Accurizing Revell AG's 1/72 Horten 229, Part 2

I've included some excellent drawings by A L Bentley from Merrick's German Aircraft Interiors so you can see my main reference. I just checked ABE books and saw it at $38 in acceptable condition. It's worth every penny!

Here's a rundown of the modifications I've made so far to the kit.

The nose. The first inaccuracy I noticed upon opening the box was the shape of the nose. The kit part has a somewhat angular nose shaped very like that of the Hs 129. In profile, it should look like a fairly blunt-nosed thick cambered airfoil, e.g. NACA 2418. I made a drawing of the correct curve from references and printed it out in 1/72 scale, then cut a piece of sheet styrene to this shape. Next I cut the kit part in half and sandwiched the piece in between. The rest was puttying and sanding to produce a master. The images below show resin copies made from a two-piece RTV mold of the master, with a couple of kit parts installed.  The obvious additions are the fronts of the jet engines, but I also cut off part of the landing gear door (discussed in Part 1) and made it a fixed part of the nose. This correction I made after molding the replacement nose, having noticed that the opening for the nose gear bay should be somewhat farther back. There are a bunch of these resin parts out there somewhere (hopefully in completed builds) as I was selling copies for a buck plus shipping back in '98.

Accurizing Revell AG's 1/72 Horten 229, Part 1

A layout of the Revell AG 1/72 Go 229 on my workbench, showing bits that have been assembled, modified, or replaced.

I've been working on this project off and on since kit came out in the '90s. This kit seems to represent a production Ho 229 (or more properly, Go 229), putting it in the realm of Luft '46. The decal sheet from the original release has operational markings for JG 301 including the Reichsverteidigung stripes. This puts it beyond historical fact, where its accuracy isn't subject to as much criticism. However, I decided to represent the Go 229V3 as it might have looked fully assembled. The V3 was and is a very real airplane, now in the hands of the National Air and Space Museum.