Beer Wagon

Here's my stab at Monogram's rerelease of the Beer Wagon show rod. I don't know how the picture got to be so fuzzy; perhaps I'm not as good with the new digital camera as I think I am.

I don't build an awful lot of car models, mostly because they're a lot of work. There's a lot of painting, a lot of in-process painting, and a lot of general fiddling. And then there's all that chrome to deal with... Nor am I much of a car expert. I can look at an armored vehicle and tell you if it's a BMP-1 or BMP-2, but I can't tell a 392 Hemi from a 426 Hemi, and I'm really bad at identifying the make and model of any given car - I can usually identify a VW Bug, but past that, I generally assume that all hot rods are Ford Deuces until proven otherwise.

This kit is fun and simpler than most car models. Including the injector stacks, the engine consists of three parts, and the suspension is easy to paint and install after the fact. There is no glass to deal with it, no radiator hoses, no interior bucket. The hardest part, really, is painting the transmission and differential detail on the one-piece frame part. Critics of this kit contend that it is "toy-like", and I suppose it is, but the engraving (what there is of it) is pretty nice and it didn't assault me with a lot of difficulty and complication.

I left off the collectors on the ends of the headers because I thought they were oversized and clunky. I drilled out the tops of the injector stacks. I lost the gearshift lever and hand starter crank and obviously left them out. I stripped off most the chrome with Easy-Off oven cleaner and after cleaning up the parts repainted them with Testors Chrome Silver. I left the wheels chromed and did a lot of sanding on the vinyl tires to try to make them look more like real tires. I also left the steering wheel chromed, though I painted the rim a leathery brown color. The instrument panel is provided as a decal, but it is black with no white backing, so the instruments would get lost on the dark blue dash. Instead of applying the decal in the normal fashion, I cut it out and glued it to the dash with the paper backing in place to provide the white background. The decals, by the way, were thick but sturdy and worked pretty well.

I painted it using the famous Whudigot method. I didn't like the bright yellow of the original model and was going to paint it metallic green, but I couldn't find my can of metallic green. So I browsed my spray paint collection and found two cans of Tamiya dark metallic blue, and decided that that would do. The seats, headrests and bed stakes were painted Testors AMC Big Bad Blue lacquer out of a spray can. The detail paint was mostly craft paint (for the wooden bed floor) and Testors acrylics (mostly silver and semi-gloss white) and Tamiya (mostly NATO black). I painted the beer kegs a dark brown color from a Krylon spray can, and drybrushed them with "antique gold" craft paint. And that was pretty much it.

In general I enjoyed building the kit. The kit doesn't appear to pass muster with experts, and I'm sure my execution of it won't pass muster with experts either, but it was harmless fun and best of all, I didn't have to do any engine wiring. It was a fun break from 1/72nd scale armor, and who can ask for more than that?

Deretentivize

Lately I've been reading a lot of model magazines. Between cancer and a particularly unpleasant course of chemotherapy I haven't really had the gumption to build anything. I'm starting to work on things again - a Revell 1/72nd M40 self-propelled gun, say, and a Monogram 1/24th Beer Wagon show rod, for another. But for a long time, my involvement with modeling was largely limited to reading magazines.

Often British magazines, especially SAMI and SMMI. And over time, I've come to note a marked anal-retentiveness about certain things that I can sum up with the following line: "I can't build model X until someone makes a replacement detail part." The kit cannot be built until someone offers a replacement set of exhaust nozzles, or a new drawbar, or an antenna., or whatever. Or they get completely wrapped around the axle about paint colors, to the point that a kit cannot be attempted until someone produces a color photograph and a paint chip showing exactly what color of grey the thing was painted.

This anal-retentiveness doesn't irritate me - everyone enjoys the hobby in their own way, and that's their way. But it does make me shake my head sometimes. Producing an authentic model is nice, but to me it's the building that's the fun; absolute authenticity is not an absolute requirement. Is the sand color I painted my Crusader III absolutely correct? Nah. Do I care? Nah. I had fun building the Crusader and if the sand color is a little too light, well, who cares?

