Model Kit Reviews - I have such disasters to show you!

Klingon Bird of Prey

2011-12-20T19:38:00.000-08:00

Klingon Bird of Prey, painted almost entirely with craft store acrylic paint except for an overall coat of Krylon "Army Green". This model felt like more of an armor kit than a spaceship to me, which is good, because I haven't built any armor in a while and was getting out of practice.

Revell Junkers G.38

2011-12-18T14:03:00.001-08:00

These are pictures of Revell's 1/144th scale Junkers G.38 airliner. I enjoyed this model considerably. The G.38 is decidedly unusual, with a combination of an elegantly swept wing, a square-section fuselage that is about as graceful as a box girder bridge, and landing gear that somehow reminds me of a steam locomotive. But it has an odd appeal for me. Maybe its greatest appeal is that it isn't a Panther or an F-16.

The kit itself is very nicely done and fun to build. The corrugations are particularly well-done, and the kit even has a modest interior, though I question the accuracy of the control yokes on the flight deck, which look more like something you'd see on the Cutty Sark than an airplane. I didn't use the clear plastic parts for the fuselage windows and used Micro Klear instead, but the other transparencies worked pretty well, and didn't even need glue (the "skylights" over the engines simply pressed in, while the glass in the wing roots, nose and flight deck needed only a little Future to hold them in place).

The corrugations make it hard to clean up the seam at the leading edge of the wing, but at the same time, they made it easier to paint the black stripes on the wings. The parts layout of the fuselage leave one with no seams to clean up at all.

On the whole, I very much enjoyed this kit, and I personally think it would be a riot to get a seat inside the wings of a G.38 - the view forward must have been quite striking indeed, though the roar of the inboard engines might make it hard to enjoy the airline version of "603 Squadron".

PS: Something drastic has happened to the Blogger editor. Either they changed something, or I changed something, but either way, I am NOT impressed with how it's working right now.

The Eagles Were Coming

2011-11-27T11:49:00.000-08:00

There's a scene in the movie The Return of the King that amuses me. It's near the end, where Aragorn has led the Army of the West to the very gates of Mordor to distract Sauron long enough for Frodo to slam-dunk the Ring. At one point, one of the hobbits cries "Here come the eagles!" as Gwaihir and his folk come in to dogfight with the Nazgul aboard their great winged beasts (clearly Junkers designs, if you ask me - what's the difference between a Ju 52 and a flying Nazgul beast? Not much).

Anyway, whenever that scene comes up, I think about how cool it would be if they were F-15C Eagles coming in. How would an AMRAAM work against a Nazgul beast? Or would the Lord of the Nazgul be able to deploy some dark ECM to spoof the missiles? Does the Nazgul's segmented armor have some kind of inherent stealth property? Would a Sidewinder be able to guide on a winged beast's (presumably warmish) breath? Or would it turn into a knife fight at close range, where guns and swords become the primary weapons? And if an Eagle pilot shot down a winged Nazgul, does he get credit for one kill, or two? But since the Nazgul are neither living nor dead and can only be undone by swords made in Gondolin and imbued with special Elvish anti-Nazgul spells, does the Eagle pilot get credit for any kill at all?

It takes me ten or fifteen minutes to get my head back into the movie once such digressions set in.

All of this becomes relevant when you remember that yesterday was Black Friday. My preferred on-line hobby shop (Squadron) was having a Black Friday sale, and I decided that the time had come to finally buy a model I've wanted for a long time, the Tamiya 1/32nd scale F-15C. They run about $130, and that's just a bit more than I can see myself paying for one model. I'm game to buy just about anything up to the $100 point, but once a model crosses that threshold, a certain ouch-factor sets in and I find myself saying things like "Do you realize how many 1/144th scale airplanes I could buy for that sort of jing?"

To say nothing of the fact that I really don't have anywhere to put a 1/32nd scale F-15C once I finish it. But to an extent, the finished model isn't the point. Building it is the fun; having it just means I have to dust it and figure out where to put it and how to keep the cat from wrecking it. It's the difference between carving off a huge piece of pie and sitting down to eat it, and all the moaning and groaning that sets in later when you mumble "I shouldn't have eaten so much pie..."

So I got my cup of coffee and went to Squadron's website and commenced to buying stuff. But I went about it in the wrong order. Rather than putting what I most wanted in the shopping basket first (namely, the F-15C) I bought a whole bunch of other stuff, so that when I got around to looking at my shopping cart just prior to selecting the F-15, I swallowed my tongue. Cripes, $300 in models already, and I haven't even bought the F-15???

Clearly I had to get rid of a bunch of stuff in my cart. But I couldn't. I wanted it all. I wanted the Williams Brothers radial engine. I wanted the set of ICM figures. I wanted the Lindberg velociraptor. I wanted the Trumpeter M26 Pershing. I wanted the Minicraft EC-121. I began to panic. Finally, if only to prevent myself from having a complete nervous breakdown, I clicked on the Check Out button, just to have an end to the madness.

So - the Eagle was coming, but due to gross lack of discipline on my part, it isn't coming. I have nobody to blame but myself, but draw some solace from the fact that I can always go back tonight and order it anyway.

I'm wary of saying things like "Such-and-such an airplane was the best fighter ever built!" Such statements are usually pretty subjective, and in any event I'm not a fighter pilot and am not really qualified to have an opinion. But I will say that I really like the F-15's shape, and if I had to pick an airplane to be on my side in an air battle, it would be hard for me to bet against the F-15's undefeated record (there is some debate about what its actual record is, but I've seen 110:0 and have no reason to argue with those numbers).

Revell Do X

2011-11-27T11:32:00.001-08:00

Revell's 1/144th scale Dornier Do X flying boat. It was a fun kit. I like the contraction between the rakishly pointed nose and the slabby wing that looks like it was carved out of a railroad tie, and the great profusion of engines and propellers gives it the appearance of improbably ornate Victorian machinery. The kit is pretty easy to build, and features really nicely detailed corrugations on the top of the wing and the leading edge, though those same corrugations are a nightmare to clean up - I just left them be, preferring the slightly visible seam over a much more visible smooth patch. The only real disappointment in the kit are the propellers - the blades seem kind of ill-formed to me, and the propeller hubs have heavy parting lines and flash. But they're hard to fix, because the blades are so thin they snap off if you look at them sideways. And that's bad, because there's a ton of propellers (stupidly, the only part of the kit that had any flash at all were the propellers - it figures).

The "biplane" elevators and ailerons are no picnic either. The mounts for one of the elevators was broken beyond repair when I opened the kit, and I elected to just leave it off entirely. If I hadn't mentioned it, you might not have noticed. Sources seem to differ on exactly what color it was. I settled for overall Tamiya aluminum, but I am prepared to be proven wrong. Not that I'll actually fix it; I'll just accept that I was wrong and move on.

But on the whole, it's a pretty nice kit of an airplane you don't see every day. The only really hard parts are the propellers and the biplane elevators. A few nips of Jim Beam to calm your nerves before starting the propellers might not be a bad idea - at least you won't care so much when you break one.

Tamiya Stegasauri

2011-11-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

So THAT'S why my lantana bush looks scraggly and unkempt - dinosaurs have been eating it! It's one thing after another. The squirrels go into hibernation, I finally fix the gates so the rabbits can't get through, and now it's dinosaurs eating the landscaping...

These are Tamiya's stegosaurus kits, of course. Curiously for a Tamiya kit, the fit wasn't especially good in places, especially the fit of the spinal plates to the bodies, and the seams are awkward and hard to fix. I concealed them by flowing multiple layers of Testor's liquid cement (the stuff in the little black bottles) around the seams, which eventually filled them in. But for a while the fumes were so thick I expected an intervention from friends and family urging me to seek professional help.

Clearly I need to build more predatory dinosaurs lest the ecosystem in my back yard go completely out of balance.

Chaos Howdah

2011-11-21T08:03:00.000-08:00

I suspect that most modelers, if asked, could give you a list of modelers who inspired them, or in some way changed the way they think about their hobby. I know I can. Like a lot of modelers of my vintage, I was deeply influenced by the Shep Paine diorama inserts that Monogram shipped with their kits in the 1970s. Those were a masterstroke of marketing, if you ask me - I know I bought Monogram kits simply to get my trembling hands on the diorama inserts even if I didn't really give a wet slap for the kit itself. And here is perhaps the most inspiring one of the bunch:

This is, of course, Shep Paine's diorama of a downed US Navy TBD Devastator that shipped with the old-but-impressive 1/48th scale Monogram TBD kit. I found this diorama deeply inspirational, though on the surface, it doesn't appeal to me at all. I find the TBD uninteresting and, well, oogly. Downed airplane dioramas don't appeal to me in general. And since all of my experiments with making water with polyester resin have failed spectacularly, I generally forget that I ever tried.

But there's something about the ethic of this diorama that I found very inspirational. I didn't want to duplicate it, even when I was a wee lad who wasn't yet shaving. But something about Paine's skill and taste spoke powerfully to me. Maybe I didn't want to duplicate this diorama, and maybe I'd never be as good as Paine, but at least he showed me what was possible, and convinced me that there was more to modeling that just hastily gluing parts together and then just as hastily blowing them up again with firecrackers. Viewing this diorama insert seemed to tell me that modeling could be more than just stringy masses of Testors cement, vast gaps between parts, and shooting holes in vintage M48 tank kits with my trusty Remington .22 rifle (my old "Nylon 66" probably destroyed more enemy tanks than Michael Wittmann, and certainly more battleships than Mitsuo Fuchida could have dreamed of).

Another inspiration was actually a single picture submitted to the Reader's Gallery of FineScale Modeler magazine (henceforth referred to as "FSM", because the bicapitalization in "FineScale" just irks the hell out of me). It was a "chaos howdah" built by Fraser Gray. Fraser Gray is perhaps more famous for his AFV modeling, but the chaos howdah he built was just absolutely flabbergasting. It was a fighting platform mounted on two Airfix dinosaurs and manned (if that's the right word) by various 25mm figures that have all the characteristics of Citadel Miniatures. It was a delirium of dark wood, moss, chains and weird artwork. The banner surmounting the whole thing, a graveyard scene with a bloated moon hanging in a blood-red sky and shining through the gaunt black limbs of a tree... Words fail me. It was simultaneously creepy and cool, and it's one of the few models that I've ever deliberately intended to recreate on my own.

I wish I had a picture of it, but the only known photograph of it is in a copy of FSM that probably now occupies some fairly deep layer in an Arizona landfill. The media may be decomposing, but the memory of his fabulous howdah has remained with me over the years. I've always wanted to build my own rendition of it, and can finally report that I've at least started. I finally found a crucial missing element - 1/72nd scale "skeleton warriors" - and with a crew finally assembled and dinosaurs rounded up (Lindberg anklyosaurs), it was time to finally start cutting wood.

My version of the infamous Chaos Howdah, with the major pieces plopped atop one another, with a couple of skeleton warriors for scale. I may rebuild the upper deck, which seems a little beefy and might weigh the dinosaurs down. But then again, it's a chaos howdah and they're chaos dinosaurs; who's to say that they aren't really strong?

Westerners

2011-10-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when I watch a western on TV, specifically Tombstone, the one with Kurt Russell, Michael Biehn, and Val Kilmer - I root around in my closet and find a bunch of Western figures.

A Bad Guy's view of the Andreas 54mm Wyatt Earp.

'Tother Wyatt Earp out on the street in front of the saloon, with a couple of locals hanging out on the porch watching him shoot. The guy in the chair is supposed to be the marshal (he's wearing a badge, anyway) but he seems remarkably casual about the whole thing. Never mind the enormous thumbnail on the left. We can edit that out in post-production. His hat, being composed entirely of super glue, is harder than titanium.

The marshal and his deputy hanging around in front of the saloon. The marshal is a 54mm Andreas figure, while the deputy is a 54mm Streets of Laredo figure. They're both excellent figures too, but the chair was a bitch to assemble, and I never did get all the leg spreaders installed. The deputy (he's really the "No Mercy" gunfighter figure) was the motivation for the scratchbuilt building facade; he's sculpted leaning against a wall, and thus I had to build him a wall to lean against. I intentionally built the building facade a little out of square and a little non-uniform, and was deliberately messy with the painting. This is Jericho we're talking about, dag nabbit, not New York City.

I find it immensely amusing that I painted the marshal's shirt with RAF dark green, and his pants with RAF light earth.

Shootout at the Schizophrenic Stable

2011-10-29T17:38:00.001-07:00

Two men in a gunfight both claim to be Wyatt Earp. At least one of them is lying. Worse, they're both wearing the same hat!

Here we have two 54mm takes on Wyatt Earp. The one on the left (double-wielding) is white metal from Miniaturas Andreas; the one on the right is resin from Warriors. They're both excellent figures with nice dynamic poses and big, easy-to-paint mustaches. I lost the right-hand Wyatt's hat somewhere along the line and made a replacement using the old modeling clay and super glue plunge mold method using the left-hand Wyatt's hat as a master. Perhaps the business of having to share one hat made them cranky and led to the showdown; who knows?

They're posed in front of an Old West photo backdrop I made out of random scraps of wood. I still haven't gotten around to making a knob for the door. Doh.

