Revell 1/72 Junkers F13W: Two Builds – Part 2

By the end of my previous post, I’d completed all the necessary revisions to the kit parts to produce an in-flight model of Gidsken Jakobsen‘s ill-fated Junkers F13 floatplane, LN-ABH. (See the previous post for details of its fate.)

Unusually, I painted the fuselage and wing parts before complete assembly—because of the boxy nature of the aircraft, there were no seams that were going to need filling and sanding. One of the challenges was going to be to produce the smooth curve of black paint on either side of the fuselage at the nose of the aircraft, particularly given the very fine corrugations moulded into the kit parts. The kit provides a narrow, curved black decal, intended to act as a demarcation line for this paintwork, but the decal didn’t match the curve of the paint edge on the real aircraft.

Junkers F13 LN-ABH, Balestrand, Norway
Norsk Luftfartsmuseum public domain image NL.04060001
Click to enlarge

First, I coated the kit parts with primer and then airbrushed on my Duralumin paint mix. In a fit of masochism born out of Covid lock-down and impatience, I didn’t use any of the commercial premixed preparations, but blended my own from Humbrol Aluminium and Gloss White, in a 4:1 ratio. (A lot of people complain that Humbrol is practically un-airbrushable, but actually it goes on quite nicely if it’s not thinned as much as usual, and is sprayed at a higher working pressure. I stirred in a little thinner until I got to a paint:thinner ratio of maybe 7:3, which is noticeably thicker than the usual “milk-like” endpoint for most airbrush paints, and then set my airbrush’s working pressure to 30 psi/2 bars.)

Then I scanned the (conveniently flat-sided) kit part and used that image as the basis to construct an appropriate curve using a graphics program, which I printed out at the correct scale, and glued to the back of a sheet of Bare-Metal Foil. I then used this as a guide to cut out the necessary curve in the foil using a new No.11 scalpel blade. Then I laid the foil on as a paint mask on the kit part, and massaged it into the fine corrugations with a cotton bud.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 masking nose
Click to enlarge

This rigmarole worked out well. (In the view below I’ve also filled the locating holes for the wire-frame step on the port side of the fuselage, which had been removed by the time this aircraft became LN-ABH, and replaced with a ladder. I have, however, not yet removed the little triangular tail-skid support, which was absent from the float-plane version.)

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 nose painted
Click to enlarge

The elderly kit parts had all assumed interesting curves over the years, so it took a bit of effort to get the fuselage floor to fit into one fuselage half. I glued it a little at a time, gradually flexing the parts into alignment, rather than trying to get it done all at once.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 interior in place
Click to enlarge

The second fuselage half went on more easily.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 fuselage closed 1
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 fuselage closed 2
Click to enlarge

I found I needed to leave the tail end slightly open, by a fraction of a millimetre, to avoid the roof part overhanging slightly in that region. The slight gap at the rear would be entirely covered by my replacement rudder. Here’s the fuselage largely assembled and painted, complete with new rudder, exhaust pipes and cowling tie-downs:

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 Master-X fuselage 2
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 Master-X fuselage 3
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 Master-X fuselage 4
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 fuselage 1
Click to enlarge

With Mika’s replacement decals still caught up in an endless Brexit/Covid postal delay somewhere between Finland and Scotland, and heartened by my success with the Bare-Metal Foil paint masks, I decided to make some stencils for the underwing registration letters. I scanned Mika’s original decals, corrected the “N”, and then printed the registration letters in reverse on the back of a sheet of Bare-Metal Foil.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 preparing lower wing masks
Click to enlarge

Then I cut them out, and rubbed down the resulting stencils on to the underwing kit part (already primed and coated with Duralumin.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 lower wing masks
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 lower wing masked
Click to enlarge

After a coat of black, the result fell into the not-great-but-not-too-bad category. The “B” in particular was going to need a little additional freehand repair work.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 lower wing painted
Click to enlarge

The float struts in this kit are notoriously difficult to attach, since there are multiple locating holes that all need to align simultaneously with multiple locating pins. So I decided to fit the floats to the unassembled lower wing section. This let me nudge each float strut into position in its correct hole, and then secure it with a little dab of cyanoacrylate gel from the inside of the wing, before moving on to the next one.

Once the floats were attached, I also added the boarding ladder connecting the float to the wing-root on the port side, putting it together from short pieces of 0.5mm brass rod. There seem to have been two versions of this ladder, one near-vertical and one sloping:

LN-ABH ladder, vertical
Detail from Norsk Luftfartsmuseum image NL.04030006
LN-ABH ladder, sloping
Detail from Norsk Luftfartsmuseum image NL.04120004

Without any evidence to suggest which was the later version, I went for the more vertical option.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 floats attached 1
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 floats attached 2
Click to enlarge

With the fuselage largely completed, I was able to dry-assemble the bulk of the aircraft to check its centre of gravity, because (as an in-flight model) I wanted to put this one on a stand. There was plenty of room inside the thick chord of the wing to place a small neodymium magnet, which I could use to attach the model to a similar magnet on an old transparent Airfix stand.

Airfix stand with neodymium magnet
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 magnet in place
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 test fitting to stand 1
Click to enlarge
Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 test fitting to stand 2
Click to enlarge

Then I closed up the wing.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 wings assembled 1
Click to enlarge

The areas where I’d removed the moulded kit ailerons had a tendency to gap too widely, so I slipped in a little styrene strip as a spacer, and to provide an anchor point for the Master-X resin replacements.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 wings assembled 2
Click to enlarge

These went on nicely, with only a tiny amount of sanding to get a neat fit along the length of the parts.

Revell 1/72 Junkers F13 Master-X ailerons added
Click to enlarge

At this point, I gave wings and fuselage a coat of gloss enamel varnish and set them aside, still separate, to await the application of decals.

Next time—a much more straightforward build for D 260.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.