SMER 1:72 ME-262 B-1a/U1

 

Reviewer: Myself  (smakr@bigpond.com)  (kit #: 0834)
Kit Built June 200; Review submitted:  July 2000

Aircraft:
The Me-262B was a two seat development of the single seater Me-262A. The Me-262 B-1a/U1's depicted in this kit served with Kommando Welter as night fighter defence for Berlin, with its Lichtenstein SN-2 radar.

Kit Parts:
This SMER kit is a reboxing of an aged Heller release and you will find that this kit shows its age.  Four sprues carry about 50 light grey injection molded parts (plus one clear canopy on another sprue) in a plastic bag. Parts have the usual Heller raised lines, there's no flash on the parts but some on the sprues themselves.  No wheel well detail and basic detail on other parts, eg: undercarriage.


The Heller kit release - my thanks to Walter Fischer for scanning and supplying the boxart

Instructions:
 A single A4 sheet folded in half to make the booklet contains brief history and technical information in Czech, German and English, building tips, assembly symbol information then nine adequately covered assembly views.  Positioning of parts is by blocky looking arrows so one needs to consult the locating pins on the aircraft itself, no problems for the more experienced and only the absolute novice would have problems, if any.  No individual parts/component painting instructions are provided, which is poor, only on the four view markings diagram on the back of the instruction booklet - this is quoted in RLM and OLD Humbrol/Airfix numbering.

Construction:
Building starts in the cockpit and you actually get a decent little fit out for this type of model.  There is no sidewall detail, but you get two seats, stick, instrument panel for the pilot and a tabletop like platform for the rear seater and what another modeller quoted as possibly a radar set.  The seats are simply lumps of L-shaped plastic and the instrument panel, while having a molded face, doesn't fit very well into its hole, it ended having to sit on top of the cockpit tub.

Cockpit unit fits okay.  Fuselage halves went together quite straightforwardly but needed assistance with the optimised placement of some pegs and rubber bands.  You are also required to trap the nosewheel in this step and there is no way around this, don't forget also to through in some decent nose-weight to prevent tail sitting, the instructions fail to alert you to this.  The Join lines were crude and needed sanding, bye bye to some raised surface detail while I was at it unfortunately.  As a sidenote, I had troubles with fitting the nosedoors later in my wheels up model, so if you are thinking of doing the same, add in your nose door half to its respective fuselage halve then sand the sides smooth so it acts as part of the fuselage half when mating, will save you plenty of hassles later!

The next step was sub assembling the engine nacelles.  This proved to be a little problematic and some attention is needed here.  Best advice I can give is to affix the exhaust and intake cones first as the fit of the nacelle halves themselves was a little difficult and the fact that those interior bits were already secured ensured there was no ruining them!  I also painted the interior parts before affixing the halves.  This is where one notices the huge disparity in quality between the SMER and Revell tooling!!  The halves ended up going together quite well without any gaps or need for filler.  

The main wing section is broken into five pieces.  A flat belly undersection with the main wheel bays, two upper halves that overlap onto the top of the belly section and then of course the underwing halves to complete the assembly.  I did a fair bit of sanding both to the belly section of the aircraft and the belly underwing section itself to ensure an optimum fit otherwise it would be very difficult.  This still resulted in some gaps, main around wingroots, but relatively easy to fix with a bit of filler.

The engine nacelles went onto the wings okay although needed some assistance with some light filing at the mating joints. I was quite impressed with the ease of which they affixed, but I have heard from other modellers that you will need to try and force them on if you don't sand the area a bit. 

The landing gear as stated in other reviews is about as basic as you can get with no detail other than its outline and shape.  Likewise the wells and gear doors also sport no detail.  Building a wheels up model required the closing of the doors. All doors created problems and were difficult to do with putty required to plug up some gaps. The worst part were the wheel strut holes. In order to actually have closed gear doors you had to remove these! I used a blunt nose sprue snipper to hack it down to a smaller size then it could be filed down.