Long Johns

2011-10-17T19:52:00.000-07:00

Fig 1: Long John of the genus Monogrammus Nostalgicus Ressiue

Fig 2: Another view of the Long John

Fig 3: A Long John of the genus Pastrius Yummius Chocolatum

Dragster kits don't get much simpler than the Monogram reissue of the vintage Long John slingshot. It's all quite basic - the entire kit has fewer parts than just the blower on most modern Top Fuel dragsters. But it's still fun, and recalls those heady days of the late 1960s when models could sometimes be assembled with a hammer and nails. The main point of interest, probably, is the inclusion of really nice resin tires with press-in white sidewalls. They fit perfectly on the kit wheels and are much easier to sand flat than vinyl tires. A little Bare Metal Foil on the hub cabs (or are they "wheel covers" these days") is all they need.

As for the other Long John... I'm on a diet and can only gaze upon it longingly.

Stop The Panthers

2011-10-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a favorite modeling genre, I'm sure. I have many; I've never developed any kind of modeling discipline and tend to build pretty much everything, meaning that I never get really good at anything. And I'm sure that everyone has a specific subject that they've always wanted to see in kit form, or maybe in the form of a new kit. I would, for example, pay heavily for a 1/25th scale kit of a Euclid 1LLD mining dump truck, or a 1/72nd scale M42 Duster, or a large-scale motocross motorcycle, preferably a works Suzuki as ridden by Roger DeCoster or a works Husqvarna as ridden by Heikki Mikkola, or even just a plain old Yamaha YZ-360B.

I'm also sure that everyone has at least one subject in mind that they think is wildly over-produced, to the point that they say "I need another hole in my head more than I need another kit of X." It's our least favorite subject, the one that causes us to groan with disbelief every time some new Chinese company announces another new kit of it.

There are a lot of candidates. Spitfires are dangerously close to that point for me, but I can still understand their appeal. Early Spitfires are graceful and aesthetically pleasing, and later Spitfires seem to exude a kind of barely-controlled power. And it's hard to argue with the Spitfire's role in history. The same is true of P-51 Mustangs. I could build a new driveway out of all the P-51s that are on the market right now, and I just really don't need any more, thanks, even though I recognize the importance of the Mustang (to say nothing of the fact that there are people alive today whose fathers took P-51s all the day downtown to the heart of the Third Reich, and I do respect such men).

I grow very weary of the Bismarck. Actually, I don't have strong feelings about Bismarck models one way or the other; I just get tired of all that gooey "It was the most powerful battleship ever made" palaver. It wasn't. I'm not even sure that it was all that much better than the much earlier British Queen Elizabeth class. Faster, maybe, but with a goofy three-screw design that gave it a weak stern, and I wouldn't fancy the Bismarck's chances against a ship like the USS Washington, to say nothing at all of the New Jersey or Yamato. Considering that the Bismarck was for all practical purposes sunk by a single fabric-covered biplane Swordfish torpedo bomber, I'm not sure the "most powerful" label really applies. And for that matter, I think there are plenty of New Jerseys in kit form already; why not do something wild and make, say, a Brooklyn-class light cruiser, or HMS Onslow, or a German disguised raider like the Atlantis?

Bf 109s! Can I not have more Bf 109s? Surely we've made more models of Bf 109s than there were real Bf 109s, and the prospect of a new 109 just doesn't thrill me.

And I can't go into a hobby shop without having great piles of F-16s and F-18s fall on me. Okay, I can sort of understand that. They're still in use, they are used by many different countries, and they exist in many forms, and they play into a sense of post-9/11 patriotism. But gee whiz. The only F-16 I could imagine myself building for the foreseeable future is a Tiger Meet version, and that just for the wild paint job.

But the one that I think is wildly overdone is the Panther. How many Panthers do we need? How many Panther variants do we need? I don't need any, frankly, and reading about a new Panther kit fills me with a sense of regret for what might have been. We could have had something new and interesting. Some weird, obscure early cold war iron like a Conqueror, or an M103, or a T-10M. But no. Another Panther. We could have had some interesting World War Two subject - a Matilda I, a decent Crusader, an A10, an armored Cat D8, a T-26S - but no, it's another damned Panther. We could have had some interesting interwar thing, like a Medium Mark II or a Medium-D or even one of those weird Soviet things like the "Tank Grote", but no, it's another Panther, and more Zimmerit, and God save us all, a retooled Notek light. It's enough to make a man weep.

How about a reasonably inexpensive injected plastic Discovery from 2001? A VentureStar from Avatar? A decent plastic Federation dreadnought so we don't have to keep carving up our Enterprise kits? A Klingon C8 battlecruiser? A decent Shuttlecraft? A redone Enterprise bridge?

How about a Bomarc? Or a Navajo cruise missile? Or two-stage Black Brant rocket, or a four-stage Scout?

NO! You'll take your new Panther and you'll like it!

Okay. I'll take it. But I don't have to like it.

Ullah!

2011-10-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

Pegasus 1/144th scale War of the Worlds diorama. It comes complete with two manta-style war machines, two M4A3E8 Shermans, and a blobby clear plastic piece for the Martian heat ray. The green portions of the war machines are also clear plastic, but I painted them - they're too thick to do the old paint-the-inside-of-them business, but Testors old-school "Sublime Green" goes on nice and smooth even with a brush.

This was actually a lot of fun to build, though it takes only a few minutes to build and you spent most of your time painting. It's made of ABS plastic, I believe, rather that styrene, but the ABS parts for the war machines are commendably smooth and polished. They're so smooth, in fact, that the war machines are difficult to hold on to; they kept shooting out of my fingers like watermelon seeds. I handed one to my wife, and she couldn't hold on to it either. Unfortunately, my first choice of paint, Krylon metallic copper, crazed the plastic considerably, and though I wet-sanded and polished it all smooth, I never got it as smooth as it was when it came out of the box. I ended up painting about six coats of Future floor wax on the completed war machines to try to make them look smooth and alien.

At first, the heat ray seems entirely unconvincing, but I kind of like it now. It has a seam that is impossible to remove, but after I painted it Testors "Mango" (a model car paint) and feathered in some Krylon fluorescent yellow and red, I came to rather like it.

The Shermans aren't half-bad for models that contain exactly four parts each. They could probably benefit from extra details, especially .50-caliber machine guns, but I find that I'm fresh out of 1/144th scale armor accessories. I added some white stars that I found in my decal box, but they turned out to be too small (they're white "kill markings" scavenged from old decals for, I believe, a Soviet La-5FN fighter).

The base is a one-piece ABS casting. The instructions say to paint the three supine guys on the base "white", and that puzzled me for a while. What, since when do Imperial Stormtroopers appear in War of the Worlds? Then I realized they're supposed to be victims of the heat ray, so it seemed logical that they should be surrounded by a charred spot. The script on the nameplate is very slightly raised. I painted the whole area Testors "Sublime Green" and then overcoated it with fragile craft store black flat acrylic, then rubbed the black off the high spots with a damp paper towel. It worked better than I had any right to expect.

Good fun all the way around! Ullah!

Romans and Romulans, Oh My

2011-10-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

54mm Aquilifer (eagle-bearer). I think the figure is by Soldiers, but I threw away the box ages ago, so I can't really verify that. I actually started painting this figure several years ago but found the pteruges too demanding. I set it aside pending better ideas, and eventually got back around to it. You can't really tell from this angle, but the face kind of resembles Tony Curtis. Don't let my ham-fisted painting dissuade you; this is an excellent figure. (Just for fun, I painted the vast majority of this figure using old-school Testors paints in the square glass bottles. Vallejo acrylics are apparently the choice of masters these days, and I guess the fact that I didn't choose them means that I'm not a master. I may also be a tightwad, since I happen to have lots of old-school Testors paints on hand and tend to adhere to the "use what I have" school of thought.)

AMT Romulan warbird, seen from the angle of greatest interest. It's an easy kit to build (I built most of it while watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and it's even easier to paint. The decals aren't bad, considering their size. Mine cracked in a few places and I patched them with orange paint that doesn't quite match the decal, but that's life.

I'm greatly heartened that Round 2 is re-releasing many old (and not so old) Star Trek kits. I think the next one will be the Klingon bird of prey.

Been A While

2011-09-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I really finished anything. It's just been too fearfully hot. My workbench is out in the garage, and during the high months of summer, working on a model just isn't a lot of fun. And sometimes it's nice to take a brief break and do something else for a change, like float in the swimming pool and drink altogether too much Newcastle brown ale.

But recently (meaning last week) the weather finally broke. It's still hot, but it's just hot, if you know what I mean, not fearfully, brutally hot. I can go outside without feeling like I've inserted my head in a pizza oven. So this weekend I started cleaning up my workbench, which gets a tad dusty when I'm not there every day, and finished a couple of projects I'd started before it got hot and which waited patiently for me to run out of Newcastle.

The top one is the Enterprise-E. I don't remember the scale, since I threw the box away ages ago. And since I also threw the instructions away ages ago, I wasn't entirely sure what colors were called out. So I simply spray-painted it with Tamiya Japanese Navy grey and added a few other shades of mostly acrylic paint. The decals had become damaged. There was some sort of brownish goo on half of the decal sheet. Spilled iced tea? Spilled Diet Coke? Spilled Newscastle brown ale? Ectoplasm? I have no idea. It took me a while to clean up the decal sheet, and I lost a few, mostly some of the escape pod hatch covers on the underside. It isn't my best work by any means, but as they say, any Star Trek model is better than no Star Trek model.

The dinosaur is the "new" Atlantis Tyrannosaurus Rex. I say "new" because it's really a reissue of an old Revell kit; some of the parts still bear the Revell trademark. I don't think it's particularly correct by the lights of modern research, and it isn't all that easy to assemble either. It absorbed titanic quantities of MEK and super glue, and even my largest wood clamps were unable to close up all the joints. It wasn't easy to paint either. Atlantis says it's molded in a color they call "reptile red". It's more like pumpkin orange. And I live in a desert that fairly teems with reptiles, and none of them were ever pumpkin orange (though there are "scorpion lizards" here with upcurved tails that are almost lemon yellow). Anyway, pumpkin orange is a bitch to cover. I ended up using spray cans for the sake of speed and convenience, and sort of feathered three colors for the undersides, flanks and top. I meant to go back and airbrush more detail, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked the spray can feathering.

So I left the airbrush alone. My compressor is set up right now for air tools anyway, and connecting my aging Model Master airbrush to 90 PSI air would probably not be a good idea. So I just detail-painted it and drew in the "panel lines" with a fine brown felt marker.

A while back I bought a new book about dinosaurs, thinking I'd use it for reference material, but I don't think I care for the paintings in the book. I'm sure they're accurate, or at least plausible, but I just have a hard time dealing with the interpretations of various theropods that make them look like big, pissed-off-looking chickens. So I went for something more green and minimalist. The model is far too large to handle during painting anyway, and I decided that a disruptive camouflage scheme would be harder to pull off than it was worth. And whatever the case, I still think it looks better than pumpkin orange. And I like green dinosaurs. Sue me already.

Next up: I bought the reissue of the classic Star Trek Romulan warbird. That sounds like a winner to me.

Zombie Truck

2011-07-02T21:11:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I get stuck on various projects. They're either too hard, or they don't interest me, or I don't have the right paint, or the planets aren't aligned properly. Who knows why, but sometimes I get myself in a position where I simply never finish anything. I've been in that sort of rut lately - building a fair amount, but not finishing anything.

To try to get things moving again, I decided to set myself a mild challenge. I'd just written a 160,000-word novel that was my own take on the ever-popular (and very cliche) zombie apocalypse. One of the "characters" in that novel was a gun truck hastily assembled out of whatever came to hand. I decided to build a model version of the truck that appeared in my novel, building it in the same way that the characters in the novel built it - quickly, roughly, and with whatever came to hand.

The basis was Revell's "Tactical Truck" kit, a rough and fairly crude rendition of what I believe is an M34 six-by truck of roughly 1960s vintage. To supplement the truck, I allowed myself to use whatever I could find in one of my Tupperware junk bins, which included some 1/35th scale armor accessories and a bunch of scrap plastic and wood.

So what have we got? Plastic rod roughly welded across the windows and windshield. Pieces of plastic sheet scabbed onto the doors and roof as applique armor. A crude framework "welded" together to support a plywood roof. Heavy wood planks "bolted" to the sides to keep the evil undead from getting handholds and easily climbing into the truck (I ran out of Grandt Line nut-bolt-washers so you'll have to imagine there are enough bolts). An angled "zombie-catcher" made out of scrap plastic sheet and rod that's intended to keep roadkill zombies from getting into the radiator. Extra lights. A CB radio and a US Army radio that I believe came from a Tamiya Humvee kit.

Not seen in the back of the truck are a 55-gallon drum of fuel, about forty gallons of fuel in jerry cans, forty gallons of water in plastic jerry cans, some MREs, and all the ammunition cans I could find. There's junk on the roof, including a ladder, rope, scrap lumber, and a sand channel I made out of sheet plastic.

There's a .30-caliber Browning machine gun for the shotgun passenger. There's an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon at each "broadside" position. And to deter pursuit, there is a pair of .50-caliber M2 heavy machine guns at the rear corners. There are also various M16s and pistols here and there, and a couple of M60 machine guns thrown onto the roof just in case.

It looks pretty crude, but it was meant to look crude, and it was built in three days. But best of all, it's done. And it made a significant dent in my supply of junk, which isn't a bad thing either.

