This is third time I've built this kit, and it took two tried to get this attempt right. I had these decals from Karaya, and wanted to build a captured plane. Nothing much to say about the assembly, except for the landing gear, which I always manage to mess up. My first foul-up was attaching the strut cover to the strut - one of them gave me trouble, and I had to attach it with epoxy. I seem to always have trouble attaching the landing gear to the plane itself, perhaps due to the actuating arms. This time I glued the landing gear struts to the wing using superglue, and let that dry. I then used epoxy to attach the actuating arms, which wasn't quite as hard as I expected. Once the epoxy dried, the struts were quite solid, and I attached the wheels, also with epoxy.

The bottom is Tamiya XF-3 Flat Yellow. This isn't quite as orange as British yellow, but it was close enough for me. I used Tamiya XF-54 Dark Sea Grey for the Ocean Grey on the top, since I had run out of XF-82. The Dark Green is AMMO 0206 RLM 81 RS34079 BS641. After I painted the exhaust panels black, I noticed that two of the three subjects on the instruction sheet don't have the panels painted, so I don't know if it would have been.

The decals are from Karaya D4802 Captured Butcherbirds vol 1. They were printed by Techmod and went on well, but unfortunately the serial number on the left side folded over onto itself, and I was unable to unfold it. The decal sheet shows the rooster head on the left cowling. This is left over from the original German colors. It seems odd to me that the British would have left it, as they would presumably had to paint around it. But I'll confess I haven't looked for photos of the actual plane on the web.

Page last updated July 14, 2023.