Junkers Ju 88A-4 by Peter Kormos (Revell 1/48)

Revell's 1/48 scale
Junkers Ju 88A-4

by Peter Kormos

Junkers Ju 88A-4

Shanghai Dragon's 1/48 scale Ju 88A-4 is available online from Squadron

Construction

Here is my Junkers Ju 88A-4 kit from Revell.

For detailing, I used the #48246 Eduard photo etched set, the Aires resin cockpit. Also I made a lot of home made items that were built into the kit.

The following table contains the summary of these home made items:

Cockpit	87
Main gear bays	2 x 31
Tail gear bay	88
Engines	2 x 9
Lights/Clear parts	10
Other external surfaces	78

Construction

First, I separated the control surfaces from the horizontal and vertical stabilizers. The resulting gaps were then filled with stretched sprue and filler.

I wanted to assemble the fuselage (without the cockpit area) and wings as soon as possible so that the glue I use for holding the parts together would have time for setting. So I detailed the tail and main gear bays as best as I could and started to glue things together.

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images:

The model is definitely not a shake-and-bake kit, but with patience most of the fit problems can be corrected. On some areas I had to shave away some plastic on others I had to use filler to blend the connecting parts together.

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images:

One can find little surface imperfections here and there, but the most noticable is the mis-aligned panel lines on the belly and - as Mr. Floyd Werner highlighted in his recent Mistel articles - is the fit of the wing tips. Unfortunately, I glued the wing tips together so a good amount of time was spent to eliminate the step between the wingtip and the wing.

The prominent fuel filler cups are also missing on the fuselage spine, so I used custom made templated to re-scribe these details.

Before painting, I sprayed Gunze Mr Surfacer to have an even surface and the rivet lines were reproduced based on the line drawings of the AeroDetail booklet.

Painting and Markings

I used Gunze acrylics for the camouflage. "Hard" edge demarcation line between the original RLM70/71/65 camouflage was achieved with a combination of paper masks and Blue-tac. Next came the RLM79 color and sun faded all RLM 70/71/79/65 colors (but almost nothing is visible from that after the wave-pattern was applied).

RLM79 and the wellenmüster (or wave-pattern) was sprayed on free hand with my good old Holding airbrush using the fine 0,2 mm nozzle and needle. The paint was first thinned in about a ratio of 1:5 and the air pressure was reduced a little bit under 1 Bar. Here and there the paint run or the squiggle happened to be too wide. On these places, I overpainted the squggles with the underlying color, and then re applied them. Some places I had to do this again and again 2-3 times until I was satisfied.

I used markings from an XtraDecal sheet (#X01348) and some of the kit decals that went on without any problem.

For the exhaust stains, I used a combination of black, brown and grey acrylics from Gunze and Tamiya, oil stains were replicated with black and burnt umbre artists oils.

References

Squadron/Signal Ju88 Part1

Aero Detail Ju88

http://www.ju88.net/

Conclusion & Acknowledgements

I am not 100% happy the way the wave-pattern turned out, but I can live with it. While I was building the kit, I promised myself not to build any more Ju88 kits from Revell (aka. ProModeler), because of the fit issues and some missing details. Well, after finishing this model I'm not that certain any more... ;-) but first, I'll finish my pending projects... and then... who knows....

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank my good friend Károly Brassai for lending me his Squadron/Signal booklet, and my internet friends: Charles Green, David E. Brown, Kevin Meadows, Ákos Szabó and the kind members of the TOCH message borard for helping me in the research phase.