The canopy and tailplanes go on in a straight forward manner providing you take care in placement of both components. Spend some time on the interior because with the large canopy you can see a fair bit.  One thing I did note was that if the navigator's radio/radar equipment (or whatever it is) is not flush down then it won't allow the canopy to fit properly so be wary of this.

What really lets the kit down is its external array of antennae, tubes and aerials. Not because they are hard to do, but they are thick, crude and unrealistic!  There is a small stop bit that basically acts as the stem of the aerial between the body and the aerial itself.  The antennae has a bowed appearance like a { or }- annoyingly the instructions do not tell you which side to put the little 'strut' on.  After consulting reference material, it looks to me that the aerials bow in toward the aircraft, so the strut goes on the 'inside' of the bow if that makes sense.

Anyway, I superglued this on to the antennae and left to dry before superglueing to the aircraft with special attention paid to positioning.  This proved to be quite straightforward, moreso than I was anticipating, and the antennae, if not for it being so thick, was an excellent outcome.  The pitot tube on the port wing needed to be held in place while it dried and rather than a hole actually has an overlapping tab. The instructions are also vague in the positioning of upper fuselage aerials, mainly which goes exactly into which hole. To make matters worse the locating holes are large and crudely done.  Likewise the tail bumper locating hole was far too large for the part, so I stuffed some putty in and while it was drying molded the bumper in with a dob of glue. This worked well but I needed to keep an eye on it while it dried as the bumper had a tendency to lean toward one side.

Versions:
While the instructions would make you believe you can only produce one version, theoretically you can do two based on the details both in the kit and on the decal sheet. The bottom of the box has the second version.  One version is based in Magdeburg, duben (April) 1945 and is Kommando Welter's aircraft, painted in RLM 76, mottled/snake patterned with RLM 75. The one on the back of the box is an unknown type, with the upper fuselage in dark green and brown, with hellblau lower surfaces. 

I used Humbrol 127 Ghost Grey to produce a close enough (is good enough in my opinion on this occasion since it was more a kit bash than anything else) finish and then mottled with dark grey and purple to get a slight gray violet appearance which seems to match reference material.  Annoyingly I forget which dark grey I used because I did a fair bit of testing first on dud plastic before I found what I thought was a close match, but if I remember rightly it was H32.  Make sure you do your own tests though first.

Decals:
The decal sheet, produced by Propagteam, has a good array of stencilling and in very good colour register.  Unfortunately though I had a few problems putting them on, they are extremely thin and care is needed as they are prone to disintegration if left in the water too long, but if done right looks excellent as they do conform to the surface very well.

Accuracy:
It looks like an Me 262B according to the few reference photos I have but there are a few anomalies.  The starter motor in the nacelles look incorrect, and the nacelles themselves are not accurately replicated in shape at the rear.  The fuselage is too slender (especially if compared to the Revell!).  As already stated above the antennae, aerials, tubes etc are far too thick and crudely done.

If the Revell Me 262 new tooling is supposed to be about the most accurate version you can get, for god's sake don't put this model next to it!  You will be very disappointed!  :)

Summary:
This was quite a cheap kit to get and I guess it is really what you pay for is what you get. For a basic and relatively accurate rendition this kit does the job okay.  I actually enjoyed this kit immensely, it was a good challenging, but not overtaxing, build that allowed you to use some skills without ever getting frustrated - would suit the novice providing they have the basics to be able to sand a few parts for a better fit.  The build and the simple paint design made the kit quite a lot of fun.  This is the type of kit you would get to have a bit of kitbash with and relieve some AMS, but don't go thinking it is the most accurate kit out there, as there are plenty of others that will beat it.  For the stickler for accuracy go for a Revell.

 

Note: the following related reviews links have not been updated since early 2000's - more kit reviews of this aircraft may now be on SMAKR, not reflected below.  Refer to the Index for other kits of this type.

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Bottom of the Smer box featuring alternative painting instructions quoting Humbrol range