I’m building this beast for the Battle of Britain group build (going on now).
This is not my first attempt at the kit. I had previously grabbed the Monogram Pro-Modeler boxing back when it was first released, where it then languished in my stash for years. A couple of years ago, I thought I’d build it and end up with a big Ju88 hanging off one of my walls. Well, that didn’t turn out to be the case. I was proceeding just fine with a cockpit that had turned out quite well, adorned with Quinta Studios 3-D decals, when I ran into what I considered to be an unrecoverable error*. I mis-aligned a portion of the cockpit floorboard that fits against the port side wall. When I went to install the port fuselage piece, it was immediately clear that I would never get it into position properly. I tried to find a work-around, but I couldn’t get there without producing a subpar build. I ended up deep-sixing that kit. That’s a decision that I regret, but I think I just wasn’t emotionally up for combatting the self-inflicted problem.
- Unrecoverable insofar as I did not want to tear everything apart, cause any cockpit damage, or fog the canopies to conceal missing parts in the very visible cockpit.
A couple of months ago, I opened an email from Kitlinx about a sale on some acquisition of kits from whatever source (possibly the stash of a modeler who had passed away?). I had thought about giving the Ju88 another try, but eBay prices were twice what I’d originally paid for it back around the year 2010 or so. Nope. So this sale had the Revell boxing for $70. Yes. I still had some of the after-market pieces I bought for my first attempt - replacement guns and exhaust stacks, and a Montex Mask set. All I needed was to get another Quinta Studios 3-D decal set.
When the kit arrived, there was a bonus included. Whoever previously owned this kit had apparently had good intent on how (s)he was going to build it, and had acquired a lot of research material on the kit. Pages ripped out of a FSM issue, as well as a couple of other British-based magazines. Good articles with lots of pointers that I will be perusing repeatedly while building this thing.
When I start a new build, I typically clean the work bench and for larger kits like this one, I will use a black Sharpie to highlight sprue letters and parts numbers. This is a trick I picked up from someone on here several years ago. It greatly reduces the time it takes to find a part when your kit has a dozen sprues with a bunch of parts.
Here is my recently cleared off work bench with all of the research material I have for this build. The big book I have here is a go-to for every Luftwaffe subject that I build.
Finally, as a result of my earlier failure, I knew that I had to do everything to avoid a similar failure with this build. To that end, I removed every relevant part from the sprues, cleaned them up, then dry-fit them together until I verified that the problem I had previously can be avoided this time.
