1:32 Fw-190 D-9

One scale down, the same machine

The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 D-9 closed a line of development that had begun with a stubby fighter with a radial engine. Fitting the liquid-cooled Jumo 213 twelve-cylinder stretched the aircraft at the front and at the rear and gave it a silhouette nobody would have expected from this family. It went into combat from the autumn of 1944, mostly over German territory, and some of the machines covered the airfields of jet fighters at the moments of takeoff and landing. The cooling circuit hidden in the annular cowl ahead of the engine still misleads: in a photograph it looks like a radial engine, while in fact it is an inverted V12 powerplant. Pilots called the machine Dora after the letter in the version designation and many considered it the best fighter they flew during the war.

Description of the set

The outlines on the sheet follow the windscreen ahead of the pilot, the sliding teardrop and the fixed part behind his head. This is the variant covering the glass from both sides.

How the work differs from larger scales

In 1:32 the cockpit is smaller than on the large 1:24 models, but still large enough for the inner frame to be clearly legible through the glass. That is why the set holds pieces for the inner face as well, whereas in small scales the masking is done from the outside only. Tweezers with a fine tip are more useful here than fingers, because the smallest parts are only a few millimeters across and the film ripples quickly from the warmth of a hand. National insignia are absent from this line in every scale, so for the crosses and numbers decals have to be reached for.