These are some pictures of my build of the Trumpeter Ju-87 E, in 1/32 Scale
This was not the easiest build I have worked one. The kit is the Trumpeter 1/32 scale Stuka E model, with the long range external fuel tanks. It’s an older kit from Trumpeter and there are many issues with the kit in both shape and fit.
Shape, the main issues is nose chin for the oil cooler which is not deep enough. Also the wheel spats are not the correct shape. I attempted to use a 3rd party correction set in resin for the nose. This set comes with a new propeller, the entire nose and wheel spats. As hard as I worked on this I was never able to get a good fit around the nose where the entire nose fits to the fuselage. Also the resin part did not have the same degree of detailing, no rivets and the panel lines were not as pronounced. One of the hardest things to re-create on a model are panel lines. Yes you can re-scribe them the it’s not the easiest process. After many attempts, I went back to the kit nose and just lived with the issues. If you go with the kit nose, you also can’t use the propeller as the hub is too large.
The fit issues were mainly with the wings. The Ju-87 had a classic gull shaped wing and the way that Trumpeter put the wings together was less than stellar. They mate in the inverted area and no matter what I did, I either had a gap on top or underneath. I chose to keep the gap underneath and just fill it.
Painting was also a total mess. I wanted to use the classic desert snake decal set from Eagle Cals. The paint pattern for this was very hard to work with as you had to paint the Ju-87 in the classic RLM 70/71 scheme and then over paint it with the desert color. I used AK real colors for the RLM 70/71 and the RLM 65 on the under wings. For the patterns I used tape as I felt that there should be a hard line demarkation on the colors. Even though I washed the kit before painting, I had many issue with paint pulling off the plastic. I had primed the kit with Mr Surfacer 1000, and was surprised at how many problems I had with paint pull off.
For desert yellow over color, I use a paint by tru-color pain, TCP-1419, FS-30266. This is an acrylic lacquer paint similar to the AK real colors. It sprayed very well through my Grex airbrush.
Decals were all by Eagle Cals, and they were easy to apply besides the actual snake, which was a mess as it has to fit over a lot of the smaller raised areas around the nose. Using both Micro Sol and Micro Set, I was able to get a pretty good fit. The Eagle Cals versions of the snake does not have red blotches instead it uses the color of the aircraft to fill these. There is a big question as to if the snake was red and white or just white with the aircraft color.
The canopy should have some of the structure internally represented, however as the Trumpeter canopy has hard lines for the framing, all on the outside, I left it like that. The actual Stuka canopy had both internal and external framing and its actually very complex.
Overall a fun build. I have left the kit with the glossy finish on as prefer this for cleaning later on. Much easier to remove dust from a glossy finish.