Construction of the kit went surprisingly quickly. I don’t always build in the suggested order, instead I’ll often tackle what appear to be the worst or most contentious areas first in order to eliminate the onerous tasks and enjoy the rest of the process. Therefore, the resin bits were first onto the table. I made short work of the pour plugs on the back of the circular wheel well inserts using a finetooth razor saw and a coarse sanding stick (one of several I’ve picked up in the cosmetics section of WalMart…if anyone looks at you strangely when you’re shopping in that section, tell’em you’re playing the part of Dr. Frank N. Furter in a Rocky Horror stage show and they’ll likely leave you alone .) The plugs fit the wings nicely; I did run some 400 grit paper around the circumference of the walls once the plugs were in, and cleaned up the edges of the forward gear bays, but added no additional details owing to my lack of reference materials.

Next up were the cockpit pieces. Have a look at the scan of the resin parts above, then compare them to the pictures found at www.amivirtual.com/re2001technical.htm: There is a LOT more detail which could be added to these parts should the builder so desire; also note the unusual drilled seatpan in the picture immediately above. This style of seat pan was also used on the French Arsenal VG-30 series of fighters. The CA kit provides a resin “cushion” premolded on the seat, which gets around this issue nicely. Belts are molded on the seat as well, and the whole cockpit benefits from a careful wash and drybrush job. A word about the interior color: CA lists the FS equivalent as 34558, and an article in SAMI mentioned “interior green with a touch of emerald”, whatever that implies. Not having an FS deck or any emerald lying about, I simply opted for Model Master British Interior Grey-Green. I presume that is not the correct shade, but I can live with it, I’ll keep looking for a closer match for future Italian birds I plan to build.

Another item to note, and an important one at that: the rear bulkhead does NOT, repeat, does NOT get sandwiched between the fuselage halves. Remove the resin pour plug from the back using your favorite method (mine involves the aforementioned razor saw and sanding stick) and sand it until nice and thin, say around .020. Do not step on it or fold it, it will break  . I affixed the rear bulkhead to the floor section with superglue in order to give a more positive location to the seat, which simply sits on two resin blocks, and then used the assembly to draw locator lines on the fuselage halves for the resin walls. I also sanded the mating surfaces of the fuselage halves down as there is a slight ridge near the lip of the cockpit coaming on each side. Doing this and sanding the rear side of the resin walls gives a nice, smooth fit. Be sure to dryfit throughout this process; I had to do so several times and wound up cutting the very lowest stringer off the resin walls in order to get a perfect fit between all the parts. Line up the resin walls with the reference lines drawn by using the floor/rear bulkhead assembly, and then glue the walls into each half.

Once the walls are mounted and painted/detailed to taste, you may add the instrument panel, which butts up against the forward edges of the fuselage walls. Note that the panel will also benefit from a careful wash and drybrush…I use an 18/0 red sable liner to paint the needles on the dials, then add a tiny drop of Testor’s Clear Parts Cement with a pin to give a “glass” face to the panel. It’s not hard, and makes quite a difference on the finished product!
Add the stick and rudder pedals, and the cockpit is essentially complete with the exception of the gunsight. Once the instrument panel was installed and dry, I added the resin gunsight. This was enhanced with a light drybrushing, a “reflector” from a tiny disk of silver Mylar sequin (if you have it, use a #1 punch from the Waldron punch and die set and get a package of these thin, round mylar sequins in a huge variety of colors from your local Wal-Mart’s craft section). A sight glass was cut from .005 clear plastic and the gunsight was done.

Before you can close up the fuselage halves, however, there’s a few things up front which need to be taken care of. First of all, now is a great time to add the resin exhausts. Drill out the very forward edge and square off the hole (see a pic of a Messerschmitt Bf109E exhaust to see what I’m talking about), then carefully dryfit the exhausts into their respective slots in the fuselage halves. I had to elongate the holes at the forward edges to allow the exhausts to slide in…your mileage may vary. You should also paint and add the oil cooler at this time. Once it’s in, you’ll think, “Ugh, that roof and seam looks like crap”…well, I’ve got a foolproof fix for that, too.

NOW you can close up the fuselage halves. Once again, I carefully dryfit the floor/rear bulkhead assembly in the right fuselage half ONE MORE TIME, then secured the assembly and the halves with trusty ol’ Zap-a-Gap. Seam cleaning followed: I scraped a sharp #11 X-acto blade down the seams to knock’em down first, then followed with the coarse sanding stick, then the fine version, and finished up with 1500 grit wet/dry used wet. To fix that goofy looking oil cooler intake, just cut a strip of .005 styrene sheet wide enough to fit snugly lip to lip in the cooler intake, and superglue it along the leading edge where the strip meets the UPPER lip of the cooler. Once dry, cut off the excess and sand it down…works like a charm, see the overall lower surface photo below.

