Messerschmitt BF 109-E7 from 7/JG 26

 

The whole cockpit was primed using XF-16 "Flat Aluminium". However I had alot of problems with the metallic. It completely clogged my airbrush nozzle. I read that less thinner will help here, since the particles wont settle as fast. After using less thinner, I was kinda able to spray the metallic. I also read that the tamiya paint retarder will help alot but unfortunately I only have the acrylic one and since I need the base layer to create scratches, the base layer should be more resilient than the second acrylic layer and thus I used lacquer thinner. I also thought that the dried paint had a very rough surface. This is of course also bad, since the second acrylic layer will adhere better to the base layer which makes it harder to scratch the paint of. Next time I'll use Mr. Color Silver 8, many people on YouTube use this silver color and it seems to be much better. 

The cockpit is nearly ready to be clear coated, decaled and weathered. In the end I couldn't resist to adding some details like fuel pipes, chains, cables etc. As assumed in the first picture, scratching of the second acrylic layer was quite hard, due to the rough surface of the base layer. Thats why I am not 100% happy with the result but there is no way back now, since this would make the surface horrible uneven and it was my first time trying this technique, so in the end, I learned alot here. All the added details consist out of stretched sprues, soldering lead and copper cables. I should have added them before painting but initially I didn't plan on adding some extra details as previously mentioned. 

Quick modeling tip from someone who went fishing in his very early years. I tied all my fishing rigs myself and because fishermen are very precautious, it was a common practise to thicken the fishing line on the end, so there was no chance for the line to slip through the eye of the hook. This only works properly with monofilament fishing line. To achieve this, hold a lighter close to the end of the fishing line and the line will become shorter, with a drop starting to form on the end. I was thinking how to scrap build the lever of the bf109 to thighten the seatbelts. Doing it with stretched sprue would have been much harder, since it would have been hard, getting the sprue to form a round end. Then I remembered this trick and it worked on the first try, definitely a recommendation if you want to scrap build levers! 

I decided to keep this build completely out of the box. However I thought that the seatbelt decals would look too 2Dish. This is why I cut out the decal precisely, got the dimensions and scratch builded seatbelts out of Tamiya tape. I still used the decals but I applied them over the scratch build ones to give the decals a more realistic look instead of looking flat like a decal 

Finished seatbelts, they might not look perfect but in my opinion they look much better than just the flat decal 

Some pigments were applied, gloss varnish was out on the instrument gauges and the gun sight was glued in place, the cockpit is now finished 

 

All the cockpit components before the two fuselage halfs were joined together. 

While the glue was bonding both fuselage halfs together, I used the time to glue the wing section together. 

As I said, I don‘t want to use any aftermarket product for this build, this means that I also have to mask the canopy myself. Thanks to the easy shapes of the canopy, masking it wasn‘t hard, I only made one minor wrong cut but all in all, compared to my first build, the Eurofighter, I did much better this time, nice to see how my skills evolve! 

Using black pigments, I colored the fresh Milliput putty dark. I did this to fill the gap between the cockpit and the fuselage because it would not have been nice if the model is finished and light is to shine through from the cockpit floor. 

Those gaps have been filled with the dark putty 

If you look closely, the putty can be seen since I didn‘t get it to the same dark grey as the cockpit floor. But in my opinion its not a big deal and certainly much better than a gap with light coming through the cockpit floor. One step that made alot of sense to me, was to mount the wings right after the putty was applied. The reason for that is, I thought that once the putty gets hard and I have any fit issues due to the putty, I‘ll face alot of work to get the hard putty sanded away. Glueing in the wings while the putty is still soft prevents this, as excess putty will be pushed away by the plastic and thus a good fit is guaranteed. 

Wings are glued in place, the color of the inner cockpit side was sprayed on the outside. For the two fixed parts of the canopy this is good enough. For the part that will be in the open position however, I cut out masking tape the same size as the windows of the section and also masked the inside of the canopy because this part is way more visible from all angles.  

The canopy inside was masked off, the 109 is now ready for the primer 

The machine gun on the top engine cowling is probably the worst molded part of this kit. The barrel wasn‘t cylindrical, considering the size, there was quite a big seam line running down the barrel. To counter this issue is not hard, a bit of careful sanding will get rid of the seam line, just be cautious that not too much is sanded away, otherwise you will end up with a semicircle barrel. To add more detail, I used a hipothermic neddle to make a small hole on the end of the barrel. Following that, I started to use my smallest drill and carefully drilled holes in the ends of the two barrels. I slowly worked my way up in the diameter until I thought that the hole is reasonably big. Due to the muzzle brake, drilling the hole needs to be done with alot of care, since the diameter of the barrel gets smaller and drilling too wide or too deep, will leave you with an unusable barrel. Drilling holes will result in uneven plastic and some drilling debris will also get left. To clean up very small parts, the best method is to use a bit of extra thin glue, the glue will melt the debris and levels out the surface. Just a small amount will be enough since alot of glue could melt the whole barrel. 

