Bolt Action: Flyers Part 3: Messerschmitt Bf-109

Today the final post in a 3 part series about the role and history of the most famous warbirds in World War 2, perfect for modeling and playing in Bolt Action. Read on!

Although flyer models don’t really play a role in Bolt Action, I love to use them in our games to enhance the cinematic experience. They are really easy to incorporate into a game, using a 1/72 scale kit, a bamboo skewer and a Games Workshop 60 mm base. Once you have played with actual plane models, you don’t want to go back!!

Recently I put together a Messerschmitt BF-109 for the Afrika Korps. My friend John put together a little Afrika Korps army and I thought he could use this plane to go with his troops.

I got the idea of the paint scheme in my Finescale Modeler from last month – it had a detailed build of the flyer of Hans Joachim Marseille, who’s airplane is featured in a lot of 1.32 scale kits.

My model was not correct, since the 1.72 scale kit came from a Revell Battle of Britain set, from 1940, so the airplane doesn’t match (wingtips). But for our beloved game, it would do just fine. Here’s a quick build story:

1. After building, I preshaded the panel lines across the entire plane. Notice also i built a little tropen filter above the engine exhaust.

2. Priming with Tamiya desert yellow, you can see pre-shading does work well to create natural looking panel lines.

3. The Messerschmitt has a gnarly cockpit with lots of panels; I asked my wife to create masks for them and put them on, her eyes are perfect for that job. The cockpit needed two coats of primer.

4. Decals took forever, and the 1/72 kits are filled with them, and the small size makes it pretty challenging. The yellow numbers are actually from a Tamiya M8 Grehound kit in 1/48 scale; it’s pays off to keep all your unused decals from previous builds. The kit didn’t come with a swastika for the tail, I decided it would be too expensive to buy a whole decal sheet for this purpose

And here is the plane on it’s base:

I really recommend building some nice looking flyers and use them in your games. The models are cheap, the history is fun and your games will get better!

I have built two other airplanes for Bolt Action,  below are the links:

1. Spitfire, desert camo

2. Mustang

Hope this inspires all of you to give Bolt Action a shot.

SC Mike

Author: SC Mike

Mike is a veteran historical tabletop wargamer with over a decade of experience. His specialty is the WW2 historical wargame Bolt Action. He began writing for BoLS in 2014.