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BF-109 Blueprint DVD Review

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Blistex

Member
Joined
Mar 2, 2016
Messages
8
Location
Canada
A friend of mine picked up the "Bf 109 Blueprints, Aircraft Manuals Plans Messerschmitt Me109 Luftwaffe WW2" off of eBay. He lent them to me on a USB drive to check them out and I thought that I would give a quick review here for the benefit of anyone who might be interested in picking them up.

The eBay Posting:

So here is the first bit of the ad posted without alteration to give you an idea of what they are advertising their product as.

"A total of 1,968 Messerscmitt factory engineering blueprints and an additional 1,000 plus pages of factory documents such as illustrated parts manuals plus additional parts photos and rare aircraft photos. With these blueprints and reference documents from Messerschmitt and Daimler Benz, you'll be able to make replacement airframe components and restore or remanufacture the most iconic German fighter plane of World War II. "

I don't know about anyone else, but to me (the impression I got) it sounds like they are trying to convince the potential buyer that they have included enough material to fabricate a new BF-109. I've only had about an hour to look through what has been offered, and this is not the case, as the number of blueprints and the quality of them have much to be desired. Here is another quote to give you an idea of the kind of quality they are hinting at.

" These blueprints and manuals are used in the construction and maintenance of the Me 109 or Bf 109 E F G and K airframes. They will print beautifully from your home PC or at an outside service or alternatively they can be imported into a CAD programme and manually traced to produce paths for CNC machining and other tools and forms."

From my limited knowledge of CAD software and machining, this is not really possible. There are some CAD files included (191) but they seem to be limited to a few fuselage panels and the tailwheel assembly.

The Good:
Some blueprints are high quality (the high quality ones are posted in the eBay ad)
There are some CAD files that you can use
Plans, parts and manuals you're not going to find with Google
Most of the documents are PDF files so you don't need to install some strange program to read them.
Files are organized into Folders (Articles, Blueprints, CAD, Manuals, Photos, Parts, Instruments, Gunsight, plans)

The Bad:
99% of the files have absolutely no description. So you're going to have to look at every single one to have any idea what you have.
Almost none of the blueprints have been properly scanned, rather they have been photographed with a camera, so lots of distortion.
Many of the blueprints must have been in rough shape, as they are dark and smudged.
The impressive document page count has been padded with manuals with a lot of useless information.
The photo section looks similar to a 15 minute Google image search.
Files have obviously been padded to fill up the two DVDs. 100k photos from google have been saved at max settings ant in tiff format to up their size to 10mb or more.
Other people's drawings/three-view plans have been altered in Photoshop to look like genuine Messerschmitt plans.
A lot of duplicate files in the blueprints section. (exact same file, different file name)
Some of the CAD files included are springs, chunks of cut pipe, or pieces of stamped metal with a single bend and 2-3 holes in them (very simple stuff that really didn't need to be put into CAD)

Given that there are 2,793 files, most of which are not named with any useful description, I've still only really scratched the surface of the package, but I feel safe in saying that this should be a pass, especially with its $100+ (USD) price tag.
 
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