The elevators, flaps and other fragile parts where not glued in place prior to priming. I thought that this would be the smarter approach since I prime the model to reveal imperfections but sanding them away is much easier if you don‘t have to look out for fragile parts. This was a good idea since I later decided to add missing rivets and this would have been much harder if more control surfaces are glued on. The upper engine cowling was fixed in place using blue tac. I also didn‘t want to glue it in place since the machine gun is under the cowling. This would have resulted in unnecessary masking of the barrels. In retro perspective, I could have primed the model without the engine cowling since it needs to be primed in white anyway because than the yellow color looks nicer. 

The 109 was primed in mr surfacer 1500 (the grey one), some other parts where also primed, this includes to radiators, elevators and the lower engine cowling. The parts who will get painted yellow were primed in white mr surfacer since the white primer will make the yellow more pronounced. 

The model after priming. All the sanded spots on the model are due to my incompetence on rescribing panel lines 😄 I imagined that I'm like Plasmo and tried to rescribe the panel lines only using a razor saw. The fact that I rescribed for my first time, led to some mistakes, were the blade jumped out of the panel line. I need to mention however, that this model wouldn't need to be rescribed, I just wanted to try it and thought it might be a good lesson, which it definitely was in the end, you learn the most out of your mistakes and challenges as they say 

Quick tip for your future build of this model: not glueing in the upper and lower engine cowling will give you a good point to hold the model while painting. The parts fit so good that it‘s no big deal to glue them in after the painting has been done and it will make your life alot easier.  

I decided to try some riveting. I really struggled with the trumpeter tool because it is very unstable and gives you a very bad view, thus I modified it a bit (which I will show in a later picture) but still, this showed me that a good riveting tool will be a important investment for the future.  

The riveting of the upper wing section is nearly finished, now the fuselage is next, alot of riveting still needs to be done, didn‘t I mention somewhere that I‘ll keep this build simple? 😄 

To get a litte break from riveting I decided to assemble the lower engine cowling. First the radiator needs to be painted and the the airintake is painted in the typical yellow. This way I can mask the radiator with a sponge and simply paint the outer part yellow and don‘t have to care for the raditor or the air intake 

The left landing flap had a scratch out of the box. This was however the only part that had any issues what so ever. The scratch was very minor and only on the surface and thus could be sanded away easy 

All the riveting is finally done. This was for sure the most time demanding process of this build. As you can see, I modified my trumpeter rivet tool by sanding away alot of the plastic around the wheel to get atleast some view on where the wheel is going. The tool is still terrible because the wheel is so big which means you can‘t rivet close to the fuselage. I did the rivets close to the fuselage using a hypothermic needle. Unfortunately rivet tools are hard to get a hand on in austria seemingly but I will try to get either „rosie the riveter“ or the „Z63“ tool for future projects. Some of the rivets unfortunately look like some drunk guy made them 😄 but I learned alot since it was my first time and the inperfections hopefully disapear after the camo is sprayed on 

Due to the construction of the BF109, many rivets next to panel lines are NOT double sided. This can be seen especially here on the fuselage.  

The wheel wells were painted and masked. Due to the round shapes, I think it is easier to paint the wheel wells first and mask them compared to painting them afterwards. The areas on the edge and where no sponge is, were masked using masking liquid. I was a bit scared of masking fluid because the Vallejo masking fluid is very hard to get rid of afterwards but then I bought the masking fluid of VMS. This stuff is very great since most of the time the complete film is pulled of just by pulling on one end. With the Vallejo masking fluid you end up with several tiny pieces that wont come out of small spaces. 

Did some preshading. In a Video I saw a person using brown instead of black because this allegegly will give a warmer shadow. I think this is true since zenith shading on a figure should also be made using dark red paint instead of black paint. 

When I did the preshading, I had problems adjusting the paint to thinner ratio. I used the 0.2mm nozzle set on my H&S Evolution the get thinner lines, however, as you can see, I got many small sprinkles in my paint job. The good thing however is, that preshading doesn‘t has to be perfect, in fact, there should be a bit of variation in the preshading as this will make some panels more pronounced than others which creates a more interesting finish. I did intentionally do alot of preshading in this build, because I need the practise doing fine lines with an airbrush because when the mottling stage comes, no mistakes should be made. 

