TA-152 Zoukei Moura 1/32, My First ZM

[DocRob]

Hola Senhoras e Senhores,

Some time ago I browsed through my stash and let my thoughts sway a little. After some time it arouse to me that I never had build a german plane with all that complicated camo and mottling stuff, so why not give it a try. My eye came to a halt on the nicely boxed TA-152 H-0 by Zoukei Moura, which I bought along with some AM stuff like barrels, Metal cast wheel struts and PE for the cockpit and some exterieur stuff. Having seen some very nice builds of the bird, some here in LSM (with or without wings ), I deceided to give it a go.

The TA-152 is the last incarnation of the slim and elegant FW-190 D and stretches the elegance, along with the dimensions to a max. It looks like the plane is build around the engine and afterwards got stretched in the wind channel. The only exception from that sleek look is the air intake for the turbocharger, a huge snorkel which reminds me of the compressor hoods of american muscle cars.

Enough of the prequel ,lets get to the plastic. Thankfully not multicolored like the sprues of the H1 most of the parts show decent detail. Some parts mostly in the cockpit area are not very well defined and there is a lot of cleanup to be made. The Instrument panel (a clear and a grey one), to my eye are not made for a decent paintjob without decals. there is no detail in the becels and overall detail is not very sharp, so I got lucky to have invested into the ZM-Eduard interieur PE. This is a nice and to me necessary upgrade, but not without little quirks. Having seen lots of colored PE from Eduard I have to say that these are to blueish and somwhat rsasterized. A matte varnish and drops of clear for the dials helped a little to blend in. I deceided against the PE seatbelts after painting the preformed ones by hand.

A little sidenote to what I have expierienced so far with this ZM-Kit. I think they are really overpriced. They are in a price range together with Tamiya without the sharpness of mould and with at least questionable engineering in many parts. The internal structures are a nice idea on paper, but through lack of detail and beeing not overly correct I prefer a classic layout of a kit. Seeing the multipart fuselage gives me the creeps and I hope my other ZM Kits show an improved quality. One of my last builds was the very moderatly priced Raiden from Hasegawa and this Kit was on the money detailwise, sharp IP and very inelligent parts breakdown. ZM looks to my a little toyish.
Another "untested" critique is for the decals. They seem to have wide borders of carrier film and look thick and have some mispellings like "nichit" instead of "nicht" for not in german.

Enough of the first thoughts, some pics to follow.

The very simple cockpit of the TA-152 with erased detail for the PE

 

The IP with some levers and an added matte coat and the dials finished with a drop of Future

After painting with AK RLM 66. The PE looks less blueish in natural light.

Almost finished, only some chipping and moderate ageing to come.

 

Cheers Rob

[spliffsecond]

Nice start,

very clean  work, looking forward to what follows.

it’s a shame that the rasterization passed Eduard’s quality control. 

Meaby you can put an oil filter on the blue parts,

it will hide the rasterisation and you could tone down the blue hue,

two birds one stone. 

I see  a stowaway hair on your very nicely build footstraps.

I am no expert, but have you mounted the ruder pedals upside down?

 

grt free

Edited December 18, 2017 by spliffsecond

[DocRob]

Thanks Spliff,

there is always a hair in the soup, in this case even two. The mentioned one was already removed, but you are absolutely right about the orientation of the pedals. Now that I have closed the fuselage, that will be hard to fix.
I like your idea about filtering with oils to reduce the blue tone of the PE. If that would hve been a Raiden or a Corsair I would have done so,  but in the TA-152 nearly nothing of the cockpit details will be seen again after fitting in the fuselage and adding the hood above the IP, except you use some surgical optics.
The blue is not that bad in reality, must be my otherwise well biased lightning or the chip of my camera, and everything is heavily macroed, sometimes to much for my liking .

Cheers Rob

 

[Wingco57]

Hi Rob,

Nice project and good to see you stepping out of your comfort zone. Something I should do one day as well.

Cheers

Cees

 

[DocRob]

Thanks Cees,

that's the thing with comfort zones, step in and feel cozy and... bored at the end. Isn't modelling always about challenge? I do not compare my results with others and I do not take part in competitions, but to challenge myself with new techniques and skills is what I love about modelling and sometimes I fail bigtime, like with that wrong orientated pedals .

Cheers Rob

[coolboxx]

Neat work Rob,I didn't put the straps on my 190 rudder pedals... you can't see them. And I know there not their....haha

[DocRob]

Thanks Darren, but better not to put, then to put them wrong and knowing about . After that philosophical heavyweight I try to ignore the pedal thing till I can see or not see them in their final stage of assembly.

Cheer Rob 

[spliffsecond]

I am feeling really sorry I brought it up. 

Grtz free

[DocRob]

Never mind Spliff, after 24 hours of meditation I'm beyond that point now  and empirical testing showed, that nothing will be seen after completing the cockpit in the fuselage.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

Little progress is made. The tanks were masked and airbrushed, representing rubberish material with straps to keep everything in shape. None of these will be seen after closing the fuselage, but hey,  what is a plane without a tank.

