ProModeler 1/48 Ju-52
| KIT # | 5944 |
| PRICE: | $33.98 |
| DECALS: | See Review |
| REVIEW BY : | Scott Van Aken |
| NOTES: |
HISTORY
The Allies had the C-47 and the European Axis had the Ju-52. Adefinite jack of all trades, the 'Tante Ju' was seen in every theater ofoperations. Built about the same time as the DC-1, but not with thesophistication of the Douglas product, the '52 first saw service with LufthasaAirlines. It's carrying ability was not lost on the new Luftwaffe and it wasquickly turned into a bomber version. It saw action in Spain in that role aswell as that of normal cargo transport.
The production run of the Ju-52 was not that long compared tothe C-47 and only about 4,500 aircraft were built, including those manufactured post-war. Their lumbering speed and thedecimation of a huge number of them in the taking of Crete meant that as the warcontinued, the number of Ju-52s decreased. While there were always plans made toproduce a replacement, the Ju-352 was only built in a very few numbers.
Despite the huge losses during the war, the Ju-52 went on toserve in a number of Air Forces. They were produced in France and Spain wellafter the war ended. Probably the last military Ju-52s were the three of theSwiss Air Force which were retired in the mid 1980s. Today, there are still afew of them flying the warbird circuit and they are in many museums the worldover.
THE KIT
Promodeler's kit of the Ju-52 comes in a huge box, similar tothe one that holds the 1/48 C-47 and B-29. There are well over 150 parts inMonogram's (I guess that should be Revell's) typical medium grey plastic.Detailing is superb as one would expect from the designers of all thoseexcellent kits over the years. The instruction sheet is typical of a ProModelersheet with each step logically sequenced and color call-outs throughout thesheet. There are two decal options; one for a Spanish Civil War bomber andanother for the Crete operation in 1941. It has a typical Scalemaster sheet inthat it is out of register as are all the Scalemaster sheets I have ever gottenwith a ProModeler kit.
Options are for a bomber version complete with the underfuselage'dustbin' gun emplacement. For this you need to cut a hole in the floor. Thisversion also has wheel spats. The other option is a regular troop carrier. Youget four paratrooper figures so that you can do a diorama with the kit. Onething I noticed is that, like Fujimi Bf-109s, all versions of the Ju-52 areprovided for in the fuselage and floor parts. There are enough hatches and doorsscribed on them to enable one to do a multitude of variants. Unfortunately,figuring out how to fill in those doors and hatches on a corrugated surface arebeyond my abilities. To my understanding, rarely did one fine a '52 with all of those options on oneairframe! One just needs to hope that one doesn't run across a Junkers 'experten'if displaying this kit at a contest!!
Without sounding too trite, construction begins with the interior! In fact, youwill be spending a lot of time doing this part, mostly because of the hugenumber of bits and pieces that go in there. While I was assembling this section,I also glued together the wings and wheels. The wheels are nicely flat spottedon the bottom. The instructions tell you that if you are doing an in-flightaircraft (the only way you can pose the 'dustbin' gun emplacement in the downposition) to simply turn the wheels around and hide them in the wheel 'spats'.The spats are not typical of the troop carrier version later in the war, thoughyou can find pictures of them.
I also glued the wings. Theseare very long indeed, and both of mine were warped. Not really that much of asurprise, considering their length, but one that needs careful gluing. One of mywings worked out great and the other didn't . It needed lots of filing andfilling to correct.
Rather than a blow-by-blowaccount of all the interior pieces, I'll hit a few spots. First of all, try toglue as many of the partitions in place prior to painting as possible. Theserequire some fiddling to get right. Be especially careful of installing theco*ckpit to cabin doors as they don't want to fit too well. Clamps are requiredwhen gluing the floor onto the left fuselage half. Same when doing the otherfuselage half. All the little bits fit rather well, but on the right fuselagehalf there is a small crank. This is for the radio operator's long wire antenna.The instructions are not too clear on mounting, but you need to mount it on thehigher of the two small longerons to have it fit properly when assembling thefuselage halves.
I'm not sure how much one cansee in the interior when it is done, but like most of you, I will detail theheck out of the inside, only to have 95% of it be invisible from the outside.Typical of me and large Monogram kits! Interior color is RLM02 grey and forthat, I used Aeromaster's enamels. After the details were painted, the sectionswere washed and drybrushed to bring out details.
