Plastic Wings And Armor: Airfix Messerschmidt Me109 E-4

It was bound to happen sooner or later - one small mistake leads to another and then yet another, then you loose the patience and the final result is a scratched project. Well, in this case I should say "almost scratched", since I managed to recover, but it was a close call.

OK, so what happened? As reported in previous post, I was done with building, painting and the decals. My little Messerschmidt was ready for final stage - weathering. First off, I decided to highlight the panel lines. In Spitfire project I did this in traditional way - mix of black and burnt umber oils heavily thinned with turpentine was brushed into the engravings, with capillary force doing the rest of the job. This time around I've decided to try something else.

Couple of weeks ago, by pure coincidence, I found on Youtube a demonstration of weathering fluids from company called Flory Models. The results looked impressive to say the least, so I've ordered a couple of bottles of this "magic" product. The package arrived promptly just a couple of days later and now it was time to try it out.

I'm starting to realize that Youtube has become an invaluable assistance for modellers.

The weathering fluid from Flory Models is extremely easy to use, but using it for the first time was a little bit scary. It takes a tiny leap of faith to just slap a dark brown, dirty fluid all over a shiny, clean and freshly painted model. Pictures below show how the model looks after the application of the fluid - I think we can all agree that it's not a pretty sight.

Here's the thing though - all that grime can easily be removed with slightly damp paper towel and it doesn't matter when you do it. In this case, I've applied the fluid in the morning and removed it during late evening of same day. And of course, if dirt is the effect you're after, you don't have to remove all of it. In this first trial, I removed most of the residue, mostly to see how it would affect the areas of the model that I wanted to stay clean. I was very pleased with finding out that only a very faint darkening remained once I cleaned the model. All panel recesses were however beautifully outlined in dark brown.

Encouraged by this result, I've decided to take the weathering process a little bit further - with help of weathering powders I'd try to recreate the smoke stains around the engine exhausts and gun barrels. Simple task really - just take a little powder, add some turpentine and apply the mix in right spots. Right....

Things started to go wrong when I spilled a little too much weathering powder into the container. Didn't give it much thought at the time. Next, I couldn't find the bottle with turpentine. By now a little frustrated, I grabbed the bottle with rubbing alcohol instead - after all, one solvent is as good as another! The mix was a little thick, but yet again, I didn't think much about it until it was too late. I slapped it onto the model and left it to dry.

To say that the result of my efforts wasn't as I expected is an understatement. I wanted for the powder to leave gentle streaks of smoke residue. Instead, a thick, hard-edged crust was now blemishing my beautiful model. Allright, no harm done, I thought, I'll just remove it with a brush moistened in rubbing alcohol. Bad idea! To my surprise, my attempts had no noticeable effects on the powder crust. To my horror, the alcohol did have a visible effect on acryilic gloss varnish I applied as a preparation for deployment for decals and a sealer once they were in place. The entire project was rapidly going south and I admit that at this stage I was ready to toss the model into the bin.

In the end I decided to wait and access the damage once the alcohol evaporated. The inspection wasn't very encouraging - in spots where I tried to remove the weathering powder 'melted' into the varnish, resulting in ugly stains. In pure desperation, I decided upon one last rescue attempt by airbrushing the dark brown paint over the "damaged" areas. This worked remarkably well - thin layers of paint did manage to mask most of the ugly stains. If I had better control over my airbrush, I might even have done a pretty decent weathering job out of it. But I think it can safely be said that I was again a bit overeager and the final result is an airplane which looks as if it suffered a severe engine fire.

I've learned three important lessons from this project. First of all, rescribing the panel lines is much more difficult than I expected. Second, less is more when working with weathering powders! Third, acrylic varnishes and rubbing alcohol don't like each other.