Focke-Wulf Fw 190F-8

by Arkut Yuksel

Tamiya's 1/48 scale Fw 190F-8 is available online at Squadron.com

Tamiya’s 1/48 scale Focke-Wulf Fw 190F-8 kit has been so well covered in articles and galleries here on HyperScale that there is very little left to say. As most of you already know, it is simple to build, fits together perfectly and so on.

My main objective is to build a model that looks like the real thing. I am not so concerned about minor inaccuracies.

I followed the kit instructions when building this kit. Not too many extras were added - seatbelts for the cockpit, brake lines on the main legs (the support leg wires were not in my range but next time they will be), antennas, landing gear indicators, bulged tyres.

Also the underwing antenna was omitted per the instruction of the decals.

I used the decal sheet from Kommandeur Decals instead of the kit' s one.

As the decals are from Kommandeur Decals I used the scheme shown in their instructions. The decal sheet includes 4 aircraft.

I chose "White 48" which has a different cowling and unpainted landing gear doors as can be seen. The aircraft is also shown on Squadron's recent Walkaround book about Fw-190 A/F on pages 75 and 78; but I did not have any idea about this until I bought the book by which time the kit had been finished.

The colours shown in the instruction are RLM 02, 74, 75, 76 and 83. They are from JPS (74, 75) hand mixed (02, 76) and from Gunze Sangyo (83).

In the instructions it is shown that the wings are painted with regular paints; but only a small portion of the right wing, close to the fuselage, is painted RLM 83 with the RLM 74, the difference between the tones are nearly invisible!

The under colour of the aircraft is a mixture that is done with Aircraft Gray and White from Pactra Acrylic. I had chosen the Aircraft Gray to be mixed with White as the colour itself, from Pactra, contains blue pigments as RLM 76. The actual colour also contained the blue pigments but as the quality of the blue pigments was so bad that they had shaded away immediately; the colour usually appeared as a very light gray. In these pictures the colour appears as completely gray but in sunlight the colour shows the blue shade hidden inside!

I mixed the gray to white to get the tone.

After much of the patience and time my model was waiting for me to do the decaling and weathering job.

I prepared the model by first spraying Dullcote from Revell that would protect the model from dirt and accidents and started to search the pictures in the books. I used the ones that I had in my library.

Checking every close-up photo of the other FW-190' s pictures, I tried to simulate weathering on mine. Since at that time there were no pictures that I had seen of "White 48" I just had to apply the weathering in a logical way. In my opinion the result does not seem that bad.

By the way, some may ask why there are some RLM 02 paints at the right wing root and on the right flap. While I was painting the model the paint stripped from there showing the bare metal foil underneath; as I had thought that it would be too weird I decided to paint it in RLM 02 with a "what if" idea, as I know the Germans did paint the planes in that way, but sometimes they had used a red- primer instead of 02.

Also some attention must be paid to the wing root guns. One can see that there is no weathering of the gun powder although the rest of the plane is considerably weathered. This is same as on the real aircraft. That part of the plane never got the powder weathering due to firing. Until now I could not see any close- taken picture showing that area blackened because of the gun powder; more I would be very glad if one sends me any photos because I am still surprised about that; well what can I say, I tried to do what I saw.

The antenna is slack because the mechanism was so on the blown-hood canopied Fw 190s.

The wing root panels are left unweathered because that is what suggested in the decals instructions. From there one can understand how much weathering I did to my model, the paint there is the fresh one!

The wings were sprayed freehand.

I would like to thank to Ufuk Aydýner who took the photos.

Click the thumbnails below to view larger images:

Model, Text and Images Copyright © 2001 by Arkut Yuksel
Page Created 13 September, 2001
Last Updated 04 June, 2007

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