Junkers Ju-87D-5 Axis Satellites - Bulgaria

Special Hobby did a good job at supplementing the basic Academy cockpit.

There are some things I'd like to note. First, the photoetch pieces used for the foot pedals are very tiny, difficult to approximate into the appropriate shape, are easy to break, and easy to lose. They're also very difficult to spot once the cockpit has been installed into the fuselage so one could skip them entirely.

Also to avoid fit issues, install the rear gunner's seat after installing the two boxes that flank the base of where the rear machine gun is located. 

As per the instructions, there is some surgery to be done here. The stock tail rudder has been removed and sanded down. Be mindful of the placement of the box-looking piece in the top fuselage half. This piece can conflict with rear of the pilot's seat and makes it impossible to fully join the two fuselage halves around the cockpit.

Even without the cockpit or the aforementioned piece above, the fuselage halves themselves were misaligned. I don't recall this being an issue with the original Academy kit so it's strange for it to be an problem here. To solve this, I snipped off the guiding pegs and manually mated the parts together. 

The cockpit is mostly done. The decal for the control panel are a little oversized but nothing that a few coats of softener couldn't fix. A base coat of RLM66 was applied to the entire cockpit and subsequent details were painted by hand. A black panel-line wash was applied to the console behind the pilot's seat (not shown) and a brown wash was added to the floor and interior wall. 

On the left is the new tail rudder provided by Special Hobby, while the one on the right is the original Academy rudder. The Academy rudder is not terrible, but it's too straight and not as accurate to the real plane as the new one.

Speaking of accuracy, there is a long-running debate over whether the nose of the Academy (and by extension, this kit) Stuka is too short. I'm not an expert on this, but I am inclined to believe that this is the case. I don't really obsess over that sort of thing, so long as the deficiencies aren't too egregious. 

This is by far the most challenging part of the kit, at least in my experience. A rectangular-shaped cutout has to be made to install a D-5 series undercarriage. There's also an oversight in the instructions; there are four holes that need to be drilled into the bottom of the wings at this stage to account for the air coolers. It's not a big deal if the step is missed, since one could snip off the guiding pegs from the air coolers and approximate the placement instead. 

The D-5 undercarriage has been installed. It looks pretty ugly, especially along the sides. The top section had a huge gap that was filled with putty. Subsequent applications of putty and a few dabs of CA glue would have to be applied later, followed by sanding and an attempt at restoring some of the lost detail. 

The dive breaks are made from photoetch. I personally don't like this. I find that it's too easy to accidentally bend or warp them. The underwing bomb locks consist of a peg and a slotted section. This will be relevant when assembling the bombs themselves as the stabilizers have to align with both the slotted section as well as a hole on the bomb itself which fits on top of the peg. 

I used an aftermarket masking set to take care of the canopy and the tire rims. The stabilizer fins for the bombs are made of photoetch and while the smaller bombs weren't too bad, the large bomb was very annoying to piece together.

I need two hands to count the number of times I've accidentally broken the canopy antenna. 

RLM65 has been applied to the underside of the plane. For some reason it looks gray on camera. The dark spots under the dive breaks are there to simulate the German Balkenkreuz markings being painted over, as they were in real life when these planes were supplied to other Axis-aligned countries.

Of course the undercarriage still looks really ugly. I can live with it as this space will be obscured with a bomb and guiding arm soon enough. 

The standard Luftwaffe splinter camo was applied to the top side of the plane. The green goo is a masking liquid that will aid in the next step, which is the application of camo-splotches of RLM75. The instructions depict the camo as having a hard edge which is difficult to accomplish without a mask.

This is my first time using masking liquid so this was bit of a make-or-break moment in the build. I wasn't sure if the liquid would peel off the paint beneath it. 

The camo splotches are complete and decals have been added. The decals were really easy to slide into place and are much better than the ones that came with the original Academy kit. There does seem to be some sort of carrier film that is present, possibly like the kinds that come with newer Eduard kits. I might try and see if the film will come off with small amounts of enamel thinner. Maybe it's not worth the risk so late into the build. 

Following a tutorial I saw on youtube, I tried rubbing a small amount of enamel thinner with a brush to lift the carrier film off the decal. Turns out nothing happened. I could very well be mistaken in my speculation that these are later-style Eduard decals. Or I'm doing it wrong.  

Sure enough, the ugly work that I did on the undercarriage is largely hidden by the bomb and guiding arm. The position of the guiding arm is approximated as I had a hard time getting it to seat in it's actual, proper position without risking a mess of the paint around the area.

The front landing gears are comprised of new parts. The fit isn't the greatest, with the two halves of the landing gear housing having difficulty closing around the tires. A firm grip (or clamps) along with some Tamiya Extra Thin and a sanding stick will solve this. Installing the completed landing gear into the underside of the plane should be done very carefully. It is a very tight fit and requires some force to properly set into place.

Worst case scenario, if the landing gear breaks in the process of trying to set it in place... the kit still comes with the default Academy parts that can be used. They'd also fit better too and the detail isn't too bad.

A panel-line wash was applied to the top and bottom surfaces of the plane. 

Initially I had toyed with the idea of going with the Slovak scheme and have this plane serve as a companion piece to another kit that's in my stash; a Letov Š.328, also by Special Hobby. Both planes were flown by opposing sides during the Slovak National Uprising and I thought it would make for an interesting juxtaposition.

I ended up shelving that idea because every time I unboxed the Letov to study the instructions and the sprues, I get apprehensive about starting it. 

According to the information provided by the instructions, this particular scheme depicts a plane that took part in anti-partisan operations in Macedonia, in the summer of 1944. Then in September of the same year Bulgaria would join the Allies and this plane would go on to attack the Waffen SS Skanderbeg division in the same region that it had previously hunted insurgents in. 

It's done! This one has been sitting in my stash for half a year I think. I keep a very small stash but every time this one came up, I would just rotate it back into the pile and kept putting it off.

There was a bit of a juxtaposition that I found interesting. The original Academy kit that this is based off of is a good, if fairly simple kit. The additions made by Special Hobby doesn't increase the parts count by very much, but these small additions resulted in a very noticeable increase in the amount of work and level of difficulty.

I think a strong point of this kit is if someone wants to build a foreign service Stuka with better than average details in the cockpit, then this is a good choice. It fulfills those criteria on it's own, out of box with no need for aftermarket parts I think. If someone is obsessed with details and getting every single aspect of the plane to scale so that it matches the real thing exactly, then they'd probably be better off looking at either the Airfix or Fujimi kits (the later would need a lot of after market because the cockpit is pitiful) to get the 'correct' nose length.