1:48 Me – 109 K-4

The last production Bf 109

The Kurfürst came to the units in the autumn of 1944 as an attempt to close the gap against the Allied fighters, which had grown in the meantime. It received an engine with a water mixture for a short-term increase in power, a 30 mm cannon housed in the propeller axis and a series of small changes to the airframe. Over fifteen hundred were built and the great majority ended up with units defending the territory of the Reich in the last months of the fighting.

What the delivery includes

In the envelope are two stencils for the cockpit cover, one for the outer and one for the inner face, and two sheets with the shapes of the national markings. The pair of sheets will do for the crosses on the lower and upper wing surfaces; for the sides of the fuselage the stencils are moved, which means waiting for the paint to dry and seating them a second time.

• the cockpit masked from the outer and from the inner face
• two sheets with the shapes of the national markings
• the middle size, that is 1:48
• the matte surface of the film does not shine under a clear coat
• the cut matches the blown canopy of the late batch

What 1:48 does not reveal about the Kurfürst

This is a subject on which the middle size is on the edge. Most of the differences against the preceding batch lie in small details: relocated landing gear bay doors, a taller tailwheel, a different shape of the cover over the cartridge chutes. In a reduction of 1:48 these features measure tenths of a millimeter and on a finished model not even a trained eye tells them apart, so a built Kurfürst looks almost the same as a late Gustav. Only one thing asserts itself, namely the framing of the glazing, and that is worked only with a stencil. Outlining the bars by hand with a brush ends here in a shaky line, because a bar is narrower than the mark of even the finest brush.