Bad placement of the ejector pin, to be fair though, this was maybe the only possible placement. The pin mark can be easily filled, using a small drop of super glue. Since the mark is on the highest position of the part, sanding was also not a problem.  

Using 0.2mm lead wire and masking tape, I scratch build the brake hoses. They can be seen on some pictures and will add some interesting detail. To fix the lead wire in place, I used black super glue, to secure the masking tape, extra thin glue was used, this should be enough to keep everthing in place. Same as on the MG under the engine cowling, holes were drilled to make both MG barrels of the wings more realistic. 

Masking the camo pattern of the BF109. 

Because the grey and green of which the camo pattern consists are quite dark colors, I decided to strengthen the pre shading, using white and darker tone of red. Otherwise it could have been possible that the light pre shading wouldn‘t be noticable under the dark colors. However, to make the preshading more pronouced was a good idea, the execution could have been better. As you can see, I masked the whole camo pattern and then did the new pre shading. It would have been better to only mask the upper wing area(where the grey and green camo pattern is), do the new preshading and then mask the individual green and grey areas. Because I did it the wrong way, I ended up with little white stripes between the transitions from grey to green.  

As you can see, both colors were masked and painted. Here I peeled of the masking tape to see if the colors look good. I used the website Replikator.club to achieve the needed RLM colors using my tamiya colors. On of the colors is RLM74 which was mixed using 3 parts XF-24 and 2 parts XF-27. However, I saw on scalemates, that there are two versions of XF-27 from tamiya, with mine being the darker one. Thats the reason why I added a tiny amount of XF-5. I have a feeling that I didn't get especially the RLM74 completely right but I think it's a close match and don't forget, those aircraft were battle worn. Thus I think that hitting the color tone 100% isn't so important since they got repainted on the airfield and they probably also differed a bit from the factory color tone.  

All the masking tape was taken off, I am pleased with the result. The white lines between the color transitions are visible (I wrote about them in picture 34) but it really isn't to bad. A bit of very light sanding using a regular cloth will help quite alot. Additionally I planned on doing some post shading aswell, to highlight some panels and blend everthing together and this will also definitely help with getting rid of the white lines.  

Some vacations and university kept me away from the modeling bench. I hope to finish the build before the year ends but alot of work still needs to be done. Here I masked the propeller cone. It was my second try at painting it. The first time I tried it, I sprayed the cone black and then white but white has such bad covering properties that way too much paint was needed and it didn‘t work. This time I spray the whole cone white and then black, which worked much better.  

The upper engine cowling wasn‘t transitioning into the fuselage in one continous line, thus I sanded it a bit to create this smoother transition. I was surprised about this little error and thought that there might was a height difference on the real plane but after looking at reference photos and some books about the Me109, I couldn‘t spot any difference in height going from the upper cowling to the fuselage. 

I spotted some inperfections on the hull where the paint has come off. I don‘t know why this happend, since I used Mr.Color Primer which is supposed to be very resistant. I should get used to wash the sprues before assembling and to whipe the model with alcohol before the primer goes on.  

Thats how I tackled the areas where paint came of. I tried to sand away as less material as possible.The sanding is extremely important since it levels out the step between the unpainted and painted area pn the panel. Then I masked the individual panel. I thought that masking the individual panel is good, because I might create a little paint step and if this paint step is inbetween two panels or in the riveting, the step won‘t be as visible. 

I also resprayed the pre shading in the area. I think it‘s important to have the masking tape perfectly aligned with the panel lines or rivets. Otherwise it will look weird if the „shadow“ of the panel line runs next to the actual panel line. Respraying the preshading should also give those panels a nice variation compared to the other panels, which could give the intention, that those panels got changed by the ground crew for example. 

The area after the respraying was done. I am happy with the result, because the pre shading was also sprayed again, the shadows also look similar to the rest of the light blue panels. 

The part of the flaps that’s hidden when they are retracted is painted in a light blue color. I wasn‘t happy with the result here and nonetheless I needed to spray some post shading so I didn‘t bother masking it and just sprayed over the color. This blueish color will be the last part that I‘ll spray on the wings. 

After the wings were post-shaded, I sprayed the light blue color inside the flaps. This was done by putting liquid mask on the edge and thanks to the surface tension, the liquid mask will stop right on the edge of the wing. At this time of the project I started to make dumb mistakes however and thus got a bit unmotivated. One of those dumb mistakes was to only mask around the edges, thinking the overspray wont be as bad. What I didn‘t think through was that light blue color is very noticable on dark grey color. This resulted in a terrible overspray above the nicley post shaded wings, so all that needed to be done again which explains the lack of motivation I had at that time for the project. 

