Tamiya 1/48 He 219 Owl
By Will Riepl
Overview
The Heinkel He-219 was the ultimate night fighter design of Germany during the Second World War, with 268 of this superlative design being made before the end of the war. For a long time, the only choice of building a kit of this night fighter in 1/48 was spending a lot of money on a resin kit. Tamiya took care of this with their recent release of the He-219A-7 "Uhu". This kit is incredibly well designed, on par with the Beaufighter and the Betty. The kit comes with 125 grey parts, 8 clear parts, and one white metal part. The white metal part forms the nose wheel bay and part of the cockpit, as well as giving ample weight to keep this plane from being a tail sitter. Surface detail is finely recessed, and the cockpit detail is raised and very fine. While there is an incredible amount of detail in the kit, there are still some little things that you can do to really set this kit off.
The Kit
The cockpit is the usual place to start
off in, and this kit is no exception. I started with the seats. Here
is the first change that you need to do to have an accurate He-219.
The way the kit is molded, the pilot’s headrest is set wrong.
To correct it, you need to cut off the headrest at the angle and turn
it around 180°. Instead of having the headrest angle back, it should
now angle forward. The other thing on the seats that needs to be changed
is the footrests, as the bar style was only found on the A-0 series.
I cut those off and replaced them with a piece of properly bent wire.
To model the seat cushions, I took a piece of aluminum foil and formed
it over a piece of paper towel to give it thickness. I then gently
pressed it on a wood rasp to give it texture. I painted the cushions
up with some brown shades of Delta Ceramcoat acrylic craft paint. Check
your local craft store for these paints, as they are great for brush
painting, come in a huge variety of colors, and are considerably cheaper
than regular model paints.
Once the seats were done, I turned
to the rest of the cockpit. Not much to add here, I sprayed the whole
cockpit with Aeromaster RLM66 and set about painting up the various
details on the instrument panels and cockpit sidewalls. The only
thing I added to the final cockpit was the oxygen hose, which I made
from tightly wrapping some very fine brass wire around a piece of
appropriate sized flexible wire. After I had about an inch or so
wrapped, I carefully slid it off the music wire and painted it green.
After the paint was dry, I slid it back onto the music wire and bent
it to shape, using round rat tail files to get smooth curves. I cut
it to size and glued it in place.
Inside the fuselage,
not much was done. I painted the interior sections RLM66, and I built
a jig for the jazz music so I could use steel tubing for the gun barrels.
I made a holder to keep the barrels aligned and glued that into the
jazz music cover. In fitting the jazz music cover to the fuselage,
I noticed that it didn’t quite fit right, so I shimmed it up with
a piece of 5 thou plastic card. The ventral gun piece fit beautifully,
so all that was left with the fuselage was some light sanding on the
seams, and then I went on to the wings.
Wings & Engines
Continuing on the steel tubing gun theme,
I did the same thing for the wing guns as well, using a piece of styrene
rod glued in the wing to keep the gun barrel straight. I didn’t
want to waste all that gun detail Tamiya gives you for the jazz music,
so I decided to open up one of the wing gun hatches. I cut the twin
kit guns apart and built a box in one wing for it. I then cut open
the hatch in the top of the wing and scratchbuilt a new hatch out of
plastic card.
To fend off the flashlight police, I cut
out the intake scoops and blanked those off with plastic card as well.
For the supercharger intakes next to the engines, I curved the card
in towards the nacelle, while the outboard scoop I blanked off deep
into the wing, giving it suitable depth. I added details to the winglights
by using HO scale train signal lights for landing lights and cutting
out the wing lights and replacing them with Crystal Clear, using a
piece of painted styrene rod for representing the lights themselves.
I dropped the flaps according to the instructions, and then turned
to the engine cowls.
I wanted to display the cowl flaps in the
open position, and it was very nice of Tamiya to give us this option.
There is one thing missing, though, and that is the cowl flap actuators.
The trusty styrene rod saves the day again, as I set about drilling
holes in the cowl flaps. Once I had the holes drilled, I then inserted
the styrene rod and cut off the excess. Once that was dry, I sanded
the flaps smooth and started assembling the main subcomponents. The
wings and the tail went on with no hitches, and it was now time to
set that aside to set up and start on the landing gear.
