[Siwi]

And the bird is finished with the installation of remaining aerials and aileron hinges, radar receiver and some paint spots. It's increasingly difficult to find places to pick it up by!

This was quite a slow build due to having to take a couple of weeks out to do a beta build for Draco, and also the small matter of learning two cello concertos for performance and training for a marathon and half marathon, so I generally only had Friday evenings and bits of Sundays to work on it. New techniques I tried in this build were: using the coiling method for wheels and other compound curves; superglue to stiffen thin parts; masking tape for a metal texture; coffee as a weathering material; making miniature MGs; and the varnish tricks on the instrument panel. Some faults of course: I still didn't make a good enough wing spar to hold the correct dihedral; the engines don't align; wheels are different sizes and the canopy glazing was not cut correctly at the front. But overall an enjoyable and fairly problem-free build and I'm pleased with the result.


One other thing to mention is that whilst making this I often found myself considering the men who would have been in the real thing. What would they would have been thinking in the last year of the war, as they were pushed into missions against the inveitable collapse of the regime they had lived under for the last decade? They must have known that the war was lost and however many bombers they shot down there would be thousands more raining destruction on their increasingly shrinking territory, with the Allied army somewhere over the horizon as their bases pulled further and further back. The shortages of fuel, materials, possibly rations and the increasingly inexperienced replacement aircrew would have been all too obvious, even if it would have been impossible to comment on this in public. Did they talk privately in the cockpit with a finger over the radio, or perhaps even contemplate defection as occured with one Ju-88 nightfighter close to the end of the war?