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Summer 1941, Western Germany - the apogee of the Wermacht and the Luftwaffe. Pilots of the Luftwaffe's 10/NJG.1 pose for a photograph with their new ride - a sleek, black Bf-109E4, some of which have even been fitted with direction finding radar for target detection beyond sight.



This project began earlier this year while displaying at the South Cheshire Model Show in February where I made the acquaintance of the good gentlemen of the Night Fighter SIG who had a lovely table display of noctural defenders.

Hoping to join their display at the Hinckley show I set to work on a duo of builds.



I tackled the 109 first. This is an F-Toys kit; for those of you not familiar with these unusual Japanese productions, they are known as Gashapon and come in kit form, pre-painted (but with seperate decals) and with theoretically push-fit assembly.

As you can see from the box art on the upper image - the kits are officially sold 'blind' - you could get one of four 109 or Spitfire markings (plus a few unknown bonus options) - although this I sourced via eBay where the seller had already opened the box to identify the contents and many international collectors now buy the full 'retail' box of 10 kits to get one of each model in the set (although the bonus item is still random).

They are popular among the 144th modelling community as they often present types not otherwise available in kit form in this scale. Although the pre-colouring is often quite good, I generally repaint mine and treat it as any conventional model kit.



This model came in the night fighter scheme with two decal options, GV and JV. Photos available suggest that at some point JV carried the experiemental direction finding equipment under the fuselage but none indicate the same of GV. The kit does not include any parts for this adaptation and some sources indicate that along with the dome, the 109 had an extended tailfin too. So GV was the obvious choice for my relatively out-of-the-box model.



Initial construction doesn't take long, but you can see the big seam lines that would remain if the kit were not properly glued and finished



Seams treated and some canopies found. The kit itself comes with a very nice looking and canopy with excellent framing - but in order to permit the push fit design, it has big locating tabs which extend into the visible part and give a rather sub-par appearance.

So I found some canopies that came with the Beacon Models 109E kit (when making those, I used the open canopies from the Armory Models Emil kit, hence the spares, but the cockpit detail on the F-Toys was too sparse to warrant an open canopy). Handily these also include canopy masks so I can save a lot of time when painting.



It took a bit of work to fit the canopy around the control panel and moulded antenna post, but fortunately the general dimensions tallied nicely.



Although the black is probably the most unambigious Luftwaffe scheme of the war, of course there was some differing opinion on the markings.



Firstly on the colour of the lettering. Some sources say red, others grey or white. The kit only came with dull red options for this airframe, so it made my choice for me!

Then the crosses. Some models have just the white outlines, using the aircraft's black to fill in the rest. Others have the cross still filled with insignia black, standing out slightly from the overall paint scheme.

I went with full decals including a black base as, from my understanding, this was the standard practice at this time and, given the airframes were probably resprayed from a traditional scheme, it seems likely that the markings would have just been masked rather than redone from scratch anyway.



F-Toys decals, particularly from these slightly earlier boxings, can be quite thick and struggle to conform or disappear, particularly on such an unforgiving surface, so aside from the specific lettering, I sourced crosses and generic markings from the Beacon and Armory boxings as these are much easier to use.

I didn't add any weathering. The limited information available on these aircraft suggests they probably flew very little, maybe even as just a test flight for the direction finding equipment, so any wear and tear might be unrealistic.



I didn't have time to finish off my usual vignette scene, so attached to a base, specially painted black rather than my usual white and topped with plates from Name It Plates, she duly took her first show trip to Hinckley and with co-build Hurricane and a Sopwith from my existing collection, brought some 144th to the Night Fighter SIG.



This is one of the regularly seen photos of the airframe so made an easy choice for the vignette inspiration.



A Kubelwagen was added from an Arrowhead Minatures whitemetal kit and the figures are from eBay seller 3Djson who had a great selection of WW2 figures in several scales.

This finally completed the scene. Thanks for reading.