Once all the bits and pieceshave been installed, painted, washed and drybrushed, it was time to glue the twofuselage halves together. Now this kit is unusual in that it also has a top anda bottom. Except for the interior, there is only the tail and the very frontnose section that are joined together at this time. One has to be very carefulduring this process to ensure everything is properly aligned with the slots oneach fuselage side. Don't forget to trap the tail wheel in its strut. I almostforgot about it!
In order to ensure good fit,the bottom was attached before the fuselage sides had completely dried. Thisway, the not-quite set fuselage side could be tweaked a bit to get a good fit.Filler isn't really an option over most of the fuselage as the corrugations makeany attempt at repair problematical at best.Undoubtedly one of thetrickiest parts for me was the addition of the upper fuselage section. Were I todo another kit, I would remove the mounting tabs as they tended to give me quitea struggle. The downside of taking them off is that if the fuselage isn'tstraight, it will look horrible. The end result isn't as good a fit as I gotwith the rest, there being several gaps that needed filled.
Next are the wings. Man,these things are really huge. I'd say it has an even longer span the the TamiyaBetty and similar to the Monogram DC-3. I decided to glue the top part of thewing root first so if there were any glitches, they'd be on the bottom wherethey weren't as likely to be easily see. After a day of drying, the bottomsection of the wing roots were glued. As I had feared, the wings were not thesame dihedral. This meant a shim was needed on one wing. I used a piece of.30x.30 Evergreen strip plastic to make up the difference. It worked just fineand with all that corrugation, almost looks like it belongs there. The few gapsthat happened with filled and carefully sanded.
The landing gear were my nextstep. I really wanted to use the beefier early version gear, but had committedmyself to a mid-war aircraft with the thinner gear. The gear and mountings don'tlook like they'd be strong enough to hold up such a large aircraft, but theparts fit just fine once they were glued together.At this time, the canopywas also installed. Fit wasn't as good as I had expected and there were a fewgaps that needed filled, which I did using white glue.
While all that was going on, theengines were attended to. The shields, cylinders and pushrod casings were allpainted flat black. The engines were then drybrushed with steel. The exhaust andintakes were painted burnt iron and steel. They were then inserted into thecowlings and then filled with tissue in preparation for painting. As a note onthe engines, the bits that attach to the engine cylinders all look the same, butthey are not. Make sure that those parts shown as for the nose engine go on thatengine or you will cause yourself grief when it comes time to install them onthe fuselage. The engines were then set aside for painting. They will beinstalled as one of the final steps.
The final bits to be glued onprior to painting were the horizontal stabilizers, elevators, and ailerons. Thehorizontal stabilizers have tongues on them that are supposed to interlock. Theyseem to me to be too long and they interfere with each other when trying toinstall the stabs. I cut the tongues back about 2/3 of the way before gluing thestabilizers in place. Once they were glued in and before they dried, I dryfitted the aft struts in place to make sure they fit. They just snap in place.Once the stabs were dry, the struts were removed to facilitate painting.
The elevators fit justbeautifully and do not need to be glued in place until the final assembly. Ifyou are painting yours yellow, it would be a good idea to wait until then. SinceI am not doing that scheme, I glued them on at this time, leaving them in a downposition that is so often seen on large aircraft at rest. The ailerons were notas easy as the elevators. They are a very long, skinny molding that was slightlywarped. This makes gluing it in place a bit difficult. It also didn't help thatI had bent several of the trailing edge attachment points while working on thishuge kit. The ailerons were glued in stages to ensure a good, tight fit. I wouldrecommend against superglue for those of you in a hurry. You really need thestrength of a solvent glue for these parts. Once done, it was off to the paintshop!
PAINT & DECALS
Now that the airframe was basically complete, it was painted. Ileft off all the actuating arms, antenna and other little bits that would bebroken off during this session. I find that it is much easier to completelypaint the aircraft, then go back, add the 'fussy bits' and then repaint thoseareas. Since this was to be a North African aircraft from IV./TG 3, I didn't need anyyellow areas. I chose a scheme that I saw in the old Ju-52 in Actionbook. In fact, according to my reference, this aircraft only had a whitefuselage band. Though I really wanted to do a Norway based Ju-52 with it's largewhite wing bands or nose band, the lack of any available unit insignia kept mefrom doing one of these planes.
