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The
aircraft was flown on its first operational sortie by Wolfgang Späte in this
all over red colour scheme. The aircraft, for those of you not familiar with the
story, was repainted the night before the first operational sortie, as a
surprise for Herr Späte. Needless to say, he was not impressed, and on return
from the sortie, immediately ordered it repainted. I guess the thought of flying
a tomato-coloured target through a sky of enemy planes did not appeal.
This
model was build from the new 1/72 Academy kit, which is very nice and goes
together without any problems. Changes to the kit were basic and there were a
few items unique to this particular aircraft I did not bother with. The changes
I did make were:
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Added
small diameter tube to the gun ports to represent the protruding barrels of the
Mg151 carried by this aircraft.
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Replaced
the kit seat with a resin seat from the True Details Fw190 set – though not
strictly accurate, the difference is not noticeable in this scale.
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Extended
the antenna for the FuG radio on the spine as the kit one is too short.
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Filled
in some spurious panel lines on the rear fuselage
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Added
bracing for the armoured glass
This
aircraft should also have shorter span flaps too, but I did not bother.
Model
was painted with Gunze Sangyo RLM23 (H414). Decals were a mixture of kit decals
for the crosses and stencilling, ALPS custom decals for the fuselage and
underwing factory codes and small V-41 on the tail and the tail swastikas came
from the spares box. As this aircraft only flew one mission in this scheme, I
decided to keep it very clean. I used a thinned oil wash before sealing
everything with a semi-gloss varnish.
Craig
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