Lindbergh 1/72 Hs 129 B-2/R2

Couple of my fellow club members built 1/48 Hs 129's in N. African desert scheme, and inspired me to pull this old kit out of the stash. I decided to go eastern front winter scheme, after seeing this beauty by fellow iModeler Morne Meyer @mornem (see the last pic).

At first I was thinking I'd sand all the detail down and re-rivet and re-scribe, but decided detail was good enough to leave as is. The rivets are a tad oversize (typical) but still looks ok. I did add gun barrels, took off the molded-on exhausts and replace with styrene tube, added additional detail to the top of the nacelles, opened the scoops (radiators?) next to the engines beneath the wings (front and back, and added grills), scratch built the gun pod out of a tear-drop shaped drop tank from the spares box (cut off the front ends of the 2 halves, glued together, then sanded out the tear-drop shape), and then had to scratch build the gnome-rhone engines, as the kit just provided blanks.

There was no gunsight in the box, so that was scratch built using a landing gear piece, styrene bits and a piece of acetate.

For the engines, a took some styrene tubing, inserted into a drill, then used a razor saw to "rib" the tube. Then split the tube in two, and further cut into a somewhat "v" shape for the cylinder heads. Then some brass wire and some painting, and looked good enough to me. They are actually one cylinder short, but hey - it's what I could fit into the space with what I had to work with, and I didn't have to buy resin engines (which would have cost about 6X what the kit did!). I also added the aerial and pitot tube (not provided in the kit).

Painted with Tamiya, including hairspray technique with Tamiya paint thinned 50/50 with water for the distemper. Dots were applied with thinned Tamiya paint and a brush. Weathered with pastel chalk powder, Tamiya weathering sets, silver pencil.

The Print Scale decals I purchased were horrible - only got the black crosses on the fuselage out of that set - the rest collapsed upon themselves like a dead spider. Luckily I had another set in the decals stash that I didn't even know I had for the Hs-129 (would never have purchased the Print Scale set had I looked first...). There were even spinner decals to replicate what Morne's looked like, but I couldn't make them conform, especially with the props being molded with the spinner.

22 additional images. Click to enlarge.