I think it needs shovels and more spare tires, but I couldn't find any in my junk bin. Life's tough when zombies attack.

And now, Even More Old Stuff

2011-06-11T14:31:00.000-07:00

And still more old stuff. At this rate, I'll run out of things to photograph sometime in the year 2045.

This is a 25mm white metal figure of a "mounted wraith". It's probably by Ral Partha, but I don't remember. Oh, come on, who are we fooling, it's a Nazgul, just going by a different name. I thought the skinned, partially skeletal horse was a fun touch, and I liked the idea of mounting this hideous bloody thing on a pastoral base with trees and grass, sort of a "Extreme Cage-Fighting invades the Shire" kind of effect.

A GHQ 1/24ooth scale wargaming model of the Japanese aircraft carrier Zuikaku, as it appeared on the morning of December 7th, 1941. Except that the real Zuikaku probably wasn't mounted on a slab of balsa wood...

A tiny ship model intended for wargaming use. This was made by GHQ, and I think it's 1/1200th scale USS Constitution. Funny how it can sail without any crew or rigging at all... But since it's a wargaming model, it's intended to be moved by a wargamer's thick, clumsy fingers, not wind, so who needs a crew, huh? It used to have itty-bitty flags and pennants, but alas, it turns out that 1/1200th scale flags and pennants have a shorter half-life than atoms of Einsteinium.

More wargaming models. These are 1/2400th scale "Micro-Nauts" sold by GHQ. They're fabulously detailed considering their size, though they'll drive you half-mad in assembly, and fully mad in painting. The ship in the foreground is the light cruiser USS Phoenix, CL-46. It survived World War Two and was subsequently sold to Argentina, where it was renamed General Belgrano and eventually sent to Davy Jones's Locker courtesy of the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror. The ship in the background is the USS Montana, BB-70, a proposed "super-Iowa" battleship with an additional triple 16-inch turret aft. Though some metal was cut and welded, none of the super-Iowas were ever finished, though if memory serves the bow of one was grafted onto one of the Iowas after it was damaged.

Delta Schwarz! I think this was a Dragon or DML 1/16th scale "Delta Force" figure. I built it pretty much out of the box, but decided that I wanted to experiment with a "night urban" camouflage uniform of light grey, intermediate blue and black, with gunship grey webbing.

More Older Stuff

2011-06-10T10:08:00.000-07:00

More of my older stuff, posted mostly because I don't currently have anything new worth putting up.

The Ray Harryhausen homage. I had 25mm white metal skeletons. I had a plaster casting of a rock that I picked up during a camping trip in northern Montana. I combined them. The rock casting was going to be a rock face in my oft-contemplated but rarely-worked N-scale railroad layout. Yes, Virginia, there was a time when I thought I'd turn into a model railroader, despite the fact that the only thing I know about trains is that they snarl morning traffic something awful. But in the end, I realized that I liked building the vehicles and structures and didn't particularly enjoy the actual railroad part of the model railroad. Besides, you can't put 25mm skeleton warriors on a model railroad layout. Oh, I suppose you could, but you wouldn't have much credibility with the trainspotters afterwards.

And now, a scene from the movie The Land Before Common Sense. It's a 25mm vignette of a mostly-naked warrior woman type with three "hunting velociraptors", as they were described on the package. Well, why not, I guess. Once you've crossed the line and started making dioramas using Dungeons & Dragons figures, you might as well stop quibbling about things not making a lot of sense.

More 25mm figures, mostly because I like the one in the middle. Women, futuristic motorcycles, and automatic rifles - it's like a "guy movie" all by itself. The one on the left is supposed to be a witch, I think, but mostly she looks annoyed, as though she's tired of having to sweep up after the others all the time.

This is the oldest figure in my collection. It was called "The Ultimate ATV", but that's all I remember. It's top-heavy and it falls over a lot, and every time it does, another piece flies off and vanishes.

The oldest "serious" historical miniature in my collection. It's from Post Militaire, and it purports to be a Japanese general somewhere in Korea, which I imagine makes him unpopular with the Koreans. It's so old it was painted mostly with old Polly-S paints - remember those? I copied the Japanese characters on the banner from a book about the samurai. It supposedly reads "The Men of High Purpose Stand for Such-and-Such A Thing" but my inexpert copying probably turned it into "Onionskin Underpants Make Terrible Umbrellas".

Older Stuff

2011-06-09T21:03:00.000-07:00

I don't have anything new to post, so I thought I'd post some pictures of some of my older work.

Countess Karnstein. I think the manufacturer was Soldat, alas, long since out of business. This was in a brief phase where I thought I might specialize in largish-scale resin fantasy figures. The main downsides of these sorts of figures are that they're fairly expensive, and they're somewhat hard to explain to friends who don't actually go in for this sort of thing.

A German 120mm mountain soldier, manufacturer unknown (but it might have been Verlinden). Yes, he's missing the barrel of his MP-40, which one might say ausgeschnappened off. This was in a phase where I thought I might specialize in largish-scale resin historical miniatures (or "toy soldiers", as some in my family insist). As a matter of personal choice I don't often do models of SS soldiers or equipment, but this is one of my exceptions.

Another one of my quirks - I like to make small dioramas out of small models that are normally intended for tabletop wargaming. Here we have a European Combine Cyber-Tank (foreground) bypassing a disabled and burning Ogre. The Ogre has a couple of shot holes through the glacis, and the smoke is steel wool. I modified the Cyber-Tank by hacking off the two blunt and unimpressive main guns and equipping it with a new main gun made out of brass tubing. I don't remember who made these white-metal models, but they're intended for use with the classic wargames from Metagaming called Ogre and GEV.

Say it isn't so! A small sampling of my extensive collection of 25mm white-metal figures intended for games like Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowrun. Yes, I have played a fair amount of D&D in my day, but I never actually played Shadowrun because I could never figure out the rules. But they had great figures, like the greenish Mohawked ogre who's carrying the Vickers machine gun as his primary weapon.

More of my 25mm figures. I think most of these are from Ravenloft and Shadowrun. I don't paint many of these figures any more since my local game store did my budget a huge favor and went out of business. I bought a boxful of their old stock for pennies on the dollar when they were closing up and I still have a few I haven't painted, but for the most part 25mm figures are a taste I rarely indulge these days.

AMT Payhauler

2011-06-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

Another old soldier who wouldn't die - the AMT 1/24th scale International Payhauler 350 mining dump truck. I like mining trucks and mining equipment in general, and I wish there was more of it - but if a 50-ton mining truck occupied that much space on my bench for that long, imagine what a Caterpillar 979 would be like! I get the vapors just thinking about it.

It's a big kit, with a lot of parts, and it sucked up a sizable quantity of paint and cement, to say nothing of an awful lot of time spend sanding and scraping seams. And then, even after all that, when I was done I saw giant ejector pin marks on the upper lip of the dump box, and had to stick a couple of sacrificial boards to the upper edge to hide them. Why is it that such egregious flaws only become apparent after you've taken the pictures?

I started this giant quite a while ago, and worked on it in little fits and starts for probably two years. It spent so much time in storage I had to evict a colony of beetles from the wheels.

I tried to represent the banged-up appearance of the bed by painting it with a patchy coat of red-brown and then another patchier coat of steel. I don't know if it worked or not. And sharp-eyed viewers may note that I haven't installed the hydraulic dump ramps yet. I will - just as soon as I find them!

Phew

2011-05-22T15:24:00.001-07:00

What is this? The battle of Wolf 359? Looks like it, but no - it's the whole collection of small-scale AMT Enterprises, more or less finished and hung from an upside-down base from a larger Enterprise-E kit. These have been hanging around the workbench for a very long time, getting in the way, getting broken, getting dusty, and generally getting nowhere. I still intend to build a somewhat more formal base for them, but this morning I decided to just hang them up for now so they'd stop accumulating unnecessary wear and tear. And, perhaps more important, so they'd be out of the dang way so I could work on something else.

Another problem child. This is the Revell 1/72nd scale DH.2. It's actually a fun kit to build, its rather spindly appearance notwithstanding, and other than the dreadful Lewis machine gun, it's actually pretty nicely detailed as three-buck Revell kits go. Don't get me wrong, this is no Roden kit, let alone a Wingnut Wings offering, but considering what you pay, it isn't bad. Unfortunately, I misplaced its decals. I'd confess that I lost them, but it seems that in the 21st Century, we aren't required to take responsibility for any mistakes we make, so I'm going to insist that society stole my decals. For a while I was going to apply a set of Belgian roundels to it, simply because I had them, but they were a bit too large, and I dithered, and the kit went nowhere for a long, long time.

Then I bought a Gloster Gladiator, which just happened to have spare RAF roundels that would work. HUZZAH!

So there it is - done enough that I can say it's done so I can finally work on something else. Like the 2001 Moonbus, which calls to me.

Airfix Hs 123

2011-04-17T19:11:00.001-07:00

This, of course, is the Airfix 1/72nd scale Henschel Hs 123. The Hs 123 was a rugged and reasonably reliable sesquiplane (one-and-a-half wings) dive bomber used the Luftwaffe. It saw action with the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, but as the war progressed, it mutated out of its dive-bombing role and into general low-altitude attack missions, and ended its days on the Russian Front, flying alongside (and against) vastly more modern airplanes. But it was eventually phased out not so much because it was obsolete, but because the production line had been shut down for years and spare parts were hard to come by.

The Hs 123 is just odd enough to appeal to me, and I've always liked the Airfix kit of it. And a good thing to, because up until fairly recently the Airfix kit of it was the only kit of it there was. Like the real airplane, the Airfix kit is cheap, rugged, and undemanding. This is a relatively easy biplane to build because of the immense gluing surfaces on the rather monolithic interplane struts, but it's covered with rivets and the fit elsewhere isn't great, so you gets what you pay for.

I sawed off the enormous pilot headrest fairing because I think they look better without them, and painted it in a more or less fictitious Condor Legion scheme. The kit decals were very thick and a bit crispy, but at least they didn't blow apart like some Airfix decals I've tried lately.

I took the pictures on my wife's table, but they came out a bit dark. I was going to relight the airplane and try again, but I have such a headache right now; I'll try again later.

Lindberg Star Probe

2011-03-29T14:33:00.001-07:00

Various views of the Lindberg "Star Probe". It must drive kit collectors halfway bonkers to see hacks like me actually build vintage kits like this one. Or maybe every time I ruin a vintage collector kit, the value of theirs, hermetically sealed in dry nitrogen in a radiation-proof safe, goes up.

Either way, I like models like this. I can't get enough of that vintage future-factual space stuff, perhaps because it takes my mind off our current near-futility in space. (And it probably drives the fans of unmanned space exploration bonkers when I say things like that, because unmanned space exploration seems to be enjoying a sort of Renaissance. And that's cool. But for me, anyway, what's the point of having a space program if somewhere in the fine print it doesn't have a manned landing on Mars as a long-range objective?)

I didn't use the kit decals, obviously. They'd become as brittle as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the only way to save them would be scan them, clean up the digital image, and reprint them on decal paper. Given that my printer is being stubborn and my scanner went to its reward ages ago, I figured I'd use scavenged decals for the time being and, when I've worked out my office problems, I'll repaint the Star Probe and apply the refurbished decals. And I painted the portholes blue instead of red because I think the red ones are altogether too insectoid.

I love the little "specimen" (if you've seen The Right Stuff you know what I'm talking about) in their metalized Michelin Man suits.

One question, though: how exactly do the little specimen get from the habitation part of the ship to the ground? Am I to presume that somewhere there's a really long ladder lashed to the outside of the ship? Or maybe they shinny up and down on ropes? Probably no big deal on the moon; even I could handle that. But suppose Commander Falcon lands the thing on Mars - four tenths of a gee might be more than my slack forearms could deal with. But the alternative, I suppose, is to imagine a tunnel going through the middle of the propellant tanks and emerging somewhere between the clustered rocket engines, which doesn't seem like a good solution either.

Maybe the best approach is to open a beer, forget about it, and leave it all in Commander Falcon's capable hands.

General Viers

2011-03-16T12:33:00.001-07:00

Considering how the desert planet Tatooine always sneaks into the Star Wars movies, I felt that the Empire would be well advised to adopt desert camouflage for its heavy weapons. So here's my stab at desert camouflage on an AT-AT, employing counter-shading akin to British armor at Alamein. The photos were taken on the desert planet of Wittmann, Arizona, in the wash that runs behind my house.

I thought that General Viers, the most successful of Darth Vader's subordinates (in fact, maybe the only successful subordinate of Darth Vader) should have his own specially-marked command AT-AT. Note the kill markings on the nose (really a "mission tally" from an A-26 Invader) and the yellow tactical markings (really half of a "USAF" decal cut up a bit so they don't look like English letters from the same A-26). And in an egregious example of mixing up universes, I applied Star Trek "mirror universe" markings to the side - inappropriate, but too cool not to use. Meantime, a snowspeeder (now a sandspeeder?) zips past. Ha! Who's wearing the wrong camouflage NOW??

Sharp-eyed viewers may note the bird crap on the side of the AT-AT just below the mirror universe decal. I was going to clean it off, but became amused by the thought of some huge pterodactyl-like flying dinosaur pooping on an Imperial AT-AT and left it in place. But bird poop does seem to be a recurring theme, doesn't it? I really must remember to close the garage door more often.

Sandspeeders on the attack. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I think the counter-shading actually sort of works.