So here's a list of stuff I hardly ever do when building models.

Detail Parts. I almost never buy detail parts. If a kit comes with photo-etched or resin parts, I'll use them, but I almost never buy them separately. In fact, the only detail parts I can remember buying in the last few years were a couple of metal distributors for car models, and even then, after I bought the limited stock at the hobby shop, I went back to my old distributor technique. (Actually, this isn't quite true. I have bought several detail and replacement-part sets for the old 1/96th scale Saturn V booster, but I haven't used them yet so they don't count... Right??)

Panel Lines. I almost never rescribe panel lines. In fact, in 1/72nd scale I never rescribe panel lines at all, and only rarely in larger scales do I bother. I have sanded off raised panel lines and rivets, but I almost never scribed new panel lines afterwards. Nor do I accent panel lines if they exist. I think this produces a harsh, extreme appearance that is highly unrealistic. It demonstrates excellent craftsmanship and skill, but it isn't how real airplanes look at all.

Cockpit Interiors. My airplane models are mostly 1/72nd scale, and I find that I can almost never see cockpit details through the canopies. Unless I'm going to build the model with the canopy open for some reason, or the model is 1/32nd scale, I just don't bother with a lot of cockpit detail. I paint the interior roughly the right colors and I'll do a little paint detailing and throw in some masking tape seat belts, but film-and-photoetch instrument panels? Pfft. Can't see it, so why bother?

Replacement Tank Tracks. I dislike link-and-length tracks immensely, and I find individual-link tracks almost insuperably fiddly. I'll use them if the kit gives me no other option, but by and large I prefer one-piece vinyl tracks. Modern vinyl tracks are about as detailed as any other kind, but ever so much easier to work with.

Plugging Motorization Holes. A lot of armor modelers spend a lot of time plugging up the various motorization holes that infest a lot of older armor models, but I can't remember ever doing so. Sometimes I don't even bother to paint the bottom of the tank. Can't see it, so why bother? If you're going to make a diorama of a tank that rolled over, or is otherwise exposing its belly, then sure, I can see taking the time to do that. But otherwise? It gives me no satisfaction.

Spanish Weathering. Harsh, extreme weathering, sometimes described as "European style" or "Spanish style", is something I never do either. Really extreme Spanish weathering demonstrates excellent craftsmanship and attention to detail, but I don't see that it's any more realistic in armor modeling than accented panel lines are in aircraft modeling. I weather my tank models, sure, and sometimes it's fun to go mad and pack a bunch of mud into the tracks and suspension. But the heavy chipping and weathering done in the Spanish fashion? Not for me.

Preshading. I've never preshaded anything, and I can't say in looking at photographs of finished models that I can even see what good it does. More than once I've read comments like "The preshading produced a very subtle effect that is not apparent in photographs." Well, if a camera can't detect the preshading effect, my eyes aren't likely to either.

Modeling is no more immune to fashion than anything else. Right now, the fashion is for preshading, accented panel lines, heavy Spanish-style weathering, and dot filters. I must be extremely unfashionable because I don't do any of them, but I'll wager that I have about as much fun building models as anyone. I may be an unfashionable troglodyte, but I have fun. And that's the main thing.

Cancer Update

I've been dealing with cancer and chemotherapy for about a year now, and in that time I've found that I have basically no interest in large modeling projects. My oft-discussed "Ultimate Saturn V Project" has been put on indefinite hold, and I can't even seem to find the energy to finish a 1/35th scale tank any more. I can't even face the prospect of a 1/72nd scale airplane if it involves a cockpit interior, and as a general rule anything that requires me to airbrush anything is deemed too much effort. It isn't that I don't want to build anything; I just can't seem to scrape up the energy. Leaning down to turn on the air compressor is too much work for me, apparently.

But I haven't been totally inactive. I find that 1/72nd scale armor is doable. I can assemble a typical small-scale tank in an easy day, and as long as I can use spray cans to do the base color, finishing isn't too big a deal either. The resulting models aren't great by any means, but they aren't terrible and they help to keep my hands busy.

