Auntie’s trip to the Aegean

My second offering in as many days... this is the venerable Revell 1/48 scale Ju 52 kit, with accessory resin floats/white metal struts, resin engine nacelle cover, and fuel tank, accessories and some scratch-building thrown in for good measure. It's a very photo-heavy thread but I hope you'll forgive me... I really enjoyed making this kit so you're getting a lot of photos... ;-).

So, my Christmas gift voucher for a local model shop a couple of years back resulted in this kit being bought. I wanted to do something a bit different, so decided on the float undercarriage, if only because it's sadly the only current alternative available - the snow shoes are no longer available, and the equally interesting minesweeper ring parts are also defunct and unavailable. No matter, I found an interesting scheme that appealed to me - a winter scheme on an aircraft operating in the Aegean - more later on that.

I needed to extend the cargo doors, resulting in the loss of one window and one set of seats inside, create an additional door behind the cockpit on the right side and modify the lateral windows to the same shape and have them accept MGs. Of these windows, the right side one sits within the outline of a door. The version the kit actually represents had a door there but I didn't feel up to risking damaging the corrugated effect of the moulding, so I let that stand. It's a small concession and I can live with it. Openings were also made on the right engine nacelle and under the wing to show oil reservoir and fuel tank details respectively.

Once happy with the internal areas, I closed the fuselage, painted the basic colour scheme, applied gloss varnish, then the markings, revarnished and then with my spraygun at pencil-thin setting, set about applying the white winter coat freehand, initially round the code letters, crosses and swastikas, then branching out to all uppersurfaces. Prior to this, I also added Maskol to random areas, although especially hinges and moving parts, to create chipped paint when later removed from the kit. The floats were also painted, although in the deeper maritime shades of green, and weathered. Once done, everything was blackwashed in stages (the insides were also blackwashed prior to closing the fuselage halves).
Attaching the floats - two separate blocks of resin, plus metal struts - was very tricky. Added to that, the handling of a large model and adding further weight to it proved difficult and oftentimes unwieldy. One float attached fine, but the other took six attempts... much cursing ensued! Eventually, things worked out and I delicately manoeuvred the model upside down to attach the small amount of rigging on the float struts.

The right engine cowlings were left on the wing in their constituent parts, although they could have been joined in the 'open' position, much akin to looking like some ungainly insect, but there is enough going on on that side of the aircraft and such a large characteristic as open, attached cowlings would have again drawn the viewer's eye to that side of the model in particular. The dorsal hatch was opened, the small door behind the cockpit was a mix of the leftover corrugated side of the fuselage it came from, with a new plastic card frame and a clear plastic card window. A small crate was also scratch-built from card; the 'tarpaulin' within is tissue paper painted 'military' green and placed into the crate so it would dry out in the intended shape. The crate was then painted in wood effect, then overlaid with wood effect transfers to show the woodgrain, then coated in burnt sienna oil paint and left to dry; the contents - a spare Ju52 engine - came from the spares box.

So, this use of eight weeks of my life was very productive... ;-). Despite its age, the kit stands up well to scrutiny and is an excellent platform for the various modifications. The aircraft has the fuselage codes of 5./KGzbV1 while operating in southern Russia with wheeled landing gear, before going on temporary secondment to the Aegean, having at some point acquired floats; the tail codes indicate it was used there by Lufttransportstaffel (See) 1. Photographic evidence exists of it having been lost in a landing accident at the end of May, 1943, and being salvaged from the depths of Athens-Phaleron harbour thereafter on 1 June.

I hope you like the photos, and thanks for looking in... ;-).

Regards,

Paul

39 additional images. Click to enlarge.