1/24 Airfix Bf 109E-3

Gallery Article by Mark Littrell on Sept 3 2009

 

The "ancient" (by modeling standards) Airfix large-scale kits may have many problems, but if you ever get around to building one they make impressive (large!) display pieces. This one is such a large model, but lacks basics like wheel wells, and separate flaps (most modern kits in this size have them!). Most that try to build these old 24th scale
Airfix kits add details to them in some way. This model is more or less dedicated to "Jim," who gave it to me in the first place. He was a fellow modeler and decided to get out of the hobby for a bit and wanted to give his barely-started Airfix 109 a good home. We'd traded a few e-mails and had the same types of ideas on how it should be improved, and what kind of scratch building should be included. He felt it would be in good hands with me, and I have since lost the ability to contact him. If you're reading Jim, drop me a line!

I added a number of custom improvements to the Airfix model. The first step is improving the cockpit. My main intentions were to try painting it properly so I did what I could, especially considering there weren't decals for instruments or even any details on the dials! There was a clear piece, and I did what I could to recreate them with paint. The second step is the engine (attached to the cockpit interior). I recreated the spark plug wiring, rewired the entire engine using narrow wires based on schematics and pictures of the real engine. Third had to be the flaps and slats! I had never done this before in this way. The scale is so large you cannot cut and reposition, you must cut and fill in the missing curve THEN reposition! The fourth major thing I did was to open up one of the gun bays as if it were being serviced. By closing the other gun bay I gained an extra ammo drum for use in a future diorama with crates and parts near the open gun. I gained inspiration from Mark Mallison's 109E build that you can find on the Internet. I built similar wheel well walls to his from plastic card.

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The rounded E-3 canopy is not very good. It does not fit! The square one does. If you sit the E-3 and the E-4 windscreens nose to nose you can see one is noticeably taller than the other at the root. It took a lot of carving/filing off the top of the instrument panel assembly and a lot of work to get the left and right "legs" to reach all the way down to
the fuselage. There are a number of problems if you want to display this with the cowling in place, and I had to overcome some of them, as I wanted a removable cowling. I compromised, and assembled the portion aft of the engine directly onto the fuselage, and left the engine visible but not the guns. It took some thinning of the cowling and some chopping of other parts to make the fit work, but I love being able to take it off and put it on at will! As a parting comment on the build, if you can find resin/plastic wheels do yourself a favor and get them! These rubber monsters are impervious to any form of cutting that does not gouge chunks out, and cannot be sanded!

These plane markings are for Hans Hugo-Witt in JG26, and this paint scheme is rather well known in the model world. I have a single-action airbrush and only do solid coats with it. I masked off the areas I needed and sprayed, and touched up by hand where needed. I made the chevrons and bars by cutting up the decals that came with the kit. The rest were horribly out of register. I ended up getting help from Mike Grant with the knight artwork below the canopy, and then when I was looking at the rest of the decals, found them unsuitable. I recalled Mike Grant also used to stock 1/24th Fw190A and Bf109E stencil packs! I managed to snag one for him from a great price, and ended up using 90% of his decals for this build! However... I needed the white JG26 badge!  I had all the decals but that! I recalled a decal sheet of 1/24th squadrons (about a dozen or two) but I didn't want to waste decals or money, as I will almost certainly never build this large a scale again!  What a culture shock to move from 1/72 and the occasional 1/48 up to 1/24th! J. van Weerden here at ARC Forums had the sheet and had used a different badge, and offered the JG26 portions to me all the way from the Netherlands. Stand up guy, he deserves recognition because the model would look empty without his help!

Mark Littrell

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Photos and text © by Mark Littrell