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1/32
FW190 |
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The kit The kit comes in a stout box, with all parts nicely bagged or taped inside. The main bulk of the parts are casted in a pale-yellow colored resin, the fuselage and wings being hollow casted. The resin is really very agreable to work. The main landing gears and tailwheel fork are finely moulded in white metal and the canopy comes as a vacuformed part. Etched parts are provided for the seat belts and rudder pedals. Tubing for the cannon barrels and clear parts for the windscreen are also provided as well as a small strip of copper for the rudder pedal straps. Instructions come on five A4-sized pages.The kit can be bought with or without decals. The level of detail is very good although some may find it soft on a few parts. I was apprehensive about small resin beads here and there but these were easily removed. Air bubbles are very few, almost none in the parts themselves, most of them being trapped in areas that have to be sanded. On opening the box my first impression was of the parts being crudely casted. Patience in the cleaning up is the key issue, resulting in very fine parts. Handling the parts more and more however gives a ever-increasing comforting insight that all is very well engineered and thought. The best example of this is a cleaverly located solid strip of resin along the lower wing root, encompassing the landing gear door opening. This gives strenghth during cleaning up and dry-fitting, being easily removable once the piece has to be glued. Considering the manufacturing process this is a very nice model. |
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| One of the fuselage halves with the treated area colored in pink. Resin is roughly removed with a motortool using bits ranging from coarse to fine. I don't know if resin dust is harmfull, but I always wear a mask and safety glasses when doing this. |
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| The apertures are marked with a small hole or a series of holes as a reference, after which the remaining resin is removed. This is done by scratching the resin with a scalpel blade sanding wet from time to time to keep the surface even. Both methods having the advantage of not producing any annoying resin dust. A vacuum cleaner at hand for the residue and all remains clean. The work is controlled by regularly holding the parts against a light source. The resin can be thinned to almost paper thickness without losing its shape or strenghth. For the gun apertures on the front cowl a line is applied on each side with a fine marker to form a visual guide visible through the resin while thinning. |
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The fuselage mating surfaces are a bit tricky, as some resin residue is on them, making them irregular in places. I first thought of using the sanding method for vacuformed parts: wet sanding the parts on a even surface with a sheet of sanding paper taped on it. Finally I decided to do local sanding, using a flat piece of wood with sanding paper taped on one half. The non abrasive part of the wood rests upon the opposite side while sanding and serves as a guide. The canopy-explosive-tube-gutter (don't know how to say this in another way) on the rear deck will be removed at a later stage. Once satisfied with the fuselage halves these are compared to a 1/32 scale plan. They are spot on!!! The same parts from a mainstream kit manufacturer do not conform to the drawing. Hopefully this will convince the doubtful that this kit is not merely a improved copy of the aforementioned. The drawing was made long before I started this project. It is based on the 1977 A. L. Bentley drawings (still available). After scanning, these were blown up to scale 1/1 and summarily retraced in CorelDraw 9 using the written measurements, the scanned image merely serving as a template for control. Once done the whole drawing was resized to scale 1/32 and plotted out using a HP plotter. That's all for now, I hope this pleases some of you. Being a slow builder the next feature might take a while, how about a laser cutted FW190 jig as a appetizer. |
| © David Vanhoucke |
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