While I was disapointed the model didn't make it into the IMPSJournal, Im glad it wasn't a waste of effort to write this short article on building the Tamiya FW-190 A8 kit in 1/48 scale.
In 1937 the Reich Air Ministries (RLM) put out the call for a new fighter to supplement the highly successful Messerschmitt 109 design. Kurt Tank’s responded with the FW-190. Many innovative technologies were incorporated into Tank’s design. Rather than a liquid cooled engine, whose cooling systems added significant drag and weight, Tank designed the 190 to use a powerful radial engine contained in a streamlined cowling and using a highly innovative propeller fan to keep the engine cool. This kept the 190 light and very aerodynamic. This allowed for the addition of much heavier armament than the 109 had as a standard option. The ailerons were electrically driven, giving the 190 an incredible roll rate. Kurt’s innovations won the contract, and the development of the FW-190 took off in earnest. The production aircraft first flew in June of 1939 but there were problems. The development of a production aircraft from the prototype was slowed by problems with the design, the most serious being excessive engine heat. But Tank was relentless, and each problem was eventually sorted out until finally, in 1941 the first planes were delivered to combat units.
RAF Pilots begin reporting encounters with what was assumed to be ex-French Hawks, but soon enough they realized it was an entirely new aircraft. The early 190 was superior to the Spitfire Mk V and many Spitfires were shot down, causing a panic in the RAF. In 1942 an intact 190 was delivered to the RAF when a pilot became disoriented in combat and mistakenly landed at an RAF base. Careful evaluation of the 190 showed the weakness of the design to be its lack of a super charger.
The RAF discovered that while the combat performance was impressive at low to mid altitudes, it dropped off significantly at altitudes above 15,000 feet. The RAF countered the FW-190s with new tactics and machines. The FW-190’s superiority as a pure fighter on the Western Front was short lived, but the 190 soldiered on to the last.
In late 1942 the Luftwaffe would encounter American medium and heavy bombers. It was quickly realized that the Me-109 was not particularly suited for combat against the American heavies, its single 20mm cannon and light machine guns were optimized for fighting against lightly armored fighters, not heavy bombers bristling with heavy machine guns. The FW-190 was better suited for combat against bombers. Its four 20mm cannon were effective against the heaviest American bombers. While its performance suffered at higher altitudes, it was more than a match for unescorted bombers.
Starting in 1943 the FW-190s were modified to make them more suitable for fighting the American heavy bombers. In early 1944 the FW-190 A-8 was introduced. This version featured a Water Methanol injection system, as well has four 20mm cannon and two 15mm cowling mounted machine guns.
The kit is essentially the same FW-190 F8 kit with a new lower wing that allows for making a A8 (4x 20 mm cannon) or FW-190 A8 R2 (2x 20mm cannon, 2x 30 mm cannon) variant. Also included is the fuselage and canopy armor plate to make an FW-190 A8 R8 version as well as the paddle prop seen on some FW-190 A8 R2/R8s.
I have been wanting to build a detailed FW-190 for quite some time, but wanted to wait for the Eduard kit before deciding which kit would be best to start from. All that changed and I decided really wanted to build this kit after seeing it in the hobby shop, I had an old Cooper Details cockpit in my stash, and plenty of decals, so I decided to build this kit mostly out of the box, using the Cooper details pit (which is designed for it). Since I want to put most of my detailing effort into an FW-190 A8/R2 I decided to make this build a standard FW-190 A8 and keep the extra work to a minimum. The Tamiya kit is perfect for this as its well engineered and simple, thus making construction effort minimal.
I have several decal sheets with markings for Ernst Schröder, for this build I chose the markings from Aeromaster sheet Rammjager Part 4 (48-696) as they were both high quality, and very accurate based on my references.
I first painted the Cooper Details pit. While the pit itself isn’t entirely accurate for a FW-190 A8, It’s close enough. The design of the Cooper pit is very innovative, it comes with various console and Instrument panel parts that fit on a generic pit – this allows you to mix and match to make the pit applicable for any FW-190 A through D. Unfortunately this innovation complicates the assembly some, and you must be careful to ensure there are no seams along the side consoles. Other than filling the seam where the consoles attach, the assembly of the pit was very straight forward. As luck would have it, the photo etch for the buckles was for 1/72 scale, not 1/48 – since Cooper is no longer in business, I couldn’t’ easily obtain the correct etch, However it wasn’t a problem finding replacement buckles in my stash.
The Cooper pit painted up great and I installed it with little effort
I next turned my attention to the wing gun ports. One thing that bothers me about every single FW-190 kit is that the FW-190 wing has a very distinct gun port. I decided to model the gun port using steel micro tubing. This is very easy to do on the Tamiya kit. I simply took a small length of tube and attached it to the wing with CA. The tub
e was then faired in using epoxy putty blended. This results in a very realistic gun port. The gun barrels are steel tubing
I created cowling flaps from thin sheet Aluminum and glued them into place. This results in the cooling flaps being slightly open. The lower edge of the nose fairing doesn't fit will on any of the Tamiya 1/48 scale kits. The easiest method I have found for dealing with this hard to fill gap is to carefully build up the inner edge of the fairing where it is curved using epoxy putty. This results in a perfect fit that requires no additional sanding once set. I have never really liked the look of the molded padding that is fixed to the instrument panel cover. An easy way to improve this part is to remove the molded on padding and replace it with an appropriately sized piece of solder.
