Next came the fun part: the old Blitz’s 003 pair was first glued together and then sawed in half, leaving a front intake portion and the rear exhaust portion.  Needless to say, the marriage of the 003 chunks into/onto the 262 was hardly a smooth affair.  I also realized that I cut the tail a bit too short for what I had in mind.  This was hardly a cause for concern, though, since it was time to throw putty like there was no tomorrow (which there almost wasn’t for this kit!)

What followed were months and months and MONTHS of frustrating sanding and refilling cycles, using every kind of filler under the sun.  You can never have too many kinds, really, as each one is better than another for a certain task: “Zap-a-Gap” (cyanoacrylate) was used for structural cracks, Tamiya, Squadron and Testors putties for small tear-outs.  Further complicating matters was the fact that the front section of the 003 cluster is not symmetrical from one side to the next.  While nothing says that the Germans would not have used an unbalanced nose (B-V did much weirder stuff, let’s face it), I tried my best to shape and sand the sides to be identical.

As the rear seat fairing began to take shape, I cut down the two-seat canopy and began trying to match the contours of the fairing to those of the front canopy.  By more luck than skill, the final result was quite satisfactory: certainly no worse than the original canopy’s fit to the original body shape.  I also sanded off a number of the canopy’s frames in order to give it a racier, more advanced look: this was accomplished by working down to 8000 grit sanding/polishing cloth, using Mother’s Scratch Remover two or three times, and finishing all clear areas with two coats of Future floor polish.

When all of the sanding and filling was done, Gunze-Sangyo Mr. Surfacer 1000 was laid down for primer (and also to make sure that all of those pesky surface imperfections were gone!).  I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to etch in surface detail on the rest of the body (i.e. everything but the wings and rear tails), lest I accidentally gouge what had taken me so long to fill.  So, I decided to wait until the paint was applied and see if other panel details were really needed.

For paint, I used Testors Model Master acrylic light grey for the underside, and a typical late-WWII splinter camo pattern on the topside, care of some mixed Tamiya greens.  I violated every Grade 9 art class lesson by laying down the darkest green first, then the lighter green (using Tamiya tape for masking), and then worried about the grey.  A bead of Fun Tack (or equivalent) is a great way to get a scale “fade line” between colours: I masked off, with tape and paper, the splintered regions that I didn’t want painted, and then ran a bead of the blue putty along the tape edge.  By not airbrushing directly at the base of the Fun Tack, a subtle fading transition between underside and topside colours was achieved.

Once the paint was done, I was convinced that some sort of body detailing was, in fact, required; it just looked wrong to have the wings nicely etched, but nothing on the body.  Scared more than ever to sink the etcher’s point into my nicely painted kit, I chickened out and free-hand penciled on a rather extensive array of panel lines.  I very much like this approach, as it is easy to correct mistakes with an eraser; said eraser can also be used to smudge or thin panel lines for aging or scaling.

After laying down the surface details, a few applications of Tamiya xxxx was applied to make the surface shiny in order to avoid decal “silvering.”  Intermittent sandings with 8000 grit kept “orange peeling” to a minimum, with two coats of Future adding the final smoothness.

Decals from a variety of sources were then applied – basically, I used whatever fit from our box o’ leftover German decals :).  Only the underwing iron crosses come from the actual Heller kit; the rest were too badly yellowed, and the wrong colours, to be useful.  In addition to regular decals, I also used some Bare Metal foil, in this case matte aluminum, for the rear engine region and some ugly patches on the intakes and one of the drop tanks.  (Ugly bare metal regions just fit the whole Luft ’46 thing, in my opinion).  The patches on the engines were painted with one coat of Testors Jet Exhaust to burnish them a bit, with a few more coats on the rear faces for an especially burnt look.  This was my first time using this foil, and I was generally pleased with its performance.

In addition to the underwing drop tanks, made from re-contoured tanks from the Frog Blitz, I provided offensive armament in the way of scratch-built WGR-21 rockets.  The tubes are made from an appropriately-sized drinking straw, while the WGRs themselves are made from filed-down plastic runner.  The pylons were made from the Heller 262’s own drop tank pylons that were filed to fit with the contours of the plane’s new nose.

Microscale Microflat was used to bring down the 466’s shine to more militaristic levels.  The engines received one coat of Future to bring their shine back up, and then all of the “fiddly bits”, like the drop tanks, mortars, gear doors and spindly landing gear, were attached.

Upon sitting the plane on its wheels, it was immediately apparent that, not only was the plane the definition of “back heavy”, but it was also clear that no amount of bird shot could be stuffed into the nose to make it sit correctly (without snapping those spindly gear posts!).  As a last effort to make the plane sit correctly, I dug up a convincing 1/25^th scale jack stand (from Revell’s 1963 Galaxy kit) that fit perfectly, without any trimming, right between the engines and allows the plane to sit at the exact right attitude.  Remember, it’s always better to be lucky than good :).  This gives the kit a very “parked forever in a museum” look, which again seems fitting.

Speaking of museums, so inspired was I by the gross black frames of the Smithsonian Blitz’s canopy, that I simply had to have black frames for my project!  With that, so ended the terror, trauma and triumph of the 466 build.

Conclusion:

Overall, I can’t say that I’d do a conversion this dramatic again in the near future, but it was a lot of fun to create something totally original and different from the intended starting point.  I think that an easier-to-use bulk filler than Milliput would have gone a long way to decreasing the time and effort required to form the final contours of the plane.  However, I have no complaints with the final product (it won gold in the “Scratchbuilt and Major Conversion” category at Wellcome X), so all’s well that ends well!