1/32 Ju 87G Tank Buster

By Rick Cotton

I just don't like ugly airplanes. Call me picky or whatever, but angular, squared-off, clunky looking machines just don't appeal to me. 1930s French bombers, anything prewar British but the Spit and Hurricane, and especially the early Ju 87s. Big, ugly landing gear, a nose absolutely hideous with radiators and oil coolers, a big rectangular greenhouse canopy that really looked like a greenhouse…just not very aesthetically appealing to me.

Thank God for Jerry Rutman. Specifically his G-2 conversion set to turn the big chunky Revell B-model into a somewhat more appealing and definitely more streamlined G-2 tankbuster. Oooooo, new nose…oooooo, 37mm cannons…oooooo, new canopy! New cockpit, prop & spinner, wingtips, landing gear spats, tailwheel & strut, and more! Fun, fun, fun!

Construction started with the replacement cockpit, which consists of new sidewalls, rear bulkhead, instrument panel, radio stack, gun pedestal and pilot armor. I didn't like the kit seat, or the aftermarket one, so I scratchbuilt one from stock, and added Eduard seatbelts. I drilled out the individual spaces in the kit rear seat to reproduce the tubular structure of the original, and added Eduard buckles there as well. Rutman also supplied the Fotocut rudder pedals, and much of the rear-defense gun assembly. The gunsight was scratchbuilt.

Some trimming and sanding was necessary to get the tub together, and to get it to fit snugly in the Revell fuselage, but it does fit…tightly

Rutman's instruction sketch tells you to hack off the kit nose at the big angled panel line just ahead of the wings, so, off it went with a razor saw. So did the wingtips, after test-fitting the new tips to determine the proper cutting line. The G-2's ONLY underwing armament were the 37mm cannons, so I removed all bomb hardpoints, the wing machine guns, and sanded them all flush. I scribed all panel lines and sanded the rivet detail down. Down, not "off". There were really big rivets all over the Ju 87.

The conversion nose is a huge, solid chunk of resin, well molded, with slots for the exhaust stacks, and a detailed insert for the front of the oil cooler intake on the bottom. I hollowed out the rear of the intake and scratchbuilt the detail inside from stock styrene. Then the nose was attached to the front of the fuselage with much cyanoacrylate.

Rutman's wingtip extensions correctly portray the G-2's longer wings, but I forgot to check the flap assemblies as supplied in the Revell kit…guess what…they're too short for the G2 wings! Oh, well, live and learn. I'll fix that at a future date.

The cannons are beautiful, but you'll need to add the wiring at the firing mechanism just ahead of the front mounting jig, plus drill out the air intake port on the front of the upper housing. I used aluminum tubing to build both barrels.

The one weak point of the entire project is the fit of the new landing gear struts to the Revell wing. They don't match up at all. What is really required here is to completely remove the Revell mounts on the underside of the wing, and scratchbuild new ones to accept Rutman's struts. Wish I'd checked on that before I glued the wing halves together. Oh, well, not my first screwup and definitely not the last.

When it came to paint schemes, there really was only one choice. Hans-Ulrich Rudel's combat career reads like a John Wayne movie script. Rudel single handedly sank a Russian battleship and cruiser, destroyed more than 500 Soviet tanks, hundreds of other vehicles, and God knows what else. He shot down several Russian aircraft in the slow JU-87. He was shot down 30 times, all by ground fire, never by fighters, and lived to fight again. He did all this in a slow, obsolete pre-war dive bomber that had been largely driven out of the skies by more modern aircraft. Erich Hartmann may have gotten the glory, but Rudel got the job done. This guy had serious cajones, so I chose to model his bird. The only problem with modeling Rudel's Stuka is that not all reference books agree on the schemes. I chose to follow Aero Detail #11's color painting of this Stuka, and didn't look back.

The paint is all Pollyscale Acrylic, with a mixture of decals from many sources.

© Rick Cotton

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This article was published on Wednesday, July 20 2011; Last modified on Saturday, May 14 2016