August's Berta - FINISHED

[K5083]

Since this is to be a Spanish-accented Bertha, I'm calling her Berta.

Typical first-night detail painting. Several pleasant surprises upon starting the Heller 109B. First is the overall delicacy of detail, which is outstanding for a kit of this age. There is a little cockpit sidewall relief detail, which I picked out with black and silver over the base RLM 02. The seat is acceptable. Yellowed-white-decal belts are the only detail added. The cockpit can be mounted in the fuselage from underneath after joining the fuselage halves, which makes it easier to center than the usual process of cementing the cockpit and panel into one side and trying to adjust before it sets while dry-fitting the fuselage halves. The one area where the kit falls down, consistent with most of its contemporaries, is in wheel well detail, or complete lack thereof. I haven't decided whether to at least box in the wells. Neither I nor anybody else ever upskirts my models to ogle the wheel wells, but boxing them in is not that difficult and somewhat satisfying.



Tonight comes the dark wash and I should get the fuselage closed up.

August

[Chris]

Good pick, had this one on the shelf for years.

[K5083]

Assembly proceeds quickly on this delightful little kit. If you haven't built this one, everything you've heard is true; it really is a winner. Compared with a modern kit like an Academy, the parts don't actually force themselves into correct alignment, but they go there willingly.



If I have one slight criticism and tip for any who follow my lead in building this kit, it is that the tailplanes as supplied are swept slightly too forward, so that the elevator hinge line is not exactly straight and perpendicular. To correct this one would have to cut off the locator tabs and sand the tailplane roots at an angle to sweep them back more. I didn't discover this fault until after assembly and the error is slight so I will let it be.

August

[Old_Tonto]

Nice to see an early 109 in the GB.

[K5083]

Satisfactory progress on Berta with major painting finished.





I did decide to box in the wheel wells. For this I needed the thinnest sheet plastic I could find, to line the walls without noticeably shrinking the wells. The thinnest I can find is from yogurt multi-serve packs as shown below. These are vacuformed from about .03" styrene, and my digital calipers tell me they get as thin as .004" on the side walls. They are so thin that they probably couldn't hold yogurt without the label stickers wrapped around them. Enjoy a healthy snack, soak off the stickers and you have about a 6x3" sheet of very thin styrene.



Now to add a little more structure to the wheel wells and do some detail painting.

August

[Clashcityrocker]

Very nice paint on this.

Nigel

[jssel]

Super paint work and a terrific idea on ultra thin plastic.

[PaulBradley]

Looking very nice, August.

[Chris]

She is looking good.

[despondman]

Nice paintwork. Like the idea with the yogurt pot plastic, I'll try and remember that one.

[K5083]

A delight from beginning to end, Berta got finished with the addition of the last few fiddly bits yesterday. And for its time, this kit must have been a fiddly bit champ. Separate oleo scissors on a 1/72 Bf 109? For the 1960s, that was just showing off.

Most of the decals are original Heller, which worked fine after being de-yellowed for a few days in my UV fingernail oven. But Heller didn't capture the magnificent avant-garde numeral style used by the Kondors on these planes so I scanned the correct font in from a reference book and printed my own. I also borrowed the top hat fuselage motif from another unit, just because I like it.

I was careful throughout the build in not breaking off the radio mast behind the cockpit, only to learn in my research that the mast was deleted from 109s sent to Spain. So I had to break it off on purpose.

You can see that my phone camera reinterprets the paint colors differently depending on how much of the red cherry tabletop it picks up. The upper gray is fairly neutral, so the most accurate shots are the 1st, 5th and last.















August

[fredk]

Nice.
I hope my C turns out as well as your B.

[iggie]

That's really neat!

I can see why you liked the Top hat artwork too

[PaulBradley]

Very nice, August!

[TobyC]

Excellent stuff. The Condor markings are most unusual.