One of these days when I don't feel like such abject crap I'll post a few pictures, but for now you'll simply have to imagine the latest additions to my small-scale armor collection, such as the Airfix Sherman Calliope, the Emhar A7V, the Revell M40 155mm self-propelled gun, and the Academy "Dragon Wagon" tank transporter. I've also got three Airfix Scammel tank transporters partially built, but the suspension elements are so fragile they never seem to survive final assembly and one of these days I'm going to have to craft some replacement axles out of paper clips... when I have the energy, that is.

But for now, being sick really sucks.

Two views of the completed New Ware Lockheed Starclipper. I finished it quite some time ago, but technical problems prevented me from posting any photographs - mostly, my USB floppy disk drive croaked, and since my digital camera only saves on 3.5-inch floppies, well, I was sort of stuck (yes, I know my camera is obsolete, but I'm fond of it anyway).

Not readily apparent in any of these views, but perhaps guessable anyway, are the smooth and blemish-free nature of the castings and the crisp, thin decals. This was a pleasant kit, far more buildable and "finished" than most of the other resin kits I've attempted in the past, and if it is any guide to New Ware's other products, I'd never hesitate to buy one of their kits sight-unseen.

New Ware Starclipper

The Lockheed Starclipper was an SSTO (Single-Stage-To-Orbit) design that got kicked around a bit around 1966. It amounted to a lifting body spacecraft equipped with a pair of very large fuel tanks, "drop tanks" in effect, that were so large the vehicle actually nestled between them. The rocket engines in the lifting body drew fuel from the drop tanks, which were jettisoned when empty and went into the ocean while the spacecraft itself went into orbit. Though it was never built, some aspects of its design were incorporated in later proposals, and as far as I'm concerned it has a nice shape.

The New Ware 1/144th scale kit is a marvel. The parts are extremely well cast in hard cream-colored resin. Try as I might I couldn't find a single air bubble, and the only surface flaw I could find was a vaguely circular rumpus around the nose gear bay on the underside of the lifting body, though the flaw is minor and appears to be highly vulnerable to sandpaper. As can be seen, the kit consists of a half-dozen major parts and maybe a dozen smaller parts. Pour stubs are minimal and the external tanks, for example, fit together without any joint preparation at all. Panel lines are recessed, and mainly outline the payload bay, the gear bays, and the canopy. The panel lines are so finely drawn that they might well disappear under a coat of paint; I propose to scribe them a hair deeper before painting.

A small decal sheet provides some "UNITED STATES" and "NASA" markings, but no meatballs or wurms. The instructions are a single sheet of paper, with the assembly sequence on one side and the painting instructions on the other. As is nearly standard with US spacecraft, the paint scheme is mostly white, with black on the high-heat areas of the spacecraft, grey on the highest-heat portions of the spacecraft, and black roll markings on the external tanks. There are no metal parts or transparencies, and frankly none are required. The only thing I could say that isn't in the kit that I'm likely to miss would be a decal for the windshield.

I'm looking forward to finishing this kit. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Arado 234 Madness

Somehow I ended up in possession of no less than three Arado 234 kits - the conventional bomber, the Ar 234P night fighter, and the B29/X1-like contraption with the "Julia" rocket fighter riding under the Ar 234 bomber. Just to get them out of the way so I could move on to my project of modeling big chunks of the Finnish Air Force during the Continuation War, I built them assembly-line fashion, and the same basic remarks apply to all of them.

Fit is good, with the exception of the clear piece that houses the reconnaissance cameras in the rear fuselage, if you use that option. Assembly of the cockpit is fiddly; I found the tiny offset instrument panel and the rudder pedal mounts particularly difficult (in the end, I had to carve the mounting slots for the rudder pedal mounts wider as no end of shoving seemed to get the mounts to lock into place). There's a lot of glass and the quality of said glass is good, however, so the cockpit does repay the effort. The only thing I really did cockpit-wise, other than painting, was add seat belts. (It is my reasoned belief that the only thing I can ever really see through the canopies of 1/72nd scale aircraft are light-colored seat belts against darker-colored seats. Everything else, including film-and-photoetch instrument panels, may as well not even exist.)

