1/72 Revell Heinkel He-111 H-6

by Josip Žagar

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History:

Aw, come on!  Like there is someone here who doesn't know about He-111?!? If it was a Soviet airplane I might even have bothered with some text but since this was a German bomber, I shan't bother with it at all  ;-)

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The kit:

Although with Revell one can never be at ease, since they tend to fill those pretty dark blue side opening boxes of theirs with all sorts of antiquated plastic and newest premium plastic, you can rest assure with this one. This is a genuine Japanese Hasegawa plastic - and at half the price too!!!  What's the logic behind it I don't know, but as long as it'll get me a state of the art kit at half a price I'll just keep on smiling. Since I already have their B-25 strafer in my stash, I can only wait for them to release the B-26 Marauder and JU-88A:-)

All good things aside, there are some details that the old 1970's Italeri kit got better; namely the defensive armament and tail control surfaces. Also, the ventral MG position has better side glazing with clear inserts - helps with quicker and easier painting.

 

The build:

It started with the cockpit!  It was done mostly OOB with some very prominent electric cables fashioned from stretched sprue. I should have added some seat belts from Scotch tape since you can see some cockpit detail if you look close enough. I even bothered with painting all those vertically stowed 250kg bombs behind the cockpit, only to have later painted over the side windows.

Fuselage halves do not fit 100%. I had to even the area in front of dorsal MG nest with sand paper and use some putty under the cockpit. Also, the wings and tailplanes had to be carefully adjusted when glued to the fuselage since they might be a bit off.

The complex greenhouse canopy is made of 5 parts but if you don't panic and follow the instructions all will be well. It was painted by hand and with fine brush.

Undercarriage is very delicate and goes together without much trouble. However the undercarriage covers are a different story.  I glued them to the wing according to instructions only to later find out through some reference that they sat differently. They had to be broken off and repositioned with super glue - always check on your reference!!!

I opted to have both options of bomb armament-just for fun. MG barrels had barrels hollowed out and the nose cannon got a scratchbuilt sight. 

Painting:

The main problem with He-111s is that they were mostly painted in really dull 3 colour camo.  A model of this size simply has to be interesting. Unfortunately all options from the box weren't really appealing and all the weird & wonderful camo was used on other He-111 models.  Finally I settled on the last variant from the box but with black undersides for a mean look for a contrast effect + some creative freedom on the squiggle effect.

Basically, first I painted the 2 tone bomber splinter cammo freehand (should have used some masks after all) and after it was dry, I hit it really hard with white squiggles.  I love the effect!  It looks so organic-almost like our native Marble trout skin pattern.  Unfortunately the green nose really stuck out so I had to paint it white only to make an overkill.  Now it's too late.

Since the panel lines on this kit are rather heavily engraved I didn't apply any shade on them. All weathering was done with dry pastels.

Although the model might look impressive from some distance, I really have to buy a quality airbrush together with a better compressor.

Will I do another one?  Not really.  But that's not because of this wonderful kit. I just think that there are too many WW2 German models being built every minute.

 Josip

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Photos and text © by Josip Žagar