpg

Tamiya side view (Model by Kelly Jamison):

http://www.cybermodeler.com/hobby/builds/tam/images/tam_61097_07.jpg


By Ben Brown:

http://modelingmadness.com/reviews/axis/luft/brown162d.jpg


Besides the tailplanes, there is sometimes an apparent mismatch of the general profile appearance, but with the kit in hand it is actually a pretty good match in that overall profile appearance to this following photo, except for the tailplanes (it is much more dicey to overlay photo to photo: The actual kit in hand vs photo is much more telling) :

http://www.warbirdphotographs.com/LCBW3/he162-003.jpg

The Tamiya He-162 is clearly one of their best kits, and superceeds the Dragon by far for the cross-section alone. The heavy outside framing on the canopy is a disapointing detail error however, and the tailplanes are not an easy fix.

Gaston

P.S. I measured roughly on photo the lack of Tamiya tailfin/rudder chord at slightly under 4 mm: 3.6 or 3.8 mm or thereabouts, with 1.5 mm of that in the fixed fin portion itself...

G.

I had found a photo on the web of a real He-162 tail stand on edge. I photographed the Tamiya and DML tails. I was interested in the span, since, being the large measurement, would be the most apparent if off. I therefore adjusted the model parts photos so the chord matched the chord of the real tail photo and put them next to each other to compare spans. See the following thread over on Hyperscale....


http://www.network54.com/Forum/149674/message/1221776530/

One must be very careful when studying photographs and trying to estimate dimensions. A photograph taken with an unknown camera with unknown lens errors and then reproduced an unknown number of times before being printed by an unknown printing process with still more unknown lens distortions cannot be used for any kind of precision measurement process. The margin of error is larger than the longest length of any 1/48 kit part. Photos may usefully be used for proportion and general configuration only.

As long as the model looks in proportion and looks like its subject, then it is a successful model. Remember that we deal with representations, not recreations. Fussing over fractions of a milimetre in span when right beside that 'inaccurate span' is a panel line that would be centimetres wide and deep at full scale is ludicrous. Why cheerfully accept inaccuracies in one part of the model while obsessively trying to correct others?

At the end of the day, relax and repeat the Monty Python mantra: It' s only a model.

I agree! I was not attempting to attain certaintude, my exercise was for myself to determine which looked proportionally better, not whether Tamiya or DML was more accurate in terms of being exact scale. For my purposes, I was happier with Tamiya and left it at that, and I hope other will take it in that spirit.

I alluded to the problem of photo VS photo comparisons, which is indeed very sensitive to lens and distance circumstances: With model in hand directly overlaid to a square angle photo, the margin is nowhere near what you say, and is in fact barely more than one scale inch on a fighter-sized aircraft: 0.5 to 0.7 mm in 1:48 over a 15-20 cm model...

The reason why this is so is that for most photos you can displace the model in relation to your one open eye to replicate quite exactly the remaining lens distortion effect at square angles, and even pick out some very small discrepancies at some of the slanted 3/4 view angles, minus very projecting parts like wingtips or tank gun barrels... I easily spotted from slanted photos that the Jagdtiger glacis plate was 2.75 to 3 inches inches shorter than the King Tiger glacis plate (against the opinion of all the "experts"). The actual measurement was 2.75 inches (51.75 inches KT vs 49 inches JT): Within my quater inch margin of error by photos alone on both tanks...

The effects of lens distortion are also very easy to spot because they affect the entire image: That is not the case in distortions caused AFTER development, by scanning a curved book page for instance, because these can affect only part of the image and not the whole...

Broad panel lines seem to me to not be so much of a problem in 1:48th scale (especially with no wash), but they are in 1:32 scale, where the scale is such you would expect to see imperfections in the metal around rivets, and especially the common overlapping skin thickness always.

Gaston