I had to use a little filler where the fronts of the engine nacelles met the wings; otherwise the fit was good enough that only mild sanding was required. The clear light on the top of the rudder wouldn't fit and I had to widen its mounting recess. I knocked every one of the rudder and elevator control horns off every one models during painting, and frankly, I think the planes look better without them (better, but inaccurate).

I painted the bombers in the standard RLM 65/70/71 scheme using Model Master acrylics, and did the Julia in RLM 74 and 75 (I think; it's lichtblau and grauviolett, whatever those RLM numbers are). The night fighter was done with hellgrau with darker-grey mottle; I color I chose for the mottle was too dark and stark, but I decided that since the Ar 234P is pretty provisional to start with, my botched color scheme is no more wrong than any other. The paint worked pretty well and left a nice gloss finish for the decals, which also worked pretty well. Some of them had gotten pretty fragile in storage but I managed to stitch the broken ones back together, all except for the ones on the sheet for the Julia, which fell apart entirely (of course). The sheets don't include swastikas, so I added them from an aftermarket sheet, and put entirely fictional unit markings on the Julia. The Ar 234P includes small "Englandblitz" shields, but the red lightning bolt and stooping eagle seem to have encountered problems; the eagle looks like a squiggle and the lightning bolt seems to go sideways, but you get the idea anyway.

Here's a curiosity. As molded, the Ar 234 cannot extend its landing gear with the Julia attached, and that's a shame because the kits do feature nice landing gear. In the end I cobbled up a stand using what I think are VEB/Plastikart parts from an ancient Tu-20. I cut a slot in the transparent panel and glued the combination atop the stand, which doesn't look bad. It's a little overbalanced so I had to put a dot of 3M double-sided foam tape under the back of the stand to prevent the Ar 234/Julia from taking a header off the shelf. It looks better than all the chopping and changing that would be required to move the Julia far enough for the Ar 234's main landing gear to extend, and that's a fact. One minor irritation is that I couldn't find crew figures that would fit in either the Ar 234 or the Julia, so they're flying ghost planes.

Here's another curiosity. No nose weight is required to get them to sit on their landing gear properly. They seem perfectly inclined to behave like "real aeroplanes" without resorting to coarseness like lead sinkers or handfuls of air rifle pellets.

But can I say, I'm getting pretty sick of Arado 234s at this point. That Fokker D.XXI in Finnish marking is starting to look better and better every day.

Representational Collections

I've been thinking a lot about I was call representational collections, an attempt to capture an entire nation's aviation effort in a single collection. One of the easiest ones to think about is the classical "Luftwaffe in Ten Models" collection. If someone was going to pay you to select and build ten models that would best capture the scope and sweep of the Luftwaffe in World War Two, what would they be? And perhaps as interesting, what famous airplanes would you leave off?

It turns out that it's hard to whittle the Luftwaffe list down to just ten airplanes. I can usually come up with good arguments for at least fifteen, but in any event, here are my representational model lists.

LUFTWAFFE, WWII
Bf-109E
Me-109G
Fw-190A
Ju-88A
He-111
Do-217E
Ju-87G
Me-262
Me-110G
Ju-52/3M

ROYAL AIR FORCE, WWII
Spitfire I
Spitfire IX
Hurricane IIC
Lancaster
Halifax
Mosquito B
Mosquito FB
Beaufighter
Wellington
Meteor

UNITED STATES ARMY AIR FORCE, WWII
P-38 Lightning
P-40E Warhawk
P-47D Thunderbolt
P-51D Mustang
B-17G Flying Fortress
B-24J Liberator
A-20G Havoc
B-25J Mitchell
C-47 Skytrain/Dakota
B-29 Superfortress

That's my guess, anyway.