The landing gear is well detailed in the
kit, but after checking the Flugzeug Profile on the He-219, I saw that
there was more detail that could be added. I used copper wire to simulate
the brake lines, and added the piping coming out of the wheel hub center.
For the nose gear, I cut the strut and angled the wheel to one side.
I made new oleo scissors out of 10 thou plastic to give a more realistic
look. I wrapped Bare Metal Foil around the oleos, painted the struts
RLM02, and set them aside for later.
Painting
With everything ready, it’s time
to figure out how to paint this thing. There isn’t much choice,
but there are some interesting variations. I chose to do one black
wing, with RLM76 overall and RLM75 dots. To start out, I sprayed
the whole plane with Aeromaster RLM76. After this had dried thoroughly,
I thought about how the best way to do the dot pattern would be.
I settled for the following method, and it worked out pretty well.
Instead of RLM75, I sprayed all the dots with Aeromaster Gunship
Grey (FS 36118). To tone them down, and build up a nice fade line,
I then lightly oversprayed them with the RLM76. This method makes
doing this pattern much easier, as I didn’t have to be as precise
as if I was doing the dots with RLM75. Once the dots were painted
on, I then sprayed the one black wing and set everything aside to
dry thoroughly. After it had dried for a couple of days, I sealed
it with Testors Acrylic Flat and began the weathering process.
I used artist’s oils to weather it
with. Black, burnt umber and a rust red were used throughout, using
a turpentine wash over the acrylic flat. With the acrylic flat on,
the turpentine wash doesn’t affect the paint underneath, and a
very realistic effect can be achieved. I weathered before decalling
because of the amount of rubbing the weathering process entails, and
I didn’t want to risk removing the decals. Once the weathering
was done, I then placed the decals on. The decals were a mix of kit
and Aeromaster decals, and there were no problems with any of them.
Once the decals were on, I lightly weathered over some of them and
then sealed the whole thing again with the Testors Acrylic Flat.
Final Details
Coming down the home stretch, I glued the
landing gear on, added a steel pitot tube, affixed the gun hatch, and
made an additional touch with a drooping trailing antenna. The Uhu
was looking really good at this point, and all that was left was to
add the nose radar array. After building my Bf-110G and Ju-88G night
fighters, I have worked up a very good method of making the radar array.
I built a jig to hold the main radar strut, with holders for the individual
antennae. I made the steel tubing and music wire for the thinner part.
This was then trimmed up and set on the jig. The tubing/wire antenna
was then glued to the arm, and this was repeated for all four arms,
giving me a perfectly aligned, scale radar array. For the bottom ones,
I painted them white and wrapped a red decal around the middle.
All that’s left is the canopy and the
wiring. The armor plate in the nose of my kit is depicted in the down
position, and I added the overhead Revi gunsight for the jazz music.
I positioned this on a sliding rail that kept the gunsight out of the
way during normal flight operations. For the antenna wires, I used
invisible thread. I drilled a hole in the rudder where the wire goes
and a matching hole in the antenna mast. I then made insulators out
of very thin armature wire wrapped the smallest drill bit I had and
painted white. After threading these onto the antenna wire, I then
threaded the thread in one tail from the outside in and superglued
it in place. Next, I pulled it through
the antenna mast and brought it back to the opposite fin, threading it
from the inside out. Grabbing the wire with a pair of tweezers, I held
the kit up so that the weight of the tweezers gave
the thread some tension,
then I superglued the attachment point at the tail. I then cut the remainder
off as close as I could with a pair of scissors, then finished it off with
a sharp knife blade and covered it up with a little bit of paint. I carefully
set it down, stepped back, and took a look at the finished kit. It looks
like a He-219 to me!
Conclusion
I thoroughly enjoyed building this kit, and it filled a hole in my growing WW2 Luftwaffe night fighter collection (currently containing a Bf109D, Bf110C, Bf110G, and the Ju88G). Now that I have this one done, I think that I will dig out that Do-217N.
