Fokker G-1 "Jachtkruiser", MikroMir 1/48

This is where we are heading. I completed this a year ago, and documented the build as I went and am happy to share it here in condensed form (any longer and you'll have to pay me!), as I find the time.  

My hope is that my tips will help others take this kit on, as the G-1 deserves a place in any WWII aircraft collection. The Mikromir kit is a solid limited-run kit, and the fuselage pod design adds a level of complexity, so you will need some experience with these types of kits to take it on. 

I started with... the wheelwells! The corners needed a slight bit of filing to fit in the booms. That boxy bump in the front is where my wing spar will later go, so I suggest you drill holes in the upper/fwd/sides now instead of what I did. You'll see what I mean later. 

Next I built up the booms and wings, but first the incomplete rudder scribing needed cleanup with a UMM-USA SCR-02 and JLC sawblade. Then the rear inside edge needed thinning to match the little lip on the other side. 

The front bulkhead contains a handy slot for a more extensive wing spar than the provided stub, which gave me a sense of security and greatly aided the later alignment. 

For the front spar I found a square brass tube in my collection, here are the dimensions handily provided in both English and metric. The rear bulkhead also has a small slot but needs a hole drilled in the fuselage pod halves to take advantage of it. You'll want to do that now while the fuselage is still transparent! That rear spar was a straightened copper box staple. 

I determined that the most secure spar arrangement would be to replicate the real thing and run it into the forward wheelwell. This would lock the wings in place, establish flat dihedral, and allow rough handling. I managed to fit a drill bit down there, followed by a square file. Nailbiting, but I got it in the right place within the spar pocket and did not break through into the wheelwell. This is what I meant about putting a hole there early on. On the bottom row you can see how sturdy it is, the fuselage pod is not really structural anymore and is along for the ride. Lower right I skipped ahead lest someone try this and curse me because it doesn't fit- after pod assembly, install the front spar and bend it forward a couple of mm with a kink. This allows the wing to align correctly. 

The mask set is needed and much appreciated. You need to first apply them to these interior surfaces using the outside as a guide, and spray the interior color. I chose Tamiya gray primer for this, as it looked good to me. There is no color info provided, and I made some errors later (which see). Bottom left, I moved the PE part 21 to the other side of clear part 90 in step 21 and glued it on later. Bottom right shows the rollover structure, and the rear cone which is not worth masking on the inside. 

Miscellaneous hopping around- using thin sanding film placed on the tail to shape the tailwheel fairing, drilling out the exhausts, and going against the instructions and gluing up the engine nacelles, carefully aligned. 

Tamiya gray primer inside and out then some scribing with a scriber and razor saws. I divided the nacelle circumference by three to find the scribing locations. Also note a sprue spacer in the wingroot. 

A major flaw of the kit in my opinion is the lack of color callouts, as mentioned earlier. I had scant references and was happy to use the kit as a learning experience on the subject, but was left making half-educated guesses. The 72nd kit includes white 3D decals for the radio behind the pilots head for example (and still has no color callouts!) which I now believe was a light color not black. The side one, shown getting a black plastic back in case that could be seen, was likely black. Anyone with knowledge of the detail colors such as the oxygen bottles please let us all know. BTW I had trouble making CA (or any other) adhesive stick to these parts when I tried to add, for example, control cables running down the sides of the control column so gave up. Pneumatic lines also broke off and had to be fished out. Don't know what was going on there, it was very odd. Rudder straps were later painted brown leather. 

The interior components. Note that the one of the "pipes" on the edge of the pilots cockpit has broken off. It wouldn't stay repaired so I later glued it to the fuselage sidewall through the cockpit opening. 

Interiors installed. I drew pencil shadow lines on the grid-like PE framework floor under the center section to give it some depth. The gray you see on the inside windows is the canopy masks applied to the outside. 

Get out your sanding sticks to remove these extra crests on the fuselage- it should have a smooth oval cross-section. Then some rescribing and pushing in of rivets with a beading tool. You can see it's kind of weird sanding the primer off a clear part, revealing the same color primer on the other side! The front brass spar was pushed through and kinked forward as described earlier, the rear copper spar was also installed. 

The make or break moment when it all came together and jigging and geometry checking were the order of the day, aided greatly by all the prior prep and assembly work. This was done in two stages. The first was epoxying the spars in while gluing the horizontal tail on. The paint jar and magnifying glass are there for weight, the gray squares are for jig height, and the calipers are for tail parallel jigging. Once that was set, I tweaked the fuselage pod a bit and flooded the joint with Tamiya extra thin. 

A total of 36 (!) exhausts need to be carefully glued to the engine fronts, here test-fitted in place to ensure the proper length (they are to touch the front collector ring). Two legths of brass wire were added to the clear tailcone to replicate the hinges. I replaced the machine gun with a German resin one which more closely matched a reference drawing I used, the kit one is at the bottom. The canopy was packed with poster tack and sawed apart. Only the windscreen was used. Putty was needed at the tailcone, and the other windows along the centerline were thick and tricky to fit. 

The props were enhanced with a length of vinyl wrapped around the center post, extending a bit forward of it. Then mass balances were added from sliced plastic rod stock and the props were assembled on a jig. These would later be painted gloss black lacquer and Alclad II polished aluminum. 

My paint choice would have to be based on finding a good match for that elusive Dutch Camo Beige, which used to be depicted as a yellowish sand and is now accepted as closer to FS26360. When I tested Tamiya XF-55 I knew I had it. For the green I chose XF-58, here showing variation among three different bottles. For the brown I mixed some X-3 Royal Blue into XF-10 Brown to tone down the orange tint. Due to a poor choice of thinner I wasn't getting the finest lines that day, but it was acceptable. The camo diagram contains several errors, including a reversal of the brown and green FS numbers and the incorrect correspondence of pattern to airframe number. The "319" scheme shown was close to the early scheme I was after for 311. Apparently the scheme changed every 4 airframes.