The upper cowl is next to be added, and you’ll need to drill out the openings for the guns…they are just indentions as provided in the kit. I also added two scratchbuilt MG muzzles; I don’t know if they’re supposed to protrude or not, but I set them up about where they would be on an Me109. If this is wrong, I welcome corrections…not that I’m changing it, but it will be useful for future reference. I also drilled out the semicircular vents around the cowl and scraped open the thin horizontal vents using the tip of a #11 blade; you don’t need to go too deep on those, as you can add a little black wash in there once the plane’s painted and they’ll look just fine. All that done, I superglued the cowl to the fuselage assembly, and cleaned up the resultant seams. A note about the fit here…once again, DRY FIT the pieces and carefully shave down the INNER lip of the fuselage mating surfaces to give a better fit here. Paying a little attention to this will save a LOT of heartache later. Mine went together fine by doing this, but I’ve had instances in the past where the air over my workbench turned a particularly lovely shade of blue thanks to some inept modeling in my part. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure, and all that…

Pay attention when attaching that long intake vent on the port cowling as well…I drilled it a little deeper just to give some depth to it, but in cleaning up the back of it, I got an angle wrong and it wouldn’t sit right on the fuselage. Solution? Add an equal length strip of .010 Evergreen strip at the intersection of the intake and cowl, then sand lightly to make it look like part of the assembly. Is it right? I doubt it…but it looks OK to me, and it looks like it belongs there .

So, the fuselage is together, and you’ve got these wing parts laying around…WARNING, WARNING!!! You know that phrase DRY FIT? Well, we’re going to do it again! Here’s what I did, and I recommend you do NOT follow this procedure, you’ll find out why shortly. I decided to be smooth and add the lower wing first, then the upper halves in an effort to minimize seams. “What a great plan…can’t possibly fail…Wile E. Coyote, you are a super genius!!” You can see this train wreck coming, right?
Well, the lower wing has a notch up front which aids greatly in alignment, but is NOT perfect. I lined it up with that notch, slathered the superglue on, commenced to cleaning it up, then added the left upper wing…uh oh. Why are the angles different? The upper wing overlapped the lower wing half with about 4-5 degrees of offset, and this was echoed on the opposite side…what happened, near as I can tell, was that the lower wing did NOT center properly. I measured it using the centerline of the wing versus the centerline of the fuselage, and I got it off by 1/32”. Yes, 1/32” gave the following results:

Can you see how the starboard wing (to the left above) leading edge looks to have more of a tapered leading edge than the port wing? THAT”s what happens. I managed to knock it down a bit more, and it’s hardly noticeable now, but that was the worst thing to happen in this entire build. Solution? Assemble the wings entirely, and dryfit/adjust/fill gaps as necessary when attaching to the fuselage. The possibility also exists that the wing root fairings were not molded with proper angles, but as I definitely DID screw up the lower wing alignment, I can’t conclusively point the finger in that direction…although I wouldn’t have thought 1/32” would have made THAT much difference.

Ok, the sweating and cursing was over with. The horizontal stabilizers couldn’t be more straightforward…file the surfaces at a 90 degree angle on the fuselage and the stabs, then attach with superglue, let dry, sand. Done. The resin radiators under the wings will need a bit of sanding and fiddling to make them fit properly in their housings, but this is easy stuff since the resin is so easy to sand away. One thing I did different was to cut out the radiator flaps and replace them with .005 card folded to shape…about 30 seconds work total on each, it was really easy to do and it looks quite nice when done.
Now, on to the last fiddly bits…prop and gear. The propeller is fairly straightforward, no big tricks…I assembled the spinner first, sanded and painted it, then carefully added the blades after cleaning them up. You’ll want to add tubing to the center of the spinner, otherwise light will shine clear through the prop blade openings…I used two lengths of aluminum tubing.
The landing gear is another matter entirely. As provided, you get two sticks. Literally. The wheels are nicely done, although they may look better in resin. The gear doors are a bit thick, but generally accurate and will benefit from careful cleaning up. I also added a lip of .010 Evergreen strip around the inner circumference of the “half moon” doors to give it a little visual interest; pics I’ve seen seem to show this effect. The legs were detailed in the following manner:

- Align the legs perfectly even on a rolled up piece of tape (to hold them in place) but make sure they’ve got at least ¼”- ½” between them.
- Cut a length of lead foil/thick aluminum foil about 1 ½” to 2” long and about ½” wide, and superglue the strip towards the upper section of BOTH legs; let dry. (To get an idea of the best place to add this, dryfit the gear legs in the assembled wing halves and mark a line on the leg where it meets the lowermost surface of the gear nacelle)
- Repeat process, but with a strip only about 1/8” in width and apply about ¼” beneath the other strip; let dry.
- Cut down the middle of the strips, then take each gear leg and wrap the strips the remainder of the way around each leg, using a small amount of superglue to secure the strips; cut away remainder once the leading edge of the strip is reached.
You now have a bit more detail to work with. I never did find if there are torque links on the genuine article, so I didn’t add any. I did add brake lines from silver solder, affixed with strips of lead foil, and once the gear was installed, I added twin drag struts as suggested in the instructions from lengths of Evergreen styrene rod. I did add the doors at this point, but did NOT add the wheels yet…that came after painting.

The vacuform windscreen was added next, and this was rather straightforward…again, DRY FIT the part and VERY CAREFULLY trim the piece with a NEW #11 blade, this makes a great difference. I wound up using two of the four canopies in the process; one for the windscreen, and one for the canopy. I masked the canopy and cockpit off with Scotch tape, then loaded up the ol’ Badger 150 with plain old Testors White thinned with DioSol and shot the white fuselage band and spinner. After that was dry, I masked off the fuselage band with Scotch tape, and shot the lower surfaces (gear included) with Aeromaster Acrylics Grigio Mimiteco (1210), thinned with isopropyl alcohol. I usually don’t like acrylics, but this stuff stuck like glue, and was dry within 10 minutes! My kind of paint! Same thing applied to the Aeromaster Verde Oliva Scurro (1214)…by the time I had the airbrush cleaned out, the whole model was dry and ready for a glosscoat.