Heinkel 111P 1/32 scale by Rick - Final Portraits

[Rick]

Thanks for the scha-wing, wing. Now I feel like I've arrived!

[panzerjager2]

AWESOME WORK

[dupes]

Oh man...that interior looks stellar. Great work!

[Rick]

After almost a year hiatus, I've decided to pick up where I left off and try to push this one through. Left off with staring at a pile of clear parts that make up that big glass nose. Tackling the BV141 made me feel better about going after it. The most major difference is at this scale more of the interior of the clear parts that make up outer panels will be visible so eliminating the shiny clear panel on the inside is a key consideration. Here goes . . .

First step is applying a bunch of Eduard pre-cut masking material, and there is a lot of it!






The unmasked surfaces will represent painted fuselage panels

I needed to assemble the belly gondola so I added these parts after masking alond with the windows on either side


Part of the gondola included a wooden floor attached to the lower entry hatch. Before closing up the belly, I had to paint and weather the floor. I did this and the same that covers the bombardier floor using first by pre-shading the floors then applying a "wood" color followed by same RLM 02 interior color with a light spray. Since these are subject to heavy wear from flight boots, mud, and dirt, I wanted to have them scuffed up. Finished them off with weathering powders




Once all the external masks were applied, I masked all of the interior surfaces and sprayed the exterior framing with RLM02 so from the inside, the framing would match the interior colors.




wanted to minimize shiny interior glare from the painted over exterior panels so, I taped over a number of the windows to reverse mask the clear portions so I could paint the interior of the solid panels with RLM02 for a flat finish

[Leon]

Nice work on the masking and painting Rick! Looking really good.

[TRM]

Fine resurrection Rick! Way to get the ball rolling again!! Keep it going!!

[Rick]

Time to get some glass installed. The first couple of cockpit frames went in with no issues. The fit is very good, better than most canopies I've worked with.





Next comes the remainder of the nose. The fit was amazing.





Looking from above, some of the interior is visible inlcuding the floor of the gondola


And of course I needed to dry fit the wart on the nose to check fit. I'll paint the camo with it in place to gt the masking correct then add the MG before gluing it in place.

All in all, I'm pretty stoked the nose went on with no issues and the fit seems to be excellent. Paint will really tell if there are any issues to go back to but so far I feel pretty good about it. For that matter, I hope I got all the interior masks removed too!

[TRM]

All coming together now! Looking forward to the color soon!

[wing_nut]

NOICE! Glad to see this one back on the line. And thanks BTW. My kabuki tape stock went high enough for me to sell.

[wbill76]

Glad to see you back at work on this one Rick! Nice work on all that masking.

[Leon]

Glad to see things are playing nice so far Rick!

[Tojo72]

That's a very impressive project,and it looks great so far.

[mustang1989]

This thing is bad freekin' a$$!!!! I really like this build Rick! I'll never do anything this big in this scale but I can certainly watch it all day long.

[deafpanzer]

WOW! Bet it was worth every penny to buy the masking set... it would have taken me days to mask everything for that plane. Can't wait to see the results...

[Rick]

Thanks all. You're comments are appreciated and I'm having fun building it again. By the time masking the camo is done, Sprue Bros. should have gotten their tape back in stock! 'Stang, go ahead and build big! I've learned some new skills every time I do. And yes DP, masks are the best model invention known to man. Even so, I spent about 7 hours masking, including making interior masks.

[adt70hk]

7 hours on the masking.....now that takes some patience!

That really is a stunning job you're doing the interior looks absolutely brilliant!

Keep it up.

Andrew

[chromdome35]

Beautiful work Rick, can't wait to see it when you are done.

[Rick]

