1:24 Bf 109E-7

The E-7 version and its range

The most keenly felt weakness of the Emil over England was its short range, which let fighters spend barely a quarter of an hour over the target. The answer was the E-7 variant with a modified rack under the fuselage, on which a jettisonable three hundred liter tank could be hung, or a bomb carrier. Machines of this version then appeared over the Balkans, over the Mediterranean and in the first weeks of the campaign in the east.

Fewer insignia masks, more on the decals

This set carries only two masks for the national insignia, that is fewer than most other sets in 1:24 scale. The explanation lies in the decals that complete the package and that make up the main part of its content. For a modeler that means the number of masks enclosed is not a measure of how much of the markings can be sprayed, because the rest is precisely on the decals.

Overview of the contents

• canopy masks for the outside and the inside
• two masks for the national insignia
• decals

German crosses have hard right-angled edges that come out better sprayed than from a decal, because the corner of a decal lifts as it is pressed into a panel line. In a large scale that difference is obvious at first glance.

The colored theater bands

Machines fighting over the Mediterranean and on the Eastern Front carried conspicuous yellow or white areas on the underside of the nose, on the wingtips and around the fuselage behind the cockpit. These areas have hard edges and are very conspicuous on a model, so spraying them over your own masking is more suitable than trying to solve them with a decal. The set does not contain tapes for these areas, but the procedure is the same and a modeler can easily cut them from ordinary masking tape to a dimension read off the model.

The aircraft model is not part of this item.