[Erik Zwaan]

Hello PM's,

I've been giving it a long thought whether to start a detailed Halinski kit or not as this will undoubtedly be a lengthly project and there are so many smaller kits that could build instead. However, the call has become too strong and I’ve given in.

I have two Halinski's on my stack and my fingers are itching to start working on both of them but I’m afraid that’s not very practical. So I flipped a coin and there you go.

This Ju 88 reconnaissance version was published in 2009; it's a beautiful kit with some 1000 individual parts, so only in terms of part numbers this is already a great challenge. I set up an Excel overview of all the parts involved to ensure nothing’s left behind during the building process and accounted for almost all of them in the instruction drawings. A few, however, are missing.

The print is beautiful, with realistic weathering and dirt effects and the many pages are densely populated with parts. The former and internal lining parts have been printed on thin paper. Numerous clear instruction drawings and a Polish “opis budowy” (building instructions) that hopefully only reveals that the build should progress in accordance with the numerical parts order as I only bothered to translate the list of symbols like *, **, +, WPS, and etcetera. Also, with the help of a Polish colleague, to translate Google Translate into proper English.

I bought the laser cut and canopy sets, so all together quite an investment for a paper model, something like 50 euros, but by the reputation of Halinski it should all be worth it.

In 2012 member Wilfried also built this model and his thread and pictures are very inspirational. Unfortunately his quest stopped suddenly and I’m still wondering what happened. I hope I can fill this gap with my build. At least, his thread was the reason I wanted to build this model myself.

So far for the introduction and after checking out the parts I separated all pages and sprayed them lightly with a coat of matt acrylic varnish. And next the build begins…

Erik