"What did you do at work today, dear?"

"Oh, I attacked General Viers's command AT-AT in a sandspeeder and got my ass shot off in the process. You know, the usual. How was your day?"

Nature Has Spoken

2011-03-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

I went out this morning to see what I could do with the wretched Defiant, and lo! At some point one of the little birds that go through my garage hunting for moths and other insects reviewed my Defiant model, found it wanting, and crapped on it. When even the birds don't like your model, it may be time to give up.

Ignominy. This is the roundel that I blew off the wing, resting on the floor of my garage like a dead butterfly.

When Kits Attack

2011-03-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

There are two items of interest regarding this 1/48th scale Monogram F-101 Voodoo. The first is that it's the first model I built after my chemotherapy treatments ended. My skills, as it turned out, had atrophied at least as much as my muscles had, but it didn't turn out too terribly badly - though the bright silver on the exhausts still bugs me, and whatever color I painted it, it isn't Air Defense Command grey.

But mostly, I show the F-101 to highlight the fact that isn't the subject of this post, which is the Airfix 1/72nd scale Boulton-Paul Defiant.

I'm bad at remembering anniversaries, and though I fully intended to build a couple of RAF models to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, I forgot. As it turns out, I didn't even have a Spitfire I and a Hurricane II in my collection, and kept forgetting to buy any. (I have Bf 109E, but it seems somehow wrong to honor the RAF by building a model of a Bf 109.)

But I did have an Airfix Boulton-Paul Defiant, and the Defiant did fight in the Battle of Britain, and the Defiant is just odd enough to be cool. And I decided to build it.

That was my first mistake. I build a lot of Airfix kits and I generally know what I'm in for, but the Defiant was pretty bad. I think my model is about 80% Squadron putty by weight. I worked on it on and off for two months, trapped in the endless cycle of filling, sanding, priming, re-filling, re-sanding, re-priming... Time passed. Continents moved. Other kits came and went, and still the Defiant was covered with putty. Finally I decided to just move on for the sake of sanity, and painted it with my dwindling stock of Humbrol dark green and dark earth. Then came the decals.

They didn't just break, or fall apart, or fracture. They exploded. Violently. And because I am by nature inclined to experiment with the most important decal first (the fuselage codes, in this case), I couldn't easily recover. But the decal sheet had markings for a black night fighter version. I hastily repainted it flat black, overcoated the decals with decal film, and tried again. The decals didn't explode, but they wouldn't stick. At one point I blew lightly on the model to dislodge a bit of fluff, and a roundel peeled off the wing and simply fluttered away.

Grumble.

In the meantime, I broke off the tail wheel, broke off at least two of the .303 machine guns, broke a propeller blade trying to make something vaguely propeller-shaped out of the mass of flash, and completely failed to find a way to erase the glaringly obvious ejector pin mark inside the canopy.

So now what? I don't know. I should just throw it away. I've thrown better models away, after all. I botched the assembly of an Italeri Me 410, and threw it in the trash without much complaint. But somehow I just can't trash the Defiant, even though it richly deserves to be buried deeply and quickly in a landfill. I did a quick search of the Squadron Shop and couldn't come up with aftermarket decals for a Defiant, but I did have decals from the old Airfix Westland Whirlwind in my decal box. I'm tempted to apply them just to get the model off top dead center, and then hang the finished model from the ceiling of my garage like the F-101 above, the true home of the crappy model.

Lindberg Space Stuff

2011-03-13T13:53:00.000-07:00

Unsorted views of the Lindberg USSS Explorer and wheel-shaped space station. These aren't the originals; they're the reissues that came out not so long ago. They both required a good deal of sanding, filling, filing and clamping, and if I were building these professionally I'd have serious heartburn with the fins on the various heat exchangers on the space station in particular. But they were still fun to build - I generally speaking can't get enough of that "future factual" space stuff.

White models present a serious challenge to me - I have a hard time keeping them clean during the construction process. I don't know what my problem is. I wash my hands before I work on models, I don't eat anything while I work on them, and they still come out covered with grubby fingerprints. Maybe I have bad karma.

Airfix Boeing Clipper

2011-03-13T13:48:00.001-07:00

The Airfix 1/144th scale Boeing Clipper. Though I don't normally build airliner models, I realized the other day that I had quite a few "strange airliners" in my collection, and I've decided to finish some of them. It's a pretty nice kit - I built most of it while watching TV with the wife, and other than the Tamiya "bare metal silver" out of a spray can, it was largely hand-painted too. Except now that I see the photographs, I see that I did a crappy job of cleaning the wash off the aileron hinge lines. MEPS! Why do I never see such imperfections BEFORE I post the pictures?

Yellow Wings

2011-03-05T15:27:00.000-08:00

These are the Accurate Miniatures re-issues of the ancient 1/72nd scale Monogram F4B-4 and P-6E fighters. I remember these fondly from the dime store days, when stores like TG&Y still existed and where cheap models could occasionally be found. These were among my favorites at the time, surpassed perhaps only by the Monogram Messerschmitt Bf-110E.

They're still fun models. Detail is mostly raised and there is no cockpit detail at all, not even the instrument panels on the decal sheet like in the old days. But they're easy and fun to build. A novel feature is that the cabane struts are molded into the fuselage halves. I think I like that feature, though I'm not a biplane expert and will defer to those with more experience.

I'm not wild about the decals. I think the red meatballs in the pre-war US insignia is far too muted, so I replaced them with decals from my spares box. The wing chevron and fuselage for the F4B are printed in black, but I *think* they're supposed to be red. Reputable sources seem to disagree, so I went with the more colorful option and painted them myself. The decal sheet is also missing the thin red stripes for the P-6E's upper wing, which I cut out of an ancient decal sheet from the DS9 Runabout.

Otherwise, good clean fun and a nice addition to my growing collection of biplanes.

Waited A While

2011-02-22T19:05:00.001-08:00

I've waited for this one to be reissued for a long, long time. My most-eagerly-awaited reissue was the Moon Bus from 2001, but this was number two. Or maybe it was number three - someone (maybe Renwal) made a kit of a "nuclear-powered bomber" back in the very early 1970s, a vast delta-winged thing somewhat like an XB-70, complete with parasite fighters. I'd love to have that thing again (and it pains me to think I probably set the old one on fire).

I had to go see my oncologist today and I stopped at the hobby shop on the way, as I often do. I didn't really see anything that caught my eye, and was about to leave with nothing to show for the visit but a handful of Testors acrylic paints, when I spotted this on the "new and groovy" shelf. Score!

I haven't even opened the plastic yet, but I'm positively giddy with excitement. Well, mostly I'm giddy with excitement because I got a good report from my oncologist; the groovy model is just a bonus.

Rommel's Rod

2011-02-15T13:36:00.001-08:00

I do enjoy those goofy "concept" hot rod models from my youth - the Beer Wagon, the Tijuana Taxi, the Lil Stogie and so forth. This is Rommel's Rod, complete with undead skeletonized versions of the Desert Fox himself, along with his driver. Good clean fun, at least as long as you don't have an aversion to the undead.

About the only thing I did to the kit was saw notches in the edges of the one-piece track assemblies so they wouldn't look quite so toylike. I also left out the engine. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with a 1/25th scale supercharged straight-eight engine, but something will occur to me, I'm sure.

Then it was just a matter of Testors Afrika Mustard overall and RLM-02 in the interior.

Some Relief

2011-02-07T12:04:00.001-08:00

I had so many things going all at the same time that in the end I wasn't getting anything done, so I buckled down and finished three WWI biplanes, partly because I like biplanes and partly because like a man undoing his belt buckle after a big meal, I needed to find some extra room. So now I only have about fifteen projects going, not eighteen. Well, we take progress when and as we find it.

Revell's 1/72nd SE 5A. I quite enjoyed this model. It probably doesn't pass serious muster as a kit because it has no interior, and it probably doesn't pass serious muster as a model because I just can't bring myself to rig a 1/72nd scale biplane, but I had fun, and I guess that's the main thing. Amusingly, the pilot figure in this kit is identical to the pilot figure in the Fokker D.VII kit, so I put the German pilot in the British fighter, and the British pilot in the German fighter, just to be perverse. If you disregard the RV in the background, you might almost thing the SE 5 was preparing to fly a mission from some desert aerodrome, perhaps near Damascus.

Normally I use Tamiya "Khaki Drab" to simulate the paint (dope?) on British WWI aeroplanes, but this time I used Testors "Field Drab", which is a little lighter and browner, and a good deal easier to brush paint to boot.

Now, on to Rommel's Rod, whose nose can just be seen in the upper left corner of the top picture.

I always imagine that other modelers have clean, organized, efficient workbenches - places for everything, paints stored in nice racks with the labels out, brushes organized by size and type and handle color. Mine's always a mess. My paint storage solution isn't a very good one, and I have to write the name of the paint on the lid with a silver Sharpie so I can find what I'm looking for. There are odd bits of hacked-up plastic everywhere, brushes dropped wherever they happened to end up, toothpicks, swabs, half-built models, scraps of decal sheets for models I've long since finished... It's such a mess. And just look at the surface of my bench; it looks like I've been butchering cattle, and I suspect I'm the only modeler on the planet lazy enough to test my airbrush by spraying the front edge of my workbench...

Sigh. It isn't easy being me.

The Flying Circus

2011-02-07T11:59:00.001-08:00

Revell's 1/72nd scale Albatros D.III. A nice inexpensive kit, but without any cockpit interior at all and armed with guns that look suspiciously like pieces of uncooked spaghetti. I don't think the decals are even dry in these pictures.

Revell's 1/72nd Fokker D.VII. Another nice inexpensive kit, but it has MUCH better machine guns than the Albatros. The blue is Testors Acrylic "French Blue".

Group Photo

2011-02-03T12:40:00.001-08:00

They aren't all completely finished, and I still have to build a base or something, but here are the AMT 1/2500th Enterprises in all their glory.

Ooops

2011-02-03T11:53:00.001-08:00

This one amuses me. I didn't know that Challengers could float, or that they carried torpedoes, but there it is, proof on the model box, that Challengers are really Motor Torpedo Boats.

So Captain Rachel Garrett shows up at Starfleet HQ, and they tell her she's going to command the USS Enterpise.

"What an honor!" she says. "That ship is basically the flagship of Starfleet!"

"No, we meant the EnterPISE."

"Oh..."

I do feel bad about this one. The guy put in so much excellent work on the decals and he must have slapped his forehead many times when he saw he'd misspelled "Enterprise" on one of the main decals in the AMT 1/2500 Enterprise-C kit. I didn't even notice it myself until I was sitting and staring glumly at the model waiting for paint to dry. (And it isn't as though I never misspell words either, do I? DO I??)

As you can see, the Enterprise-C decals are basically workable, but are wrinkly around the phaser banks. I think when I build this kit again (and I will) I may just paint the blue portions as there's no real Aztec pattern in them and it wouldn't be THAT hard to mask and spray.

Too Cold To Decal

2011-02-03T11:47:00.000-08:00

An in-progress shot of the AMT 1/2500th Enterprise-D. I went outside this morning thinking I'd apply some decals, but it's about 35 degrees and I don't really feel like dipping my fingers (or decals) in ice water.

But here you can see the coverage and excellence of the decals that came with the AMT kit. Any errors in alignment are mine. The only thing that isn't a decal so far is the NATO black phaser bank, and as you can see, it needs some touch-up too. Oh, and the red and the yellow on the warp nacelles.

The kit looks very toy-like and simple as built, but the decals completely transform it. While I don't think the decals are as good as the ones in the AMT 3-Enterprises set, they're still pretty good, and one thing is for certain - when you get done applying all these decals, you'll be a whiz at decaling.

Note the Enterprise-C nacelles off to the side - though the decals are harsh and unforgiving, they can be made to work if you're patient.

Star Trek In Progress

2011-01-21T13:28:00.000-08:00

Here are some images of the AMT Round-2 1/2500th scale Enterprises. There are four kits in the series and I'm working on them all, but this is just the first kit, which includes the TOS Enterprise, the Enterprise-A, and the Enterprise-B.

The kits themselves are basically small snap-together models with heavy and simplified panel lines, and relatively few parts. Like all snap-fit models, they look better if you use cement and clamps, and then fill and sand the occasionally largish seams. But on the whole, they didn't fit too badly at all. I sanded off the panel lines on the TOS Enterprise's secondary hull; I didn't think they did anything for the model.

The real heart of the kit are the decals. The TOS Enterprise gets its share of decals, but they're nothing compared to the A and B models, which end up almost completely covered with decals - Aztec patterns, phaser banks, registration markings, warp nacelles, everything. The Enterprise-B even comes with a decal for the roof of the shuttlecraft bay, for crying out loud. The decals are so comprehensive that they're actually credited by name in the kit instructions; they are the work of a Mr. E. James Small of www.smallartworks.ca, and Mr. Small does fabulous work.

In fact, in the ensuing photographs, the only thing I painted by hand was the main deflector dish on the TOS Enterprise. Everything else is decal. (Well, other than the grey and white base colors, but that went without saying.)

The decals are just superb. They fit where they're supposed to go. They're thin and flexible, and respond to setting solution, but they're also tough and resistant to breakage. I managed to break a few, but I really had to manhandle them to get them to break. I managed to get some of the decals just horribly wadded up, but they're tough enough that I was able to tease them back into proper form with a little water and patience, and without damage either.