 

The tanks are attached to the cockpit frame and the engine is basically sprayed and is looking so toyish, there has to be done something about.

Stay tuned for the refinement of the engine an furter steps to come.

Cheers Rob

[coolboxx]

This is looking very neat so far, liking the photography too. 

[DocRob]

Something had to be done about the toyish look of the sprayed engine. The pigments of the silver color (Tamiya XF16) where far to grainy, to look like aluminum. So I took out some Uschi Iron and Steel powders, some True Metal pastes from AK and rubbed and polished a lot. The result to my eye is really nice and I start to like these pigmented stuff on a prepainted surface very much. I added some black panel wash wich went on without problems. I'm still not sure about showing the engine, but at least it is an option now.

 

Cheers Rob and happy holidays

[Wumm]

Motor looks nice and grimey now Rob, well done. 

S

[DocRob]

Thanx Wumm, in reality it looks more used and maintained than greasy and filthy , my lighting and macro lens seems to enhance the drama.
My TA-152 should finally look used but not overused, as I think that service time of these birds was not very long before they were obselete.

@all Happy holydays and feliz navidad

Cheers Rob

[Mark 'ozzy' Ostler]

Hi Doc, I always watch your work, and I'm glad your building a good subject choice!  Ive been a 'Wulf' addict all my life, I like watching your builds for inspiration. So I'll watch your technique painting this beast as we all know how tricky german camoflage is to apply. Having one in the stash myself, I'm still praying to model gods for the likes of Tamiya to BUILD a decent FW-190- 'A-5 - A9' and more IPORTANTLY a 'D-9 - D13' before my time is up. Not to mention a P-47 D Razorback Thunderbolt with some decent rocket tubes, but that's another thing! Keep up the good work, again, I'm glad your building this kite! Cheers Oz

 

 

[DocRob]

Hi ozzy, good to hear from you and thanks for the compliments, I'm still a little red on the cheeks . I'm anxiously waiting for the time to paint the bird, but others have mastered it so well, I hope I will get a decent result too.
I have no real addiction to the Würgers and D's, to me it must be a choice of the moment or a technical or esthetical appeal. I have two Revell F8's in my stash, added with a lot of resin from Eduard and other AM, one will be build as crashlanded on the ice and one will be in the insignia of NKFD (Nationalkommittee Freies Deutschland), an association of German prisoner of war, fighting for the Russians. I hope the Revell Würger will be at least decent.

The Eduard special edition of the P-47 seems ok to me and I believe there are some rocket tubes in the Brassin portfolio, so why wait for Tamiya. I really like the 1/32 Tamiya birds, but oob there are still some flaws like the rubber wheels and their nearly unbendable photoetch and thick decals. Oops, just saw Razorback and yeah that would be a nice Tamiya subject.

Cheers Rob

[DocRob]

With all that relaxing Christmas festivities going on I needed a little challenge to my nerves. I decieded to use the PE-Flaps for my TA-152, but first I cut the plastic parts, so there was no way back and sometimes it felt like sawing on the branch you sit on . Needless to say, these were my first PE flaps for me and I have many others in my stash, which are way easier to build, but hey, what did I say about challenges...

The first part was the upper flap and it took me quite some planning, about bending where, in which direction and in which order. Without my 14 cm long bending tool it would have been impossible to accomplish. In the end I had bended the raw profile and then the real horror started. Getting all the tiny struts bended twice and glued in the right position, was a nightmare and sometimes i couldn't see where to bend because of the reflections of the metal, even using a magnifying pair of  glasses.

The lower flap proved to be more simple and was a walk in the park compared with the upper ones. I inserted a piece of plastic rod as an axle.

Upper flap and there is a second one to build which give me the creeps.

You can see the multiple bending profile, but you can't hear my swearing

For the second flap I will leave the little struts on the upper side connected to the metal sheet, till all the bending is completed, because it is so easy to disconnect the struts while bending and this is when the puzzeling starts

One set of flaps is finished due to the heavy use of red wine in the process to get the shivering fingers calm.

Yeah, after the pain you get rewarded and you get some nice fingerprints you nearly can't see with the bare eye.

Some more relaxing work went into the engine assembly. The final blending and weathering and detail painting is not already applied. That will follow later. I'm still not sure if I show the engine, mainly because of some ugly ejector marks on the inside of the cowlings, I'm to lazy to remove.
For the Sherlock Holmes's between you, yes I know the engine struts are differently coloured, but this is the way they are on the last surviving sample of the TA-152.

Cheers Rob

[RichO]

Nice work Doc.

