Avia C-10 / S-99

1/48 scale

Tally Ho!

Reviewed by Jim Baker
 

Tally Ho! 1/48 scale Avia S-99 decals are available online from Squadron
 

Those who know me know that I have a weakness for weird markings. So when I received this decal sheet in the mail, I looked through my stack of kits and realized that my Monogram Bf-109G-10 REALLY wanted to be this airplane. It's like the kit and the decal sheet were made for each other -- it was a "John! Marsha!" moment in the biggest baddest way. We all know about the quality of the Monogram Bf-109G-10 kit -- simple, easy to build and as far as I can tell (I'm not a rivet counter unless I need to be) spot on accurate. As I have of late been afflicted with a severe case of Advanced Modeler Syndrome (AMS), I decided that this was the perfect subject to build as therapy.

According to a couple of websites I surfed through in looking for any information on these airplanes, the Germans were originally producing the Bf-109G-10 in Czechoslovakia towards the end of the war, and when the war ended the Czechs simply picked up production where the Germans left off. There were only a few S-99s built before the warehouse holding the Daimler-Benz engines burned to the ground and necessitated the adaptation of the Bf-109G airframe to take the Junkers Jumo engines originally intended for He-111 bombers, resulting in the nasty S-199 which everyone immediately hated.

Since this is a subject I was not familiar with, I relied heavily on the instructions supplied with the sheet in creating my model. There are no bottom views of the airplanes, so it was my best guess to put the same set of codes on the undersides of the wings as well as on the tops. Also, color information is limited to the exterior of the airplanes. Since the factory that produced these airframes was originally German, I applied German colors throughout. I painted the cockpit and wheel wells RLM66 -- mainly because I didn't feel like cleaning out my airbrush to spray RLM02 on the wheel wells. Per the instructions, I painted the airplane RLM77 under RLM75, and the red parts are RLM23 Red, all Polly-Scale colors (actually, to be completely honest, I couldn't find any Polly-Scale RLM77 and a friend told me that Light Ghost Grey would work fine, so I used that -- it looks good enough to me). Breaking from the German tradition (and because I have no sources for Czech fighters), I did paint the propeller black.

The decal sheet is beautifully printed, perfectly in register, and thin, and the colors are crisp and vibrant. Enough decals are provided to make at least four different airplanes, so if you're all about the Czech Air Force then you're in luck. The red and white codes are in two parts, the white being applied first and then the red over the top of the white. The white is reasonably opaque, since they are applied over a light color anyway, and the red matches almost perfectly the Polly-Scale RLM23 I used for the Red surfaces of the airplane.

In addition to the codes, Tally-Ho provides national insignia and a small selection of stencil decals, such as the octane markings for fuel filler ports instead of only the specialized markings, so that the modeler can use only their decal sheet to make the model. I like this because different companies interpret different colors differently, and including the national insignia makes it so that the colors match.

In application, the decals went on flawlessly. The white outline is perfectly matched to the red insides, keeping the codes in register. A half-solution of Solvaset and water makes the decals snuggle right into the surface beautifully. After gloss-coating the model with Polly-Scale Gloss, I applied first the white surrounds and the tail insignia, and then once that was mostly set up I applied the red parts of the codes. I then sliced the panel lines with a hobby knife and applied a little more setting solution to make the decals set into the panel lines. After the codes were on, I applied the rest of the small decals. A little Polly-Scale Flat -- the best flat coat on the planet -- and the decals were finished. And then the rest of the build, which of course went basically perfectly since it's the Monogram kit.

In summary, the only downsides to this decal set are as follows:

• Everyone's going to either think it's a Bf-109G-10 or that you've erroneously marked a 109 as an S-199 because not many people know what an S-99 is.

• No bottom views on the color charts

• I don't have any interior color references for Czech airplanes, and I don't know whether the prop was Schwarzgrun or black.

Otherwise these are among the best decals I've ever used, and they make a very, very unusual subject.