Anyway, all the requisite clear bits were masked and usingAeromaster RLM 70/71 and 65 enamels, the airframe was painted according to thekit diagrams. You will use a lot of paint on this kit, that is for sure.First, the undersides were painted RLM 65 blue. When dry, the undersides of thehorizontal stabilizers and elevators were masked and the upper surface paintedRLM 71 dark green. Then the white area for the fuselage band was paintedwhite. When that was dry, the 71 areas and the white band I wanted to keep weremasked and the remaining areas painted RLM 70 black green. Though there aremasking sets for the camo pattern on the '52, I have better things to do with$20. Splinter patterns really are easy to do, though this one took a LOT oftape.It also took a lot of time. There is so much aircraft to paint, thatit had to be done in stages.
Finally the painting was done. The last go around was when allthe little bits and pieces such as oil coolers and antenna were added. Thenthose pieces and the surrounding areas were painted the appropriate colors. Whenall had dried, the areas where decals go were sprayed with Future.
Decals are a bit of a quandary. There are no aftermarket decalsfor this kit, and, as of this writing, it has been on the market for a year! Theonly choice is to give the kit decals a try to see how well they may work, areal challenge on the kit's corrugated surface.
Well, the decals reacted much better than I would have thought.When applying the first one, I placed the decal and then let it dry, blotting itas the instructions suggested. It sort of lay on top of the corrugations. Then,I applied Champ setting solution. That helped quite a bit, though I smeared abit of the decal when trying to get air bubbles out of it. For the rest of thedecals, I found the best way to do it was to apply solution to the surface, putthe decal on it and then reapply the Champ.
While Champ makes mush out of Aeromaster and Superscale decals,the Monogram ones are surprisingly resilient. They do eventually succumb, thoughon most of the decals there were air bubbles trapped in the corrugations. Thismeant several sessions of poking the bubbles and reapplying theChamp.However, not is all well with the decals. Some of them refusedto cooperate and wouldn't settle down. These were slit to assist in conforming,but let the underside color show through. Others had clear areas with lots ofbubbles showing in them that refused to go away. These trouble spots werepainted with the appropriate color or underlying color. Not a perfect solution,but one that was successful.
Finding code letters and unit insignia was another real problem.By scrounging through some Modeldecal 1/72 RAF letter sheets, I was able to getmost of the white code letters. The Brit and German style is similar enough touse them interchangeably without any real problem. As with the Hasegawa Hs-126,getting a colored letter the right size was a real problem, not to mentionfinding unit badges! None of the RAF ones were large enough to use in the colorI needed. However, I did stumble across an old 1/48 Microscale sheet that had a'U' that was close enough and by combining two of them, I was able to get theright height. The unit insignia were from a 1/72 ESCI sheet and while not largeenough, were the best I could find.
FINAL CONSTRUCTION
Now that the kit was painted and the decals applied (a process thatactually took several weeks), the final bits needed to be added. This includedthe bracing struts for the horizontal tailplanes, the landing light, thegunner's position and the engines. The engines were tackled first by gluing inplace the outboard engines. These had the exhaust pipes painted burnt iron andthe interior bits painted black. I had thought of drilling them out, but thatwould not have really improved things too much.
The front engine was a bit of a more complicated process. The engine had theexhaust glued to it and then it was glued to the mount. There is a cross-overpiece that includes some sort of cooler that fits on the underside of thefuselage. This was supposed to be fit in place in an early assembly sequence,but the clever builder will hold off. There are two ways to fit this and onlyone is the best way. The instructions don't tell you which is which. You willfind out after the exhaust are in place by dryfitting. Getting the crossoverpipes from the exhaust to glue up to the cooler pipes is also a real challengethat needs a steady hand, superglue, and accelerator. Then you can fit on thefront engine cowl ring if you choose. It was not uncommon for the Ju-52 to flywith this uncowled.
Finally, an application of clear matte sealed everything in place. Then thepastels came out to add some exhaust and general grunge. When satisfied, thatwas clear matted into place. Then the many masks were taken off the windows andthe fuselage antenna added. At last!! A very nice, large scale Ju-52. Somethingto hog a lot of space in my display cabinet full of German WW2 aircraft.
CONCLUSIONS
Really a very nice kit and well done. I can only hope thatenough of these were sold to make it worthwhile for ProModeler. I know that Ibought two of them! The only problem with the kit is where to put it whendone. It really is quite an imposing kit when done. Though not the same bulk asthe DC-3, the wingspan is comparable. If you have the space for it, I canhighly recommend building it.
REFERENCES
Junkers Ju-52 In Action #10, by Uwe Feist, 1973
Copyright ModelingMadness.com April 2000
Review copy courtesy of me and my wallet!!
Copyright ModelingMadness.com. All rights reserved. No reproduction in part or in whole without express permission from the editor.
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