Oh Louis , what a great "worm party" pattern camo ! Must you have hard time with your airbrush , but the result is at least impressive , excellent !

What a great camo, Louis (@lgardner). I missed this build somehow, but it is obvious you have nailed this one. Not only well-build, but the eye-blurring camo is terrific. Glad you did it and not me. :o)

That's absolutely *perfect" "cloudy" camouflage, @lgardner. This model is going to be really impressive.

@lgardner - that is one of the best He-219s I have seen anyone do. You got the upper camo totally right, and that lower black panel looks good.

The correction at the bottom surface is very nice, Louis @lgardner
And the overal camouflage is amazing.

Gentlemen,
Tom, @tcinla
Spiros, @fiveten
John, @johnb
George, @gblair
Thank you all very much for the compliments and kind words. This is a build that I have previously spent a lot of time researching, and one of the best online resources for this build was actually coming from the years long restoration of the He-219 that is currently on display at the Smithsonian. They have spent countless hours documenting exactly how their example was painted. I simply copied what they discovered, and applied that knowledge to this model. In some places I believe the overspray on the random "squiggles" is a little too much. In other areas it looks just fine. But since these aircraft were spray painted by men using hand held spray guns, no two were alike. So for the most part I am very happy with how this one is looking.

This year I have been aiming to get some previously started builds completed before starting up any new ones. This one has been languishing for several months now. I am currently in a position where I have much more time available for model building, so I need to make the best of this while I can. I was spraying the Flat Black on the Mustangs, so it was a "no brainer" to go ahead and spray that color on the big Revell Uhu at the same time.

After studying the instruction painting guide again, I have decided to paint the black areas that were painted near the exhaust stream on the wings. I used a "Semi-Gloss" Black for this, simply to get some contrast between this area and the surrounding Flat Black that is under the Starboard side wing.

Tonight was used to carefully mask off this area. It took close to three hours to accomplish this.

It took me about 5 minutes (if that much) to spray the area.





It took me almost 5 minutes to remove the masking...

Here are the results.

I purposely left the masking in place around the main landing gear well openings. This are is going to be painted using RLM 02 next. The areas located in between the dropped flaps and the main wing are also going to be painted using this same color. That is the intended next steps.

Since the P-51's don't use these colors, I will not be spraying any Mustang parts at the same time. 😉

Spiros, @fiveten
Please feel free to join me with your big Revell He-219 build any time you would like to. This also reminds me that I have to one day finish up the 1/48 Hasegawa Ki-45's that I started as a joint / mutual build with you. This will happen, sooner than later. 🙂

As always, comments are encouraged.
Good night.

Looking great, Louis @lgardner
Indeed, masking takes quite some time compared to spraying, it is however required to get results like yours.

Here are some pictures, showing how the landing gear was constructed, and the areas that were masked.

To begin with, there was a big sink mark on one side of the nose gear strut that had to be dealt with. I used some liquefied styrene and it was ready to spray in no time.

Once the nose gear parts were assembled, I positioned them so the struts and retraction cylinders would dry in the proper alignment.



The main gear struts were built in this manner too.



The only difference was the mains were removed once assembled, after they had time to dry overnight. The gear doors were also prepared for painting RLM 02 color. This involved gluing the retraction strut for one of the nose doors in place.

These doors were sprayed RLM 02 on the interior surfaces. This is how they looked.

Since I was spraying the color, I finished the 1/48 scale Ta-154 at the same time.

The inner structure of the wings was masked off in preparation to paint this area too. This took a LOT of time, just as before.

Then I sprayed these areas,




The wheel hubs were painted Gloss Black.

Once the paint dried, I removed the masking and revealed this:


I'm SO happy with the results. Next I installed the main gear, and applied some "Ultra Bright Chrome" Bare Metal Foil on the oleo portion of the main struts.



Now the big Uhu is only a few steps away from being able to stand on it's own feet.

Did I mention how BIG this model is becoming ? This thing is a BEAST for size. The decals will be coming up soon, so please stay tuned.

As always, comments are encouraged. Thank you for stopping by.