Update for 12-22
Slow progress with work and holiday interruptions but still managed to squeeze in some time. Before I could even begin to think about paint, I needed to get the engine nacelles attached. Main issue with these is that all of the parts fitting properly are subject to how they are glued together by their individual parts. As mentioned earlier, the engine nacelle are individual parts and locating marks inside the nacelle were non existent so getting the shape correctly aligned came down to tape and guesswork. Add in separate radiator/nacelle supports and the error opportunity grows significantly. Here are the radiator parts and placement:
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It took a lot of test fitting to get them into place and on each there ended up being a gap I just couldn't get closure on it. To close the gap I shimmed with plastic strip and filled/sanded to hide the shim. Funny thing was, when looking at reference photos, the real planes had very similar fit issues on these panels too.
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With nacelles finally in place, I did a bit more pre-shading and finished painted the belly and flaps/undercarriage doors with RLM65
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Normally I would attach all major assemblies such as wings before painting. For this sucker I had to make an exception. The wingspan is 29" so handling the complete beast is issue enough but it also will not fit in my paint booth. The lower surfaces are now painted and I likely will attach the wings prior to taping and painting the splinter camo on the upper surfaces.
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More pre-shading up top and starting to apply masking to get ready to spray the base coat of RLM 71
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From what I can tell in references, even though the splinter pattern is hard edge, the lower fuselage separation from the blue is a bit more of a soft edge. To duplicate this, I needed a raised tape edge to soften the demarcation. A roll of blu-tac I think would be a bit to soft so tried placing a heavy thread under the edge of the tape. This would mean using caution to spray from straight on or below the mask to give the subtle soft I think I need. Fingers crossed as its' the first time I've tried this method. I stretched the thread on piece of glass and aligned the tape on to the thread before transferring to the fuselage.
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Next up involved masking the lower surfaces of the nacelles and wing leading edges. Early war the upper camo extended onto the front lower leading edge surfaces. No idea why.
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And all that took over two hours. Finally ready to start adding the base on the upper surfaces. This is going to take a buttload of paint for sure. Be back after the paint flies.

[TRM]

Very nice progression Rick!! Funny how sometime the things that fit not so well, actually mirror reality! Sad thing is getting some folks to believe it in the end! She looks hot under that primer and shading! Looks like you have things well in hand on the demarcation...masking is one of those necessary evils....bring on that color!

[Leon]

Nice work on the masking and shading Rick!

[joelsmith]

Keep flogging away at it, you'll get'er done.

[panzerjager2]

[deafpanzer]

Fantastic paint results!!!

[wbill76]

Looks like you'll need a restock on the masking tape when this is all said and done, coming along nicely Rick.

[Rick]

Bill, so far I've killed two rolls and two bottles of RLM paint. Still a ways to go.

[Rick]

Didn't realize it's been a month since the last update so it's time for tape and paint. With this beast, it's almost an exhaustive project. A couple more rolls of tape were sacrificed to get the job done, even with help from some cooperative post-it notes.
The 111P flew during the Battle of Britain so I'm going to finish it with the standard German splinter scheme with markings of 5/KG 54 "Totenkopf-Geschwader". So, after masking the lower surfaces, I drained a bottle of MM RLM71 Dark Green in spraying the lighter green color over most of the upper surfaces except in a few areas I knew would be darker A couple days to cure out and masking the splinter. This was followed with some black pre-shading re-applied to help vary the darker RLM70 Black-Green which came next. So, shut me up and here's the photos:




Normally I attach wings and flaps and such all before painting camo. With a 29" wingspan, there was not enough room on the bench and the right wing had a solid demarcation at the outer wing join so I left it off until later. Later when it was joined I whacked my forehead several times when turning it over to work on.





Next bottle down was a nice cold o . . . sorry, I mean RLM70 Black-Green. It took quite some time to remove all the masks:


I do have to say, I was very pleased with the effect all the sacrificial tapeage led to. I attached the right wing and here's the result:






The decals are fairly extensive but a couple of details I preferred to paint rather than risk a crappy decal placement. First up was the white slash that wrapped around the fuselage. Here is where I'll note the instruction images doesn't quite match the reality of the model. I used a couple of recognizable panel lines and went from there. I measured the decal itself to get the painted stripe as accurate as possible.



Here's where the advantage of the removable sides on my spray booth came into play.


And the result:



One piece decals for yellow walkways would never be straight under my fumbling attempts. The only left to do was paint 'em!




Both yellow and white stripeage are a bit brighter than I'd like so I'm thinking it's an opportunity for weathering to come into play and tone them down a bit. Since curing, a few details such as flaps have been installed in the down position and the tail wheel repaired due to a hard landing on the bench. A small hiatus will will lead to a gloss coat this coming weekend and decals before the weathering begins. No doubt there will be multiple late night sessions to come soon. Thanks for looking in.

[panzerjager2]

Man everytime I see this monster I fall in love with it.... IT'S MASSIVE

[dierk]

Hoody Blell! Stunning bird. Have you built the extension to your house yet, so you can display it?

[wing_nut]

Re-Schwing

[jpc1968]

What a great paint job! Love it. That thing is GI-HUGIC!