30+ years ago I wasn't too bad a model maker for a teenager. I won a national competition once.

Then video games and alcohol and girls and alcohol and work happened and modelling wasn't a thing in my life.

Suddenly my 12 year old son is into modelling. And between digging all my old unbuilt kits out of the spare room. He claimed THEM ALLLL. I decided to give the hobby another crack.

A surprising number of my old paints and brushes were still usable.

Not all, as I found out...

On recommendation from YouTube I picked Airfix's latest rendition of one of Messer Schmitt's more well known creations.

Having watched a few YouTube videos I finally understood how to use Tamiya extra fine glue (I may have written it off as rubbish decades ago as I tried to use it like cement - paint it on the entire join on the parts AND THEN fix them together. Ooops.

The kit was hand painted, using a mix of the supplied paints and random Tamiya acrylics I had knocking around.

What is probably 30 year old Micro Set & Micro Sol seems to work too.

I was quite pleased with some of the panel lines. I never managed to get that to work before, turns out thinning your paints helps. Along with half-arsed cleaning, this probably explain why I killed my first (and last?) airbrush and didn't get good results with it.

One hiccup I decided to live with was not cleaning off the manky undercoat I got from a 30 year old tamiya spray can. Testing? What is that? Down side is the port side of the kitchen has a nasty crusty skin condition.

I got a bit ham fisted with weathering, but not too shabby for a first serious attempt at a kit in many years.