For my Early War (and later) German Tank army I decided to get a box of Battlefront stukas. (I will post some pics soon). The Stuka was a Dive bomber. A plane that delivers it's deadly pay load by going into a steep near vertical dive on the target then releases its bombs then climbs up and away. The Stuka also had a device that would emit a loud howling scream as it closed with its target.
Mounting them.
I have some Hurricanes in my collection but found the stand that they plug into would snap with average gamer handling. After playing in CANCON 2010 I had an opponnent who had the same problem so I decided to try a different way to mount them onto the stands.
I decided some Rare Earth Magnets from one of the Tank box sets might do the trick. Taking the taller stands I cut off the tip that inserts into the airplane model. This gave me a bigger area to super glue on one of the magnets. I was going to carve out a bigger hole under the Stuka model for another Rare Earth magnet but instead just cut a small piece of tin and glued it over the hole. While not as strong as 2 Rare Earth magnets joining it seems to do the trick so far.
The Stukas
The box comes with parts to make 2 versions. One with under wing cannons or with under wing bombs. The army list oprions in Blitzkreig only allows for the bomb dropping version. (The under wing cannon version came later). The box comes with 6 bombs. After a bit of quick internet searching on exactly where to mount the bombs I ended up with the obvious really. 1 bomb under each wing. A lot of the images I found though tended to have 1 large bomb under the fuselage and 2 smaller bombs on each under wing mount. It was interesting to see that under the plane is a device for helping the largest bomb leap clear of the propeller when it is released.
Painting
I got the colours to get from the Art of War 2 and went down to my local hobby shop to find one was not there. I decided to just substitute rather than wait and get the exact same colour. Turns out that even with my brighter substituted colour once the camo pattern is on the contrast is very low.
By the way if you are going to do some goggling on Stukas I found it way better to type in JU-87 rather than Stuka.
Cool. Saturday Morning…..no where to go and nothing important to do.
Time for getting back to work on the Stukas.
During the previous week I had managed to get the yellow on after laying down a white base first. I didn’t measure my yellow stripe on the fuselage but in retrospect probably should have did this part more carefully and planned it a bit better. I just used my eyeball judgement and it turned out OK luckily enough.
Was a bit of a suck week as I had this flu bug thingy hitting me hard so it kept me away from Man Cave
On Friday night I actually gloss varnished all the areas that are going to get decals to help avoid any silvering problems. I had a little time to do this in the evening after going with the family to see ‘Narnia 3’ in 3D.
Saturday mornings goal was to get all the decals on. This (as always) takes a lot longer than I plan for and requires a lot of concentration. Each one has to be placed just right as the square nature of the symbols and text is a dead give away if they go crooked. I had a few scary moments when 2 decals accidentally doubled over onto themselves….dooh!
I decided that I would darken the letters/numbers that would appear over the yellow strip. I saw this in some reference images. I think I did an OK job but far from perfect. I actually painted a little white on the white crosses on the wings as well as the decal looked a little spotty when I inspected it closely.
It wasn’t long before the air-con had to go on as the day started to go from…really hot to fricken hot. It not so much the heat but the combination with the high humidity that starts to make me very uncomfortable.
I used German Camo Beige or something like that to add a bit of dust and dirt to the under side and very little on the top side.
After painting on some Vallejo Matt Varnish I thought yeah why not gloss up the glass bits with some gloss varnish? So I did. I liked the result so I will have to do this to my Hurricanes one day soon as well and will do it to any future air planes I build.
I learnt a lot from this project and would do it slightly different if I make any more Stukas. I still plan to get some sand and stones on the base and flock em as well.
Close up of under side to show the small tin tab over the hole for the stand.
Cheers
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