The engine was painted dark grey and was drybrushed with silver to highlight the edges some. Spark plug wires were simulated by adding small black colored wires. Adding details to the engine is a complete waste of time as nothing in there is visible on the final model due to a cooling fan which sits in the mouth of the opening at least I know the detail is there.
The bolts that hold the gear door to the landing gear were added and a brake line was added. I also added the electric wires that you can see on the retraction linkage using very fine copper wire.
I used the wheels that were extras in my Hasegawa FW-190 A3 kit. They Hasegawa wheels are slightly larger, and better than the Tamiya wheels
I carefully removed the elevators and posed them slightly deflected. Rivet detail was added to the entire model using a home made tool. Once all the fuselage components were assembled I used my Iwata HP-C airbrust to paint the model with Tamiya acrylics. At this point I applied some post shading consisting of Tamiya paint mixed XF-1:2parts, XF-64:1part and heavily thinned using lacquer thinner.
The thinning ratio I use for post shading is typically between 90% and 150%
Once the base painting was complete, the mottling details were added and the remaining details were painted. Research indicated that the Red ID band on the rear fuselage was a very dark red color, while the fuselage numbers were a brighter red color.
I added black to Pollyscale RLM 23 to make that dark deep red color for the fuselage band.
The model was given a coat of future floor polish which was allowed to dry for a full week before applying decals. Decals were first placed into distilled water to loosen them from their backing and once loose, were set in place using microset.
The use of distilled water prevents any staining of the finish due to dissolved solids that are found in tap water.
After the Decals were set I applied a light wash of darkened oil paint over the entire model. I applied heaver washes in areas that would be subject to dirt and grime and I darkened the control hinge lines. Details were added to the drop tank and ETC rack.
After a flat coat of Pollyscale flat I used a Prismacolor silver pencil to add some minor paint chipping to the wing roots and various service panels. Weatering was then accomplished by adding fine layers of darkened thinner to represent an exhaust stain and variouis oil leaks and streaking was added using thinned oil paint. I also placed the tailwheel so that it would be in a more natural configuration. This is a small but very noticable detail that adds realisim to the model.
There is an interesting detail on this particular plane. Photos of it clearly show a slack antenna wire (as is normal on the Blown hood). Apparently the canopy tension device was broken on this FW-190. The antenna wire is made from invisible thread and was left slack.
With the model finished, it was time to take pictures. The model was photographed with my Nikkon D-200 digital camera using a Macro lens under incandescent lighting.
To make a realistic photo I placed the model on a simple wooden base. The power unit comes in the Tamiya set “GERMAN AIRCRAFT POWER SUPPLY UNIT & KETTERKRAFTRAD”. I built the power unit straight out of the box, painted it with Tamiya paints and weathered it with oil paint washes. I added some chipping and extra dirt to make it look used.
Photoshop was used to remove the color, add some noise and create a sepia filter to make it look like a 1940s era photograph.
If you like realisim, here is a tutorical on how Brett Green, the Editor of Hyperscale created the very realistic composite image(shown above) from my model photograps using the following steps:
1. I adjusted the angle of Frank's original image so that the horizon line on his groundwork was horizontal. This actually makes a surprisingly big difference to the realism of the final product, even if only sub-consciously.
2. The light blue sections of the original image, including all the difficult small areas between aircraft and accumulator trolley parts, were highlighted with the Magic Wand too. The canopy parts were not highlighted at this stage.
3. The blue sections were right clicked and "Select Inverse" was selected. This selection included the "grass" in Frank's photo.
4. I opened a photograph that I took at Berlin Gatow airport a few years ago.
5. I copied the selected area of Frank's model photograph and pasted it onto the Berlin Gatow airport background.
6. The aircraft was moved to a spot where it looked natural (or, at least, possible). If necessary, the aircraft could have been resized smaller or larger, but it looked okay to my eye as it was.
7. The bluish canopy sections were highlighted, the Cut from the image.
8. The canopy sections were then Pasted back into the image and moved back into the correct position. The canopy layer was right clicked from the menu bar on the right hand side of Photoshop, and "Blending Options" was chosen.
9. The "Opacity" bar was slid back to 50%.
10. The aircraft layer was selected and "Auto Adjust" was applied. The hue, colour and saturation were adjusted so that the grass on the pasted patch matched the grass in the Berlin Gatow background photo.
11. Random patches of the pasted grass were deleted (taking care not to interfere with the shadow of the aircraft) to help blend the real and the artificial grass.
11. The edges of the aircraft and grass were highlighted and blurred slightly using Gaussian Blur set to around 1.5.
12. The image was touched up with the clone stamp tool
13. The layers were flattened.
14. The image was resized to 800 pixels wide.
15. The entire image had the Auto Adjust tool applied, plus a few more adjustments to saturation (reduced) and hue (slightly increased).
16. Photo blur (Hexagonal setting, radius of 3) was also applied to the entire image before saving as a .jpg file.
As far as I am concerned, there is no substitute for Photoshop when creating these composite images. It is hideously expensive but fantastically flexible.
Trial and error is the best way to get the most realistic result.
I hope that this will be helpful.
Bye for now,
Brett