Some weathering
With the main painting done it was time to add some weathering. This consists of the usual exhaust stains, cannon/machine gun cordite staining and general dirt around areas such as the wing roots. This was done with a combination of thinned paints, washes and pigments.
It was now just a case of adding all those bits and bobs such as the undercarriage, step, cannons, machine guns and flaps. One point of note is with the flaps; if you use the tabs fitted to have them in the down position they sit at almost 90 degrees which to me appears all wrong. I removed the tabs and fixed them in a more realistic 45 degrees setting.
These A series Fw190`s had self-tensioning aerial wires so they remained taught even when the cockpit was opened (on later versions this mechanism was removed and the wire hung down slack when the canopy was slid back). The mechanism was visible in the rear of the cockpit in the form of visible wire so these were added using Uschi Van Der Rosten`s elasticated thread.
Many modeller`s add the external aerial wire as a simple wire but in reality these had isolators and anti-icing cone. The isolators are straightforward small diameter brass tubing but the anti-icing cone was made by carefully heating a sheet of Evergreen plastic card until it is malleable. A sharpened cocktail stick is then gently pushed into the card to produce a cone. This can then be cut to the required size and threaded onto the aerial wire. The final thing to do was add the end to the wing pitot tube by sliding two increasingly smaller diameter bits of tube into it.
