I could find absolutely nothing on this project in any of my references, and I have a few of them! I can only assume that it is total fantasy and not based on any known paper project or research. Besides, the number 248 was given to Junkers for their build of the Me-163C. Regardless, it is supposed to be a point defense fighter whose major attribute was a ferocious rate of climb. This was before rocket or jet fighters. The pusher prop was driven by a DB.605 (or similar engine) buried just under the wing roots. The tricyle landing gear enabled easy engine access and good ground handling. Besides, can't have a tail wheel with a pusher prop!

 

THE KIT

If you have never built a Pend Oreille resin kit, then you really should. They are superbly engineered and, especially in the case of their Luft '46 kits, of very imaginative subjects.  The Just Fantasy kits are all in header bags like you see at the top, but are well packaged when sent to you. Mine arrived in perfect condition with no damage at all. All are cast in a while or near-white resin with finely engraved panel lines. Typical of a resin kit, there is some cleanup required, such as removing some flash, pour stubs and attachment points, as well as cleaning up some resin 'balls' These are usually in corners and sometimes very small ones are in the detail lines. These are easy to remove.

The wings on this kit fit snugly into the sockets provided on the fuselage. One little glitch is that the inner flaps are not repeated on the lower wing fairings so it provides no where for the flaps to go. I'd recommend just filling these inner flaps as they probably wouldn't have been there anyway.  Two vacuform canopies are provided for those of us who usually screw one up big time! A really nice addition is that the landing gear struts are reinforced with wire. The nose strut only has this reinforcement as far as the fork so you may need to do some creative gluing on this. Though the main gear sit rather far back, tail sitting may be a problem with all that resin so I'd recommend fitting some weight behind the cockpit section just in case. The resin wheels are 'bulged' and a bit too much for my liking so you may want to find some replacements or do some extra sanding.

Instructions are a single piece of paper with an alternate history and parts list on one side. The other has four construction drawings showing the building of the model. The drawings are well done, but I would have liked to have seen one with the gear down so we could see how to position the landing gear and the gear doors. With only 28 parts, construction should proceed rather smoothly and without too much fuss. No color info is given as it really isn't needed on a subject such as this. I can tell you that the interior will be RLM 66 and the gear bays and gear RLM 02 with black wheels. There is a small decal sheet provided with markings to allow you to complete the kit, though you could also rob some from the spares box if these are not to your liking.

CONCLUSIONS