Here I wanted to get the liquid mask to dry faster, so I thought it might be a good idea to spread it using a brush. It also dried quicker but I wasn't very happy when I peeled the mask off. Seems like the liquid mask softened the underlying paint coat and when I used the brush to spread the material, it damaged the paint. It's important to note, that its no problem to spread liquid mask using a brush if its applied fresh but if the liquid mask has some time to soften the paint and is then spread around, chances are high that the underlying paint coat is not too happy. I thought that this discovery is very interesting though, since that might be a new method of creating realistic scratches 😄 It's also worth noting that I used lacquer paint under the liquid mask, so this stuff has to be quite aggresive to be able to soften the paint. Maybe I do some experiments in the future with different types of paint, since this would be a very controllable way of chipping compared to hairspray chipping for example.  

Here you can see the terrible overspray I got, because I thought for some reason, that the liquid mask would be enough with a 0.2mm nozzle. Due to various painting attempts, these gaps of the landing flaps were a big motivation killer for me, because I wanted them to look as good as possible. In retro perspective, all the mistake were made because I began to rush a bit and thus could have been avoided. I am glad that I didn‘t throw the model out of the window 😄 because now I am happy with the result of those landing flap gaps.  

Now the part I had the most fear of was due: the mottling. This wing of the first model I tried to build, an Airbus A350, was my paint mule for learning how to mottle properly. Note that I already sprayed a new layer of gray on the wing to do some more training and this wasn‘t my only paint mule I used to practise. It took me one whole week to get the hang of it. The main problem was that I used the wrong kind of thinner. I used Tamyia Acrylics nearly for the whole plane, so I also used them to do the mottling. First I tried Tamiya Lacquer Thinner, then Mr.Leveling Thinner with or without retarder and various Thinner/Paint mixtures. I also varied the air pressure and got myself the inline air regulator from H&S, which is great by the way, especially for fine adjustments. I always had the same problem of having a very spotty spray pattern. I started to think that my airbrush might have a bend needle but I couldn‘t imagine why it should, I always take great care of the needle, so somthing different has to be the cause. Than I had the great idea of switching to the X-20A thinner and suddenly the spray pattern improved alot. Maybe the lacquer thinner caused the paint to dry too quick. Now I only needed to get the right shape of mottles before I could move on to the model. 

Having finally found the right recipe to do mottling, I started by making the sharp edges of the camo pattern a bit blury. Thats the same way how the individual Jagdgeschwader did it. The got the planes fresh out of the factory with their standard camo and then the did the mottling by them selfs. On many pictures you can hardly see a transistion from the mottling to the sharp edge of the camo.  

Here is the finished mottling. I am not completely happy with the result but despite my paint problems I think the result is acceptable. If you are wondering why I masked of the area of the german iron cross, when mottling was done by the crews, they tried to not spray over the cross or other wise they needed to paint it again. Thus they left quite alot of distance to the cross, this can also be seen in alot of pictures. To know roughly where the cross will be I placed this masked, so I can keep my distance to it, thats the only purpose it serves, its not there to mask anything. 

Thats the starboard side of the BF109  

The nose cowling and rudder have been painted in RLM4. Thats the paintjob nearly finished, now I just need to do some minor touch ups and then the BF is ready for a gloss coat 

A big milestone has been reached! The whole paintjob has been sealed with a generous amount of lacquer clear coat. I used Mr. Color‘s GX100 because I liked the rock hard surface it creates, once it cured. Of course I tested before on my paint mule if the clear coat is compatible with the decals solution I will be using. 

This was a moment I was looking forward to alot, finally unmasking the cockpit. I was very relieved to see that my combination of liquid masking agent, regular masking tape and sponge kept every paint from getting to the cockpit. I was especially nervous because I used the vallejo liquid mask because a couple months back when I masked the cockpit, I had not discovered the VMS liquid masking tape, which holds togehter much stronger and is thus easier to peel off. With the vallejo stuff, alot of rubbing and toothpicks are required which increases the risk of creating scrates in the paint. However at the end of the build I will make an extra post here mentioning all the stuff I discovered during this build and get to like alot.  