[DocRob]

Thanks Rich

Managed just some little steps, mainly because I got a little fed up with the kit. I believe you know the feeling, when there are more and more complications on a build and the mojo drains.
In my case it is about the difficulty to build flaps (homemade and half done ), but mostely because of the strange engineering of the kit. Test fitting showed that there will be a huge problem with the fit of the engine cowlings, probably because the PE for the cockpit was half a millimeter too wide. Other problems can be seen in the pictures. The alignment of the metal barrels is not correct and in the second picture you can see the enormous gaps in the frontside of the wings. I hope I will find a way to align everything properly, with the help of some physical bruteness and lots of glue.
Many of my problems have to do with that multi part constructions of the wings and fuselage. In my opinion the price for showing the inner organs of the bird is way too high compared to a soso detailed interior which will not be as convincing as it should (Look for the toyish guns and ammunition boxes for example).
The next days will be do or die for the kit. All depends on fitting the metal flaps into the wings and addressing the cowling problem.

You will loose every fight with theese guns

That's what I call a gap

 

Cheers Rob

[tonydrake]

I'm ahead of you in my slow ZM TA-152 build (at paint), the wing went together well for me, my issue where those plug-in's for the wheel legs. They were a millimeter or two too 'fat'... once in place a dog the re-shape. 

Also, adding the flaps before attaching the body was a disaster - the wing join to the fuselage is a nightmare... the wing root sleave between the two is very tight... (I'm working on a parallel 1/48 ZM TA-152 build, it has the same issues) - I took them both off before I broke them,

 

[DocRob]

Thanx for the comments and recommendations Tony,

I checked some of the potential problematic fittings you mentioned first thing in the morning.
The difficult thing is that you can only test fit preciesely after you glued together some of the subassemblies (like the wheel struts only after the wing is glued together). There is not enough adhesive tape in the world to have a proper test fit of the fuselage and wings .

The wheel struts on my one seem to fit. The metal ones I bought are a little easier to insert than the plastic kit's ones, so only a little work with the proper alignment.

The wingroot seems to fit with the fuselage and wings, albeit looking to be a very tight fit.

I will only test fit the metal flaps before the marriage of wings and fuselage, because I don't want to break or bend the delicate PE-flaps.

Feel free to post some pictures of your build.

Cheers Rob

[Mark 'ozzy' Ostler]

Hi doc, I've been watching your project slowly roll off the bench and I have to admit that these ZM kits really do tax a lot of mojo out of you during the construction phase but hang in there ( I did with my 219 Owl ). I found some things superb like cockpit detail, other things ordinary like the the main wheel struts very nerve wrecking. But what pissed me the most was the PE. I wasted hours & hours building up superb looking etch panels to find most of it didn't fit especially the engine access panels on top of the wing. So I hope your effort with the flaps works out for you. Keep up the good work and I hope eventually everything fits nicely.  Cheers Oz

[DocRob]

Hi Oz, thanks for the encouragement. I really liked your gorgeous UHU and kept a lot of your comments in the back of my mind, because I have a ZM-UHU in my stash as well. One thing that you mentioned was the bad dimensioned panels, so I wasted no effort in using these on my TA-152. I might had given them a try, If I had been gone for an all open approach on that bird. 

Like you say, these ZM birds are a mixed bag, some areas are really nicely detailed, while others look like they are designed for 'Fisher Price toys' .

After connecting the wings to the fuselage with the help of rubber bands ,clamps and meters of adhesive tape I test fitted the metal flaps and they seem to fit.
For the first time I compared the lower flap to the plastic part, a moment where all the pain constructing it is forgotten. I hope that momentum will carry me through the cruel bending and glueing of the second one, which I began yesterday.

Chees Rob

[Mark 'ozzy' Ostler]

Looks the goods so far!

[DocRob]

Some little progress was made the last days. I fitted the engine and engine mount into the fuselage and the engineering on these parts turned out to be a nightmare.
The align points are multidimensional, so there is no way to fit everything in cleanly without heavy bending or cutting of alignment bolts.
For future builders I would recommend to leave the front cockpit section unglued into the fuselage until this step, because you have more room to manouvre while assembling and try to fully understand how everything is connected. I had to cut the lower alignment bolts to get everything together properly.
I used so much force (and glue) on many different areas of the build to get everything aligned, that I wonder if when ready a small pointing of a finger will let everything explode . I never test fitted so much on a 1/32 plane and I dislike the multi part orgy for the wings, cowlings and fuselage more and more.

That might be the last time the engine can be seen. I experimented with PE-hinges made from the additional exterieur set, but I dont think there is a way to leave the cowlings openable and gain a proper fit of the cowlings when closed and I want to have the undisturbed shape of the plane in the end.

Finally done, phew , the metal flaps where a nightmare to build, at least the upper ones without the plastic rods. Many of the small struts came loose and they had to be glued seperately. I used a different technique for the second one, but breakage rate was the same like the first attempt, so no recommendation here.
I really like the result and now that they are ready there is no way stopping me that TA-152 project. Finishing these was a gamechanger, I don't want to put so much effort into something for the bin, so watch out TA-152, I'm ready for you .

 

Cheers Rob