1:32 Bf 109E-1/4

The first Emil and the language of symbols on the fuselage

The dash-one was the version with which the Luftwaffe went to war. The armament was four MG 17 machine guns, two above the engine and two in the wings, and pilots soon began to find it weak. That is exactly why the dash-four with cannon in the wing came about. Both variants met over Poland, over Norway and in the first weeks of the campaign in the west.

Anyone who wants to build a machine of 1939 faithfully has to be able to read the marks in front of the cross on the fuselage. An arrow meant a staff officer, a horizontal bar the commander of a group, a disc its third part and a numeral with a colored border an ordinary machine of a particular squadron. Unit emblems were added to the markings: a hat, an axe, a shield or an animal. The year 1939 was also the last in which the cross on the wing was still broad and with a thin white border.

The package contains glazing stencils for both sides of the part, a pair of national insignia masks, decals and four metal parts: the muzzles of the MG 17 machine guns and the barrels of the MG FF cannon for the E-4 version. The target mold is the Eduard kit.

On the insignia on the wing: the mask delimits the white border, but the black fill has to be sprayed in a second pass. It pays to leave a longer interval between the layers, because black paint over white easily runs under the edge of the film.

This set belongs among those that offer decals alongside the masks. Within the range that is a minority, so anyone building without a stock of sheets of his own gets a step more here than with the neighboring packages.