Here I used decals which I didn‘t need for my specific livery, to test how the decal solvents are working on those decals. I used Vallejo Decal- Setter & Softener, Revell Decal Softener, VMS Decal Setter &Softener and Tamiya Mark Fit Super Strong. This test is also important to see, if the softener attacks the used clear coat, because decal softeners are basically weak color solvents. In the plastic model mojo podcast I heard, that Tamiya Mark Fit is the best solvent for Tamiya decals, so I was pretty determined to use this product. Actually I thought to try the other solvents just for fun, thank god I tried them, because I found out, that the VMS products work even better on my decals. Don‘t get me wrong, the Tamiya Mark Fit Super strong is also great but it seemed quick weak compared to the VMS products. They really made the decals wrinkled and afterwards the decals looked more „painted on“ compared to the Mark Fit Super Strong. Another reason why I choose the VMS stuff is, that you get a decal setter and softener. The Mark Fit Super strong is just one solvent and if you are not fast at placing the decal, it gets soft and you run the risk of damaging it. The VMS setter gives you alot of time, since it only enhances the adhesion of the decals, once you remove the liquid and let it try before applying their softener. 

The first decals were applied. I took me several coats of the softener until I was satisfied with the result. After the first coat of softener I draged my exacto blade through the panel lines that were covered by the decal to make the decal adapt better to the panel lines. 

Here you can see how aggresive those thick tamiya decals respond to the VMS Softener, this stuff worked reallly great on the decals  

Using a very sharp blade (scalpel instead of exacto blade), I cut away the clear film surrounding the white numbers of the 109. In the water you can see that some parts of the clear film were already floating away. It is however always adviseable to check the edges of the decal using precision tweezers if any clear film remained on the decal or got under the decal. If you notice that clear film got under the decal after the decal has settled down on the model it is to late to remove it. 

A punch and die set also comes in handy when you want to cut out small round decals. I didn‘t have this punch and die set when I made the cockpit, especially for the round gauges this would have been a life-safer. 

Starboard side after decaling was finished  

And thats the port side after decaling, next step will be to sand the edges of those thick decals down 

After the decals, I applied a good layer of tamiya‘s acrylic clear gloss, to seal the decals. Another purpose of this coat is, to be able to sand the decals using fine grit sand paper. 

When you look at the number 3 for example, the thick carrier film is clearly visible. Especially those small numbers being surrounded by a carrier film, which is thicker than the number is big, led to the decision to sand this step away. 

On the number 8 you can see how I sanded the decal edges away. You can see a slight edge still remaining and I sanded until the edge disappeared. On my first model, the Eurofighter, I made the mistake to wet sand the decals, with the result, that the water got under the the clear coat and the decal wrinkled up. Thus I highly recommend to dry sand the decals, using high grit sand paper. If you sand to much away you only end up with small scratches in the decal instead of water marks showing on the whole decal and possible wrinkles. If you sand to long and the edge is still visible, I would recommend to spray another coat of clear gloss, just to be on the save side. 

Here I had the problem that those rivets made by the bad trumpeter tool which I used a couple months back were not even with the surface. Thus they will get sanded down more than the rest of the surface. I still chose to sand them because I prefer having the base coat showing through on some spots than having those decal edges. I also think that weathering will hide those sanded-through spots. 

Sanding all the decals went really way better than I expected it to be. I used Tamiya Gloss coat, thinned with the acrylic thinner X20-A because I was scared that a lacquer thinned gloss coat could attack the decals if it eats to much into the material. The obly problem was, that the acrylic gloss coat didn‘t dry so fast compared to the lacquer counterpart. The drying time got even more increased because I added some retarder, to ensure a smoother finish and to avoid tip drying and frosting. This lead to the problem, that the coat still felt a bit sticky even after 2 days. It was no problem to touch it but after sanding, I discovered that my finger print got pressed into the clear coat because my hands got warmer from sanding and I held the wing stronger, to aviod the 109 slipping out of my hand. Fortunately the finger print went away after I sanded it a bit and added the next coat of clear varnish. 

After I left a big finger print on the gloss coat, I chose to use rubber gloves to avoid the finger prints. How ever I still managed to transfer the surface of the gloves to the clear coat. Fortunatley, some sanding and another gloss coat got rid of it. However it was worth it in my opinion, since the sanding was really easy. I dont know if the sanding of the decals was fairly easy because the gloss coat wasn‘t fully hardend but I could imagine that this could be a reason. It just surprised me because many people say that sanding decals is quite risky but I found it to be straight forward and with some common sense this should not be a hard task 

At one point I started to trim the thick carrier film surrounding the decals. To have a better vision on the cutting, I decided to do the cutting free hand. This was the only area, where I cut a part of the decal away and because it was quite visible on the iron cross, I decided to respray the missing part by airbrush. This worked out really well and you could hardly tell that something was done here.