Here and there I encountered a few alignment problems. The tops of the warp nacelles show a sliver of the white base coat where two decals didn't quite meet, but that was my fault. I found really only three issues with the decals. One was the white backing for the yellow circle on the underside of the TOS Enterprise; it was offset by a few millimeters. Another was that the NCC-1701B registration markings on the Enterprise-B are mirror-imaged on one side. But you have to be right on top of them to see that they're mirror-imaged. And the third was that the color was printed in the form of tiny dots rather than solid colors, but again, you have to be right on top of the model to notice it.

But don't let me convince you otherwise - the decals were simply excellent. They're probably too extensive and complicated for inexperienced modelers, but if you've laid down a few decals in your day, you shouldn't have any problem with them.

TOS Enterprise with some old-school Testors paint to show scale. Yes, I intend to finish painting the remaining details, but I wanted to show the models as they come together out of the box. And speaking of the boxes - in some ways I like the new prism-shaped boxes, and in other ways, I don't. They're distinctive, colorful and attractive, but they don't stack worth a damn.

Another view. Everything's a decal except the base color (Testors camouflage grey) and the main deflector dish.

Enterprise-B. Everything is a decal, except for the semi-gloss white base coat. You can see a slight alignment problem on the top of the left warp nacelle, where a sliver of the base color shows, and here and there are a few bubbles that I need to pop and treat with decal solvent, but with minimal effort you end up with a very nice model.

POSTSCRIPT

I'm also working on the C, D and E models of the Enterprise, and the same remarks apply generally to them, with one notable and unfortunate exception: the decals for the Enterprise-C are as miserable as the others are good. It isn't a problem with design; it's how they were printed. They're stiff, thick, inflexible, and strangely transparent. They're also largely immune to decal solvent. And worst of all, they're brittle and readily break up into dozens of jagged fragments. I stopped after ruining two decals, and am now making up my mind whether I want to try to rehabilitate the decals or just mask and paint most of the detail myself.

And that's unfortunate, because I really like the chunky lines of the Enterprise-C and was looking forward to finishing it.

Thus far the Enterprise-E decals are proving to be workable, and I haven't started decaling the Enterprise-D yet.

Star Trek In Progress 2

2011-01-21T13:19:00.001-08:00

Here are some more in-progress shots of the AMT Round-2 1/2500th scale Star Trek Enterprise models.

TOS Enterprise, movie Enterprise, and Enterprise-B underside.

Side view of the fleet. Notable is the substantial size of the Enterprise-B. Once again, everything but the background color comes from the kit-supplied decal sheet.

TOS and "A" version of the Enterprise. Everything you see here is decal, other than the base coat of paint (white for the A, Testors camouflage grey for the TOS)

Side view. Visible here is the only thing I've painted so far, the copper on the TOS Enterprise's deflector dish.

X-planes, Part One

2011-01-12T11:00:00.001-08:00

I did manage to get some modeling in during the Christmas holiday. Not a lot, and nothing very serious. I certainly planned to do a lot more - I have a bunch of half-built WWI biplanes that need attention - but the point of a hobby is to have fun, right? If I assign deadlines and make schedules, then I've turned a hobby into a simulation of work, and who wants THAT? And besides, sometimes there are simply unexplained lulls.

But I did manage to finish three old X-15 kits, and the Anigrand X-20 I bought at the IPMS convention. I chose them in part because most of the work I could do on the side while watching Christmas movies with my wife, and in part because I was starting to worry that the heat in the garage was going to seriously damage the X-15 kits and their decals, and wanted to get them done and out of harm's way.

The hypothetical X-15A5, converted from a Monogram 1/72nd scale X-15A2. The X-15A5 was never built, but drawings and photographs of wind tunnel models exist, with enough variation in them to permit the modeler a certain latitude for interpretation. The main modifications: 1) Sawing the fuselage in half and inserting a scale six-foot plug. 2) Cutting off the wings and installing new sharply-swept delta wings cut from 0.060 sheet plastic, sharped at the leading edges with sandpaper and with elevons scribed into the trailing edges. 3) Adding an expansion nozzle to the engine exhaust, in this case the nose sawed off a 1/32nd scale F-16 Falcon drop tank. 4) Grafting the two side-by-side propellant tanks end-to-end to make a single long external tank. 5) Cutting apart the serial number decal and reassembling it out of order. 6) Adding wingtip plates cut from 0.040 plastic with a little stretched sprue as a stiffener. 7) Sanding off all the raised panel lines and the raised fairing for the camera port on the underside. 8) Replacing the malformed ball nose with a lump of sprue.

A better view of the sharp sweep angle of the delta wings.

Monogram's 1/72nd scale X-15A2, as configured for Pete Knight's record-breaking flight where he reached Mach 6.71 (and where the X-15 itself was seriously damaged by shock wave impingement and aerodynamic heating). The white color is a protective finish that was applied over the pinkish MA-25 ablative insulation coating. Though this was the fastest X-15 configuration, I find it the least photogenic. In photographs of the real X-15A2, the white coating shows very prominent discolored panel lines, but I chose not to recreate them. The model is lucky that I actually scribed in the missing rudder hinge line!

Even more bland! On this side, there isn't even a window, just the "eyelid" covering the port-side window. The ablator outgassed at high speed, as it was supposed to, but the residue fogged the windows. So the engineers fitted the aircraft with a mechanical eyelid that would protect one window during high-speed flight, and then open up to expose the unfogged window so the pilot could actually see the dry lake during his approach. There is actually a lot of interesting "window lore" in the X-15 program. Such as the fact that the oval window was adopted because the early rectangular window developed stress cracks at the corners and tended to shatter in flight. Such as the fact that the pilots couldn't see any part of the aircraft itself through the windows in any direction.

The silver panels on the nose are silver-painted bits of clear decal film, intended to represent the protective blast panels surrounding the paired nose thrusters (in the X-15 program, this was the "Ballistic Control System", equivalent to Apollo's "Reaction Control System" and the modern "Attitude Control System"). I am currently debating whether I want to indicate the thruster ports by drilling them out, by punching tiny disks out of black decal film, or dotting them with a black marker.

If the Monogram kit has one major weakness, it is this: the aft landing skids are molded in the folded position. If you want to display the X-15 in a "just-landed" state, you'll have to cut apart the folded skids or make new ones, or plop it on the ground-handling dolly with a tow vehicle. But I like the in-flight appearance and used the stands (how gauche!).

X-Planes, Part Two

2011-01-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

Monogram's 1/72nd scale X-15A2 posed next to Anigrand's X-20 "Dyna-Soar". I confess I always thought the X-20 was bigger than it apparently is. I also confess that I haven't installed the glass in the X-20's windows either - the Anigrand interpretation of the windows don't seem to match photographs or drawings, and I am torn on whether I should just accept them as they are, or drill and saw new window openings, or scratchbuild the heat shield sometimes seen in photos of the X-20.

Side view. Once again, the X-20 windows... The drawings I've seen show five windows; the Anigrand kit has three. Hmm. But having whined about the windows, I must say that the Anigrand kit is otherwise pretty nice. Like all resin kits, it had some pinholes, especially on the nose, and the wing-fuselage joint required some work, but the main thing is that it was fun. I also note, upon viewing the photos, that I put the "US Air Force" and star-and-bar insignia on in the wrong order. DOH! Well, maybe when I fix the windows, I'll fix THAT too.

Monogram's X-15A2. The kit is old enough to be considered venerable, but it's still a nice kit with a decent interior and a good ground-handling dolly (and even a standing figure in a Gemini-style astronaut suit. I sanded off the raised panel lines. I also sawed off the misshapen "ball nose" sensor, which I didn't think I could salvage with sanding, and replaced it with a hemispherical lump of shaped sprue.

There's something about the black X-15 with white markings that really appeals to me; it looks clean and crisp with just a little dash of color.

Olfaction

2010-12-17T00:31:00.001-08:00

The picture's just there because I hate posting without a picture these days - what, just a big hunk of text??? That's what my other blog is for! (Verlinden 200mm bust, if you're curious.)

I just got home from a long day at work. I'm tired, and I had a splitting headache. But I just wanted to say this - I really love the smell of Bondo. In fact, I enjoy most of the smells associated with modeling. Not so much MEK or lacquer thinner, but the old Testors tube glue is pretty nice, and even better is the citrus scent of the non-toxic stuff (am I the only person who ever, however briefly, considering actually tasting the citrus-scented non-toxic glue?). And I have a few ancient Pactra enamels that I keep around, just so I can open them now and then and have a nice nostalgic sniff.

(Mind you, I'm not a tremendous fan of Bondo, I just like the way it smells. I find that I have trouble getting it to stick to plastic, and I only use it in cases where giant quantities of putty are required and a mass of Squadron white putty, my normal poison, would take about 38 years to dry. I bring this up because lately I'm converting an X-15A2 to an X-15A5, which involves adding a plug to the fuselage, which involves Bondo.)

And for those Nervous Nellies out there who are likely to accuse me of actually encouraging the deliberate concentration and inhalation of solvents, get over yourselves. Sometimes model glue is just model glue.

Getting Back To The Bench

2010-12-14T08:47:00.000-08:00

I've been so busy lately I really haven't had a chance to build anything. About the only model-related thing I've done in the last week is spray some black paint on an Anigrand 1/72nd X-20 Dyna-Soar, but because I'd failed to clean the resin well enough, the paint promptly developed a bunch of nasty fish-eyes. Bad ones too - it looks like I rubbed the model with a slab of chicken fried steak. And who wants to see that mess? Certainly not I.

And meantime I've been busy getting ready for Christmas, and my wife's cousin was here visiting for a while... But in the words of the old guy in the Monty Python movie, "I'm not dead yet." So I decided to post an old photograph of the Monogram 1/48th "First Lunar Landing" while I go about the business of trying to remember what I was working on and where I put my super glue.

But first, I have to do something proactive about that X-20. I'm no psychic, but I foresee that I'll be getting the oven cleaner out of the cabinet in the near future.

The Knights Who Say Ni

2010-12-02T10:48:00.001-08:00

I'm sort of addicted to those soft polyethylene 1/72nd scale figures that Airfix, Revell, Italeri, Hat and other offer. I buy a lot of them and I have big plans for them, but I rarely seem to do anything with them (I have enough Romans to put an entire cohort in the field at 1:1 scale, it seems, but unanswered is the question of why I'd ever want to).

This was an idea I had while watching The Return of the King, namely, "Wouldn't it be cool to make a small diorama with a whole bunch of knights or heavy cavalry charging at the viewer?" So this is the result - a boxful of Italeri Teutonic Knights charging across a snowy field, presumably toward thin ice on a Russian river.

I left the horses on their bases and sort of submerged the bases in a layer of drywall compound, then later sifted baking soda over the whole works and tacked it down with Dullcote.

I'm glad I got that out of my system.

But - oh no - I have the Italeri "Medieval Tournament" set, and now THAT is calling to me!

Salvador Dali's Tank

2010-11-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

Salvador Dali was famous for, among other things, painting melted clocks, as in The Persistence of Memory. But it turns out I may have discovered evidence that he dabbled in 1/76th scale armor models too. To wit:

Oh, I can't blame this on Salvador; I did it all myself. This is the ancient Matchbox 1/76th scale Char B1, a French heavy tank from the early days of World War Two. The kit is from the era when Matchbox used to mold their kits in various colors - I think this one was dark green and dark brown. But it isn't the kit or the model that interest me, it's the way the model warped and deformed. Somehow, by some process I never figured out, it ended up spending a few weeks in the back of my pickup truck when we were moving from one house to another. Because of slow contractors, a lack of framers and general bad luck, the new house wasn't ready so we had to live in a hotel room for a month or two, and the poor Char B1 sat in the back of the truck the whole time. Whenever anyone here says "Hot enough for ya?" I always think about my poor Char B. Merde! That's hot!

But curiously, here's it's stablemate, the FT-17. Same kit, same conditions, but a different fate entirely. Other than the tracks, this is actually a pretty nice kit, and obviously it's more heat-resistant than its bigger brother. RPM in Poland makes a much better 1/72nd scale FT-17, but the parts count is daunting; 200 parts, give or take, in a model that isn't even half the size of a White Castle hamburger.

The FT-17 looks pretty anachronistic these days, but it's really the first tank in the modern sense of the word, with a fully-rotating turret on a tracked hull. The bigger British "rhomboid" tanks were probably better suited for the conditions that prevailed in the cratered moonscapes of World War One, but the TOG 1 showed the limits of that approach.

Warriors Viking

2010-11-20T22:06:00.000-08:00

Warriors 90mm Viking. Every now and then I get stuck or bored with a model I'm working on and when that happens, I often start a figure kit, because they're such a radically different experience from building a model they're refreshing. But that means I tend to end up with a lot of half-finished figures here and there, and this weekend I decided to finish three of them.

This is a nice figure. I generally prefer white metal to resin, and like most resin figures, I found some pinholes, and the pour stubs were sizable. But the figure is pretty nice; the beard detail and the chain mail texture are particularly good. It amuses me that there's a large and obvious thumb print in the resin; it's on the right side of the base in the second picture. I could submit it to Interpol and find out exactly who sculpted the base. But also, like most resin figures, it's very light and easy to handle, and less expensive than an equivalent white metal figure.

I left off the helmet visor. I wanted the base to resemble moss and mossy rocks; it's mostly painted Testors RLM-70 and RLM-02, of all things, with a few washes over the top (but to balance it out, his trousers were painted Testors RAF Dark Green, and his shoes and leggings were RAF Dark Earth before the washes and drybrushing set in). All the metalwork was painted black and then extensively drybrushed with silver and steel.

Pegaso 80mm Dancer

2010-11-20T22:02:00.000-08:00

Pegaso 80mm dancer, complete with cat. Another nice figure, but painting all that gold will eventually drive one mad. I suspect she's supposed to be Moroccan, but I decided to use a lighter skin tone and reddish hair, just for the heck of it, and didn't really do any shading or anything on her skin.

Andreas Miniatures "No Mercy"

2010-11-20T21:57:00.000-08:00

This is an Andreas Miniatures 54mm Western figure called "No Mercy", and it isn't supposed to resemble Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven in any way at all, I'm sure. It's a nice figure. I question the folds on the upper right arm, and the spurs were so tiny I lost them almost immediately. Figures with wide-brimmed hats are hard to photograph, but maybe that adds to their cachet.

2010-11-16T09:27:00.000-08:00

Detroit Diesel green? Nope - RAF Sky

A GMC tractor of some sort. I don't remember who made the kit, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't AMT. It's pretty much stock, except for the pin-up decals, which came from the second Italeri "Truck Accessory" set. I don't build many trucks, and even when I do, I tend to build more specialized things like logging trucks or dump trucks. This is my only real long-haul tractor, and it's likely to remain my only long-haul tractor for some time to come.

Barely visible on the left-side door is a small decal that was originally intended as nose art for a Beaufighter on an Italeri decal sheet.

Opel GT

2010-11-16T09:22:00.001-08:00

Another one of my older models, an AMT Opel GT. The kit is pretty basic, but it still builds up into a nice model. It comes with all sorts of customizing parts, including some manner of Buick engine. I used a custom exhaust and wheels, but settled on the original Opel four-banger engine.

The paint is Tamiya metallic blue. I just love that color; I'd spray paint the bedroom that color if my wife wouldn't vapor-lock at the idea. You can't see it from here, but there's a fairly large and very dead spider inside the car, poised on the shifter as though it expired right in the act of downshifting for a corner. De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

AMT Slave-1

2010-11-13T18:11:00.000-08:00

AMT's Slave-1. The colors are Testors acrylic hull red, Testors acrylic RLM-02, and Tamiya NATO black, with an awful lot of black and grey washes over the top - my garage smelled like a paint thinner factory for a week. Instead of doing all the chipping with silver paint, I used a silver pencil. I'm not sure it's very realistic, but it's at least clean and easy. It looks better from a distance; up close I think the marks are too obviously pencil scribbles.

New Camera

2010-11-08T11:49:00.001-08:00

I finally broke down and ordered a new camera. It's a dinky little thing, hardly top of any line at all, but it already seems better than my old one. At least it's USB and I no longer have to mess around with floppy disks.

This is the first picture I took, a Romulan "bivalve" cruiser shown hovering over the cat's food dish, which will make the cat surly. Surlier.

Academy Super Sherman

2010-11-01T13:13:00.001-07:00

Academy 1/35th scale Israeli Sherman M51, or "Super Sherman", shown in the hostile, arid expanses of the Sinai. Or is it my side yard? Either way, I have a fondness for strange Sherman variations, and this one in particular - the enormity of the French-made 105mm gun and its egadly huge muzzle brake appeal to me.

Keen-eyed observers may note a subtle homage to the movie Night of the Lepus, in that some of what appear to be pebbles are actually enormously large rabbit droppings. This is the general area where we throw watermelon rinds and such to the native rabbits, and they repay our kindness by pooping. I could have picked a better spot to take the picture, but it's some sort of fundamental law that I only notice things like that after I'm back indoors and viewing the photograph on my computer.

Whatever the case, it's a nice kit, and mirabile dictu, is has vinyl tracks! I'm SO excited.

Airfix Hanover CL.III

2010-10-30T21:39:00.000-07:00

And now, for something entirely new. This is my latest completion, an Airfix 1/72nd scale Hanover CL.III observation aeroplane from the Great War. The Airfix kit isn't half-bad by any means. The machine guns are presentable and recognizable, and the crew figures (which are still being painted as I write this) are quite good.

My scheme is hypothetical, however. I chose not to paint on the largish hexagons the kit called for, and instead dug back into my diminishing stock of lozenge decal material. Years ago I bought out the stock of lozenge decal material at the only hobby shop that carried it, and have been limping along on that stock ever since.

Some thoughts on the lozenge: Yes, it's true that I used the paler underside lozenge pattern on the top surfaces. That's because the underside pattern is all I had left in 1/72nd, and I wanted to save my 1/48th scale lozenge decals for other projects. It's also true that I didn't apply all the rib tapes, but my defense is that the decal sheets don't supply nearly enough rib tapes to begin with - just enough to cover the seams between the decals, basically. And yes, it is true that the lozenge grain runs chordwise on the upper wing and spanwise on the lower wing - but since references seem to suggest that lozenge on the genuine article could be applied both ways, and perhaps even diagonally, I decided to go for two different directions.

Applying stiff, aging lozenge decals to a 1/72nd scale airplane is no picnic. Have lots of decal solvent handy, and be sure to brush up on suitable curses before making the attempt.

Tamiya BMW R80 Paris-Dakar

2010-10-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

Tamiya's kit of a BMW R80 Paris-Dakar racer in 1/12th scale. It's another very nice kit, and the rider has a plausible stance for a desert racer, weight slightly back and up off the seat. This is one of the oldest models in my collection, and time has not been kind to it - for reasons entirely unknown, almost all the decals peeled and fell off. The only "decal" that is fully intact is the tiny route sheet that I drew and glued into the holder on the top of the gas tank.

It's mostly gloss white, Testors Guards Red, many shades of Metalizer on the engine, and some sand-colored paint highly thinned and painted into the knobby tires.

I think the decals originally identified the rider as Gaston Rahier, but you couldn't tell from the execution of the model, since all the decals fell off.

"Off Road Adventure Set"

2010-10-30T21:19:00.000-07:00

Heaven knows what this really is. It was sold as an "Off Road Adventure Set" and it amounts to a pickup truck, two motorcycles and a motorcycle trailer. The truck is an odd hybrid of what looks like a Datsun cab coupled with an American shortbed stepside pickup. There's a V8 under the hood and it came with gaudy exhausts that resembled Funny Car exhaust, but they found their discrete way into the trash can.

The instructions call for painting the generic motorcycles "yellow". But the discerning eye quickly notes that they aren't Japanese motorcycles at all; they're highly passable replicas of old-school Husqvarna motocrossers, probably CR-250s or CR-360s.

The kit is worthwhile just for the motorcycles, I think.

(You may be curious. I said it came with two motorcycles, but there's only one in the pictures. The other was more than likely carried away by a bird or pack rat.)

Round 2 Pinto dirt tracker

2010-10-30T21:14:00.000-07:00

This is a Round 2 reissue of something much older. I'm not normally a tremendous fan of this style of racing, but the cars are fun to model. I built this mainly because I drove a Pinto in the Dark Ages (the late 1970s) and the thought of someone actually racing one strikes me as being pretty funny. Of course, mine didn't have a Ford 426 engine; mine had an oil leak that made noise.

I rarely weather car models, but this one seemed to call for a little dirt splattered on the leading edges (acrylic paint flicked on with a toothbrush) and dirt caked on the tires (acrylic flat varnish painted on the tread area, then rolled in fine dirt sieved out of the yard).

Fujimi or Hasegawa Lancia Stratos

2010-10-30T21:09:00.000-07:00

This is Fujimi's Lancia Stratos, surely one of my favorite rally cars of all time. It dates from a time before the WRC, back when there were still Group B cars.

You know, as I write this, I can't remember if it was Fujimi or Hasegawa. The more I think about it, the more I think it was Hasegawa. But it definitely wasn't Tamiya. This was a lovely kit, though difficult to decal. I think I went through a whole bottle of decal solvent on this one.

Tamiya WRC Corolla

2010-10-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

Tamiya's Toyota Corolla World Rally Championship car. I confess I like the WRC, and I kind of like Carlos Sainz, so it was natural I would build his car. These WRC kits are kind of fun because they're mostly exercises in a whole lot of decaling.

I occasionally fiddle with a WRC driving simulator on my ancient X-Box, but the closest I can get to the "Scandinavian Flick" is when I flip a Swedish meatball off the plate for my dog to eat.

Link Within

2010-10-30T03:12:00.000-07:00

I'd noticed the "Link Within" feature on Warren Zoell's excellent site (http://thegreatcanadianmodelbuilderswebpage.blogspot.com/) and liked it so much I decided to see what it could do for my blog. I knew it was working when I realized I'd spent two hours following various "link within" links to hitherto unseen things on his blog.

AMT 1/24th Logging Truck

2010-10-29T20:12:00.001-07:00

This is AMT's 1/24th scale Autocar dump truck and Peerless logging trailer. Obviously I left off all the dump truck bits and added in the front bunk and headache rack from the Peerless trailer kit. Since I'd stolen the tires from the Autocar dump truck for some other project, I had to steal tires from an AMT Paystar dump truck kit for this kit. They have a funny military-style ribbed tread which one doesn't normally see in Arizona, but then again, one doesn't normally see logging trucks in Arizona anyway since the sawmills in Flagstaff went out of business in the 1970s.

I had lost the instructions for the truck, so I had to build it by what amounted to trial and a little bit of error (the kit contains two completely different rear suspensions. I don't know which is appropriate for a logging truck, so I just picked the beefiest-looking one).

Tomorrow I have to hike around the property and find some suitable cargo for it. The three "logs" that came in the Peerless kit are so uniform they may as well be rolling pins, and I figure I can do better by looking for good sticks. Once I have the sticks, I can determine the final reach of the trailer and cut and fit the air hoses, and that'll be that.

The paint is mostly out of spray cans - Krylon "Marigold", Krylon "Slate Blue", and Krylon Fusion black. Most of the chromed parts were stripped and repainted with Testors Chrome Silver; the only part I tried to save was the radiator cover on the nose of the tractor.

Revell 1/72nd Faun and Leopard 2A5

2010-10-29T20:10:00.001-07:00

Revell-Germany's 1/72nd scale Faun and Leopard 2A5 MBT. I think I posted this once before, but not this particular picture.

Squadron Day

2010-10-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

I was out in the front yard a while ago, working in the landscaping. This is really a euphemism for "standing around and leaning on a rake and wishing my lawn tractor didn't have a dead battery". I suppose I could have jump-started it, but sometimes it's easier to stand around, lean on a rake, and admire a pleasant autumn day without all that engine noise.

Anyway, the mail man showed up, bearing my latest order from the Squadron Shop. If there's anything that makes me as a modeler feel better about the world than seeing the mail man getting out of his little Jeep with a box that I know contains kits, I don't know what it would be.

All of a sudden the landscaping didn't seem that important any more.

The real reason for the Squadron order was to score one of the Lindberg reissues of the "Satellite Explorer and Space Base", a pair of kits that I have historically felt some hunger for. But I hate to order just one thing - Squadron conveniently dangles the prospect of free shipping for orders over $100 in front of me, and like a hungry bass in an almost barren lake, I go for the bait every time, and with some verve.

So what's in my box this time? The usual stuff - 1/72 airplanes and 1/72 armor, for the most part, plus the aforementioned Satellite Explorer thing. I note that 1/72nd scale takes a lot of abuse these days. Especially on Facebook, where certain people seem to go out of their ways to make fun of 1/72nd scale and the people who dabble in it. But I like it. Or maybe, it's just what I'm used to. Either way, I'm not averse to bigger scales - who hasn't wanted a 1/32nd scale Gotha or a 1/32nd scale Ki-84 Hayate at least once? But on the basis of practicality, I tend to settle for smaller items.

I can actually pinpoint the exact moment when I stopped building really big models on a regular basis. It was when I got married, and my then-new wife looked up, saw the 1/48th scale B-29 hanging from the ceiling over what would become her desk, and asked "Are you trying to tell me something?" It's a good thing she didn't realize that it was wearing Enola Gay markings; I'd have had some 'splaining to do if she had.

My box also contained two 1/144th scale airplanes - the Attack MiG-21MF, and the old Academy Su-22 Fitter. Tiny little things! The MiG-21 in particular seems like something I'd pick popcorn residue out of my teeth with, not build for the purposes of display. But I'm curious to see what 1/144th scale is like. One thing is certain: panel lines are not going to occupy much of my time or attention.

And now, the hangover sets in. The kits have been looked at. The decals have been gawked at. The packing material and box have been discarded. The kits have been put away, or more properly thrown onto the top of the pile - I'm 6'4" and even I can't reach the topmost row of kits in my closet any more - and now it's time to get ready to go to work.

Sigh.

Tank Transporters

2010-10-21T00:26:00.000-07:00

I went through a phase not so long ago where it seemed to me the ideal way to recover from brutal chemotherapy was to build lots and lots of small-scale tank transporters.

Academy 1/72nd scale "Dragon Wagon" carrying a Revell M4A1(76) medium tank. The transporter kit is much nicer than the tank kit.

Revell 1/76th scale M19 tank transporter carrying a Revell M7 Priest self-propelled howitzer. Both are re-releases of older Matchbox kits.

Airfix 1/76th scale Scammell tank transporter with a Revell (formerly Matchbox) A34 Comet aboard. I find the Airfix kit difficult to assemble, perhaps the single hardest Airfix kit I've personally encountered. There's a whole lot of brass rod and epoxy in the tractor's lower works, replacing spindly plastic Airfix axles that buckle under the load of a single Cheezit.

The hindquarters of the Trumpeter 1/72nd scale [insert ominous-sounding German nomenclature here]. Nice kit. The Revell Sturmgeschutz-IV is pretty basic and I for one think the muzzle brake is deformed, but it looks like a Stug, and I guess that's the main thing.

The full Trumpeter [harsh-sounding German words here] tank transporter. The engine was nice, so I left the side covers off.

More From The Archives

2010-10-20T23:55:00.001-07:00

MPM 1/72nd scale XF-85 Goblin. I'd love to see the "Egg" version of this from Hasegawa.

1967 Corvette

2010-10-20T23:51:00.000-07:00

Monogram 1/25th scale 1967 Corvette. Nice kit. Not so nice execution. The red-line decals for the tires disintegrated. I see now that I forgot to foil the "Corvette" badge on the tail. And there's a nasty blemish in the paint by the "Corvette" badge, courtesy of sneezing violently while holding a paint brush full of thinner. I tried to rub it out, but no sale.

The missing door handles are missing on purpose.

Oh, by the way, the paint is Testors two-part lacquer, GM Deep Red out of a spray can but without the clear top coat, which I find too glossy, if that makes any sense.

Mistel 5

2010-10-20T23:42:00.000-07:00

This is the DML 1/72nd scale Mistel 5, which amounts to a Heinkel He 162 Volksjaeger jet fighter mounted and Arado something-or-the-other jet-propelled bomb. I wonder what the guys on the ground thought of that enormous takeoff trolley ripping across the countryside, completely out of control, once the Mistel 5 took off.

The Kettenkrad is Hasegawa; the standing pilot figure is by ICM, I believe. While I'm on the subject of figures, the figures in Hasagawa 1/72nd scale kits are awful. Compare the casual stance of the (presumably somewhat anxious) pilot to the stiff automatons in the Kettenkrad. It's sad.

The "concrete" is the upside-down lid of the box top, contact-cemented to a piece of plywood and painted grey, with expansion joints embossed into the cardboard with a ball point pen.

Rebel Base

2010-10-20T23:04:00.000-07:00

Various views of a display I made out of some of the models in the MPC "Rebel Base" kit. The kit has a vacuum-formed base you're supposed to display the models on, but I chose to show them in flight.

The X-Wing had its wings ("S-foils", I guess) folded, so I cut them off and made new wings out of sheet plastic, and added new guns out of brass rod with blobs of white glue on the ends.

The Y-Wing was way too short and didn't have the open lattice in the exhaust, and the nose was way too rounded and blunt. I lengthened and reshaped the nose with epoxy putty, then used brass rod and a couple of aluminum rings cut out of some tubing to extend the engines. I made new nose guns and rear gunner guns out of stretched sprue.

The Millennium Falcon required the most work. As supplied, the side walls were flush with the edges of the hull, and bulged outward. I sawed and filed them off, and replaced them with a long floppy piece of sheet plastic that I bent to match the model. Then I glued random bits of junk from the parts box to replace some of the missing detail. The "dish" on top is the end of an enormous nutritional supplement capsule (red yeast powder, I think) and the guns are 40mm twin Bofors guns from some unsung 1/700th scale ship kit. Yes, I know they're really supposed to be quads...

They were painted a pretty dark grey, then extensively drybrushed with lighter shades before a few dulled details were painted in. The Y-wing carries markings from a Soviet "Guards" fighter unit on its nose, but the model is tiny and the decal is microscopic.

The base is half of a plastic sphere. It originally held a toy from the movie Akira, but my friend only wanted the toy, so I took the sphere. I filled it with Durham's putty and tried to paint it so it would look like a planet. I think its meteorology is a little suspect.

Modeling Terms

2010-10-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

A recent issue of Finescale Modeler included a list of modeling terms. Nice, but they didn't have certain terms that I thought they should. So I offer below my own list of modeling terms. I was going to put the list in alphabetical order, but somehow it seemed more appropriate to leave it as disordered as my own thought processes.

Airbrush: The patron saint of frustration.

Anorak: A British term used pejoratively to refer to someone who knows more about any given subject than you do. There are equivalent American terms, but they're often much nastier.

Luft '46: A genre of modeling dealing with German "paper project" airplanes in the closing stages of World War Two. It's like science fiction, only with Experten.

Balsa wood: Slightly solidified air with grain.

Cement: That which you pour around Vinnie the Knife's ankles before tossing him in the river. Also, a substance often used to emboss personalized thumbprints into high-gloss finishes on model cars.

Compressor: The thing under your bench that kicks on and startles the crap out of you while you're trying to paint something very small.

Decal: Markings for a model printed on water-release film. Also, when they break, little scale models of plate tectonics in action, complete with transverse and thrust faults.

Debonder: What Dr. No should have invested in instead of that giant laser.

Basswood: I had that once, and it was good with a little butter sauce.

Experten: A guy who seems to know more about German aircraft or armor (or both) than seems possible - or advisable.

Resin: The stuff you get on your hands when you work with green wood. Also said to be detail parts made for specific models, but I wouldn't know.

White metal: A soft metal alloy used in making model parts which, paradoxically, isn't white. I think it used to contain lead, but for safety reasons the lead has been replaced with plutonium or something.

Photo-etch: The main constituent of the junk that accumulates in my carpet.

Swab: A guy who was in the navy, but it's best not to call him that unless you also were in the navy. Also, a device specially designed to leave hairs behind on your model.

Super-glue: A type of glue especially handy for fixing broken fingernails, bonding cat hair to canopies, and perfecting the Vulcan salute.

Scratchbuilt: What you call your model, even if it isn't.

Scribe: A guy who writes things down. Also, a variety of pointed tool useful for getting glue out from under your fingernails.

Out Of The Box: Building a model kit in such a way that you don't add anything to the kit; you only use what's in the box. "Almost Out Of The Box" refers to the same thing, except that you had to make a replacement for a missing part out of a piece of macaroni.

Sinkhole: What you realize you're in when it occurs to you that you just dropped 45% of your weekly income at the hobby shop.

Round: A type of figure with round body parts, as opposed to a flat. Rounds can sometimes be too flat, so can a flat sometimes be too round?

Decal solvent: A convenient means of getting rid of excess decals.

Bloat: The consequences of eating one too many tamales. Also, when you start out building 1/144th scale airplanes and next thing you know you've got a 1/32nd scale F4E Phantom on your bench.

Multimedia: Movies on your computer. Also, a justification for a 50% price increase.

Airfix: A famous and prolific British model kit manufacturer. It's also sort of a mindset, where absolute accuracy and perfect engraving are sort of secondary to just building the damn model for the sheer joy of it. To "Airfix" a model is to build it as though you're a 12 year old boy, haven't yet discovered girls or mortgages, and life is an endless holiday.

Ejector pin mark: a round molding blemish on your model that only becomes visible when you enter it in a show.

ZImmerit: A texture applied to German tanks during World War Two, designed to keep magnetic hollow-charge mines and decals from sticking.

Vinyl: An obsolete recording medium much treasured by hipsters. Also, a material used to make large-scale figures, AFV tracks and car tires, as difficult to work with as a fashion diva.

Weathering: The process of distressing a painted model so the crappy paint job isn't so apparent.

Epoxy: A kind of slow-setting two-part glue especially useful for bonding scraps of paper to the cat's feet.

Wet Sand: A granular substance often found inside my swim trunks.

Instructions: The things I can never find.

Spray Booth: Only a heel would call it a cardboard box.

RMS: A subset of modeling focusing on Rockets, Missiles and Spacecraft. Every time a new Pzkw-V Panther kit is announced instead of a new spacecraft model, it also stands for "Really Must Scream."

Aftermarket: The glow of satisfaction that comes after a highly successful trip to the grocery store. Also, see Sinkhole.

Panther: Oh God, not another one.

Canopy: Where I store my extra fingerprints.

Futuristic: Not quite science fiction, but not quite real either. Sometimes, confusingly, refers to things from the past when the present WAS the future.

Future: What comes later. Also, a variety of floor wax often used in modeling, since it works better than the stuff specially made for modeling.

RLM: Technically the ReichsLuftMinisterium or something like that, but nowadays used mainly to refer to the many drab colors used by the Luftwaffe by number. You know you're getting dangerously close to being an Experten when you meet your girlfriend for lunch and say "Your fingernails look especially nice in RLM-23!"

Diorama: A large vignette.

Vignette: A small diorama.

Silvering: Aging gracefully.

Parts Box: To a modeler what the morgue was to Dr. Frankenstein.

Figure: The scale people that come in various kits, especially armor kits, intended to keep us humble.

Vulcan Neck Pinch: What your wife gives you when you start to say things like "You know, that 1/72nd scale Gato submarine would look cool in the living room!"

Conversion: The act of finishing a model in a form other than original, often undertaken after you've lost enough parts you can't finish it the way it was originally made.

Dry Transfer: When you rub your fingertip wet with glue on any dry surface. I often use my shorts for this purpose.

Fisheye: A round imperfection in a coat of paint, proof that one shouldn't eat fried chicken at the workbench.

Preshadowing: When writers of horror novels use lightning or storms to presage difficulties ahead. Also, when painters of models apply dark shades to panel lines on models to presage difficulties ahead.

Ballectomy: When your round-handled knife rolls off the workbench and lands in your lap.

Kitbash: Combining two or more kits to make a single new model. Often used to make science fiction or what-if models, such as dropping a blown 392 Hemi into the engine compartment of a Tiger I.

Straightedge: A social current in punk rock. Also, a device designed to instill a sense of lazy complacency just before your scriber wanders all over the wing of your 1/24th scale Mosquito.

Panel line: That which I ignore.

Filler: Something, usually potatoes, designed to ease the pressure on the meat budget. Also, a substance applied to seams on models that sticks everywhere but where it's supposed to.

Lozenge: A camouflage pattern printed on the fabric of many German airplanes in World War One. More effective than Pokemon at inducing seizures.

Spray can: Bottled, pressurized frustration.

Reissue: Proof that nostalgia is more powerful than common sense.

Methyl Ethyl Ketone: A kind of solvent cement sometimes used in building models. It affects the nervous system in such a way that it makes the modeler say "Well, I didn't really need that part anyway."

Wash: It must be Saturday, because the clothes are in it.

Pin Vise: Not to be confused with "pin vice", which is a disturbing form of iniquity.

Pin wash: Something you use when your pins get filthy.

Rivet-Counter: A guy who can always find something wrong with your model. Yet, ironically, rivet-counters never seem to actually build any models of their own.

Dot Filter: I don't know what this is, but it sounds like something in MS-DOS 4.01.

Knife: A sharp device often employed when it turns out you have too much blood in your system.

Drybrush: When you realize your hair is a disaster and you try to brush it into some kind of order in the parking lot before going in to work. Also, the first step in deciding to repaint a model.

Scale: That which keeps all your models from being the same size.

Link And Length: Two guys in a TV cop show. Also, a molding technique for AFV tracks designed to make chemotherapy seem pleasant in comparison.

Cutter: A kind of horse and/or cowboy adept at getting a single cow out of a herd of same. Also, a device useful for catapulting small parts into the lower stratosphere.

Sprue: the plastic frame that holds the part that should be there, but isn't.

What-If: The business of putting unusual decals on a model, such as an F-14 Tomcat in Luftwaffe service, or a MiG-21 with British roundels. Chiefly the result of losing the kit's original decal sheet.

Superdetailed: The work of modelers who are way better than I am.

Tweezer: Humorous nickname for a guy with unfortunate facial hair. Also, a tool useful for dropping things.

Chrome: (Also Chrome Plating) The process of making plastic parts look cheap and toy-like, while also making them hard to work with.

Flocking: A social habit seen in birds, golfers and occasionally fans of death metal. Also, a powdery fibrous material useful for simulating carpet in model cars. I'll start using it when it comes complete with scale french fries and loose change.

Curbside: Where you leave old furniture in the hope that it will simply go away. Also a kind of car model with no engine detail because the intake manifold part went missing.

Forceps: Don't Bogart that photo-etch, man.

Loft Insulation: British term for your collection of unbuilt kits. In my locale, the collection could also be called "roadrunner habitat" as the horrid carnivorous miniature dinosaurs tend to take up residence therein. Also known to house guests as "what is all that junk".

Glue: Strong stuff.

Wax: A substance used in a last-ditch struggle to remove a dead moth from the freshly painted hood of a car model. Also, a popular and effective karate training aid.

Use The Force, Luke: The voice I hear in my head when I begin to think I can scribe a panel line without a guide or straightedge.

Humbrol: To messily spill paint or cement on your workbench, as in "Man, I just Humbroled a whole cup of coffee right into my decal box!" Comes from Humbrol paints, which are superb paints disgraced by dreadful cans ("those are tinlets, bub").

Pour Stub: The thick chunk of excess resin connected to your resin parts. Really just a thinly veiled excuse to invest in cool new power tools.

Slammer: A kind of car model subjected to drastic modification with a large hammer.

Wish List: A mental list of models that the modeler wishes someone would make. Judging from what the kit manufacturers actually release, most wish lists must read like "If it's German, I'll take it!"

Siberia: The vague depression that haunted modelers in the 1980s when it was almost impossible to find models of Soviet aircraft or armor, and the announcement of a new MiG-21 could cause the same wild, breathless excitement as the prospect of a date with Joan Jett.

Razor saw: A convenient means of shortening one's fingers.

Miter box: Where one keeps one's miters.

Paintbrush: Zen. With a handle.

Sheperd Paine: A really first-rate modeler who was hired to build dioramas for Monogram back in the 1970s. The Sheperd Paine inserts in Monogram kits of that day completely changed the way I viewed scale modeling, and I suspect I'm not alone.

Thinner: A Stephen King novel. Also, what many of us wish we were. Also also, a liquid useful for not quite cleaning a paintbrush.

Ferrule: The business end of a paint brush, the part that falls off just as you're about to paint a button on a Napoleonic Hussar's uniform.

Skewer: To accidentally poke yourself. Also a sharp bamboo stick intended for kitchen use, but which turns to be a multipurpose tool with about six thousand uses, none of which involve food.

Rat Droppings: The small rounded lumps of hardened epoxy putty left over from whatever you're working on. If you miscalculate and mix up too much epoxy putty and have a lot left over, you may be said to be in possession of a righteous turd.

Ploop: The ugly sound a tube of old-style model glue makes as it emits a giant blob of goo right in the middle of your Thunderbolt's canopy.

Work: That which both enables me to model, and prevents me from modeling. If I could ever come to terms with this paradox, I'd probably be a much wiser person.

From The Archives

2010-10-17T02:12:00.001-07:00

Old photographs from my modeling archive:

A scratchbuilt model of a Japanese Baka rocket-propelled suicide bomb, shown here moving out with considerable delta-vee (well, considerable delta-vee for an A engine, anyway). It flew pretty well, but it took so much weight in the nose to keep the CG ahead of the CP it came down like a brick and destroyed its parachute every time. This whole dry lake area is now a housing development, and the home-made launch pad was in the toolbox of my truck when someone stole my truck out of the parking lot at work. Grrrr.

The Screamin' Pinhead. Big model, but paradoxically easy and fun to paint. It came with the Altar of Souls and two puzzle boxes. I added chains and actual fishing hooks to one of the puzzle boxes, with super glue used to stiffen the chain and made it stand straight. This is almost all craft store acrylic paint, by the way, as enamels seem never to fully cure when applied to vinyl.

DML's 1/35th scale North Vietnamese Army set. I like painting these things and plopping them on a common case, even if the setting makes no particular sense. I wish I had known about horse hair before I did this; it's much easier to work with than the stuff shown here, grass from Woodland Scenics.

Tamiya 37mm FLAK-37 and "German Infantry At Rest" in a revetment made out of Celluclay, painted sawdust, and a whole lot of strip basswood, origin uncertain (I tend to buy bags of scale wood whenever I come across it, but I can't begin to remember the brand name, or where I bought it). This was my one experiment with Gunze Sanyo paint; they offered "field grey" and I thought I'd give it a try, but it's very glossy and I had no luck achieving any kind of respectably flat sheen. I later discovered that Delta makes an acrylic craft paint called "Hammered Iron" that is a dead ringer for field grey, and it's flat, and it's easier to use. There's a fourth guy, sitting in the corner of the revetment on the far right; you can just barely see a scrap of his helmet and the toe of one boot. Also note that they have a frying pan, but no stove... Hmmm....

From The Archives

2010-10-17T01:50:00.000-07:00

Some random photographs from my archive of old pictures

1/35th scale diorama of German infantry about to ambush a Soviet 120mm mortar team, taken more or less from the movie Cross Of Iron, less the trees. The Soviet 120mm mortar and team are Zvezda, I think, and the Germans are Dragon, I think (I can't remember the name of the set, but the figures seem like they were based on Steiner, Kruger and Schnurrbart from the movie). The rest of it is Celluclay and a bunch of dried trimmings from a Lady Banks rose bush.

A simple diorama of some modern French Foreign Legionnaires sheltering behind an abandoned T55 medium tank, presumably in Chad during the Libyan invasion. The tank is an ancient Lindberg offering; the Legionnaires are DML, I think.

A German Panzer-IVD medium tank bypassing a broken-down French Char B, which itself is being picked over by curious German infantry. I intentionally made the road as narrow as possible to highlight the considerable size of the Char B heavy tank. The German tank is the good Tamiya kit; the Char B is an old and somewhat rough MB Models resin kit - it weighs a ton and had to be screwed to the base with a drywall screw to keep it from falling off. The German infantry are random figure parts, mostly Tamiya, I suspect.

Screamin's 1/6th scale (or was it 1/4th scale?) Boba Fett. Vinyl figures are not my specialty, but I take the occasional plunge. For such a large kit I thought it was a little soft in the detail department, but it was still fun.

When To Admit Defeat

2010-10-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

When does one admit defeat? I have a hard time knowing when to stop fighting a given kit and save myself a lot of trouble by throwing it into the trash can. Sometimes I must resemble Captain Ahab just a little, snarled in the ropes and old harpoons on flank of Moby Dick, stabbing away as I go down with the whale. Okay, that's a little dramatic, but you know what I mean. Maybe it's pride - boasting "I can redeem this mess; I have the skill and I have the super glue." Maybe it's stupidity.

I have two models on my bench at the moment that are starting to resemble Moby Dick. One is a Hasegawa 1/72nd scale Grant medium tank; the other is a Hasegawa 1/72nd scale Churchill I infantry tank. They've been in my garage for years (they actually got lost behind the ramps we use to change oil in our cars). I got them out and glued them together while watching TV the other day. Hasegawa's older armor kits aren't great, but I kind of like them - at least they're cheap.

The Grant has sand shields, a common fitting in British service, so that means you have to sort of paint the undercarriage and tracks before installing the sand shields. I thought I would do the Churchill's tracks at the same time. Only now, the tracks are disintegrating. It seems that every morning, I go out to the workbench and find that the tracks have broken in a new spot. So I super-glue the broken tracks to the various wheels anew, touch up the paint, and the cycle repeats over and over. The Grant's tracks are largely hidden by the sand shields, but the Churchill had no fenders and the whole top run of track is clearly visible, and the more I glue and fret and snarl, the worse it all gets.

There are other things in my life, you know. Well, other models, anyway. Nicer models. Models whose tracks are not likely to break, or which don't have tracks at all. I have all the AMT 1/2500 Enterprises, for example, and they look like great fun. I have a Romulan cruiser (the double-decker, the "bivalve cruiser" as I call it) poised on the edge of being done. I always thought the Mirage F1 was a particularly sexy jet fighter, and I have several of them I could be working on.

But no, I'm spending all my time gluing broken fragments of tracks back together. Soon I'll be using an electron microscope to glue broken molecules of track back together, all to salvage a couple of tank models that weren't all that good even in the first place.

I draw back, harpoon in hand, ready to plunge it home even as the great white whale begins to sink beneath the waves.

Time To Clean The Bench

2010-10-11T18:33:00.000-07:00

What a mess. I should be ashamed of myself.

Note the Monogram 1967 Corvette on the left, the 'wings' from Slave-1 being weathered on the right, and the gloomy Viking in the background, next to the bottle of water, viewing this wretchedness with a certain amount of despair. As do I.

2010-10-11T18:24:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I tend not to finish very much - my habit of getting sidetracked.

The other night I was sitting at the workbench, drinking a beer (Newcastle brown ale, if you want to know) and trying to work up some enthusiasm for my current project, a 1967 Corvette. I had a piece of cedar wood, one of those "make your closet smell good" things that no longer smelled good. I had some HO scale figures I'd painted back during my brief but expensive flirtation with model railroading. And I had five 1/96th scale Rocketdyne F1 engines from the Revell Saturn V kit (I'm replacing them with batted F1s from Realspace Models, so they're just flotsam and jetsam now).

So off I went.

The engine seems way too big to me and I'm always thinking "No, I grabbed some N-scale people by accident." But no, they're really HO, and if anything the people are too big. Man! How big WAS the Saturn V???

The engine is pretty much stock, other than some sheet plastic plugs in the propellant inlets. The figures are Preiser. The wood is from Bed, Bath and Beyond.

Airfix RE-8

2010-10-11T18:10:00.001-07:00

Here is the Airfix 1/72nd scale RE-8. Sources on the Internet seem to disagree on whether the genuine article was any good or not (with a slight majority leaning toward "not") but I happen to like the shape a great deal. Something about that "bent in the middle" shape appeals to me.

Once again, the paint is basically just Tamiya Khaki Drab and Desert Yellow for the wooden bits.

I know that I earlier said I was going to rig the thing, and obviously I didn't. I started to stretch up a bunch of sprue for the task, but then I went inside, laid down for a while, and the fit passed. My defense for this is that the model would benefit from better machine guns (the kit-supplied parts are, in the immortal words of Jeremy Clarkson, "rubbish"), some kind of mesh in the nose radiator opening, and a better interior. The pilot's opening is particularly large and would reveal a detailed cockpit quite nicely... if I'd actually supplied one. (The figures are shocking, by the way. I'm not sure what nationality they are. I'm not sure what era they come from. I'm not even sure what species they are. But I saved them; someday when I built a science fiction diorama they might be useful, what with their third eyes and flat heads).

Spock

2010-10-11T18:00:00.000-07:00

This is what happens to me when I go to a hobby shop - only instead of being ambushed by three-headed snakes, I'm ambushed by models. I go in for something simple, like some super glue or decal solvent, and I end up buying so much stuff I almost need a porter to help me get it all to the car. No wonder my tires are wearing out; I'm constantly hauling all that wretched cargo.

This is, of course, the recent re-release of the famous old kit. Not hard to build at all, though the three-headed snake was a bit ill-fitting. The snakes had seams in a concave part of the tops of their heads that I couldn't find a convenient way to fix, so I cut fake crests out of sheet plastic and glued them in to hide the seam (and to make them look a little less like ordinary terrestrial snakes). There are also bits of stretched sprue in their mouths, to hide other seams that I couldn't fix. And the strap for Spock's tricorder wasn't acceptable, so I cut it off and burned it (to to speak) and replaced it with a strip cut out of doubled-over electrician's tape. The final thing I did - I glued Woodland Scenics "blended turf" on instead of trying to paint and drybrush the molded grass. It looks a little park-like, but better than the stock parts, and it was useful for filling the yawning gaps between the asparagus-like tree and the base.

For whatever it's worth.

Revell 1/72nd Nieuport 28

2010-09-09T02:19:00.001-07:00

Revell's 1/72nd scale Nieuport 28, as flown by Captain Eddie Van Halen... err, I mean, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the top American ace of the Great War. It's another beautiful kit, as far as I'm concerned, with very nice rib detail, fabric texture here and there, and nicely engraved detail on the cowling and forward part of the fuselage. There is no interior other than a seat, and the machine guns are little lumpy, and as you can see, the decals are a tad transparent, but it's fun and easy to build.

I'm a little dubious of the colors, which are mostly Model Master acrylics (olive green, dark green, dark earth, sand and a little bit of NATO black). But I am not richly endowed with reference materials for WWI fighters, and the instructions only call out Revell paints, which I do not use. So this is my interpretation of what the instructions said I should use. My model doesn't look like a Nieuport 28 in French service, that's all I know.

Most World War Two fighters fall into one of two categories: the streamlined in-line engine jobs like the Spitfire, and the chunky radial engine jobs like the F6F Hellcat. I think this is the reason I like the Hawker Typhoon and Curtiss P-40 so much; they're sort of a cross between the two and are thus distinctive. But World War One aeroplanes have much more character, and each one seems to have its own character. Albatros fighters look fast and lean; Spads look powerful and tough, Fokker D.VIIs convey a kind of slab-sided inelegant Teutonic efficiency, Fokker Dr.1s look aggressive and dangerous (to fly against, or to fly in), and Nieuports seem to convey an impression of grace and agility.

Revell 1/72nd Fokker Dr.1

2010-09-09T02:15:00.001-07:00

The Revell 1/72nd scale Fokker Dr.1 triplane. What's a collection of Great War aeroplanes without at least one Manfred-mobile? I'm occasionally known to claim that Fokker Dr.1s and Pzkw-V Panthers are grossly over-represented in the modeling world, and I think they are, but that doesn't mean I won't build the occasional example.

It's a lovely kit, featuring a pretty nice interior, nice fit, and nice surface detail. The decals are nice too. It's just nice, all the way around. Even the Spandau machine guns are recognizable, though you couldn't tell that from my ham-fisted photography.

Odds and Ends

2010-09-09T02:04:00.001-07:00

Here are some odds-and-ends things I've been tinkering with lately.

A Rebel Transport (better known as the "fish ship") from the "Rebel Base" set. It came with several X-wings, several Y-wings, a Millennium Falcon, and this thing. I'll add photos of the others later, but for now, this is what I've been doing while waiting for other paint/glue/decals to dry. Got a minute? Grab the fish and do some painting. I added a couple of nozzles made from the noses of 1/48th scale Maverick air-to-ground missiles, but otherwise, it's out of the box.

An itty-bitty Federation Dreadnought from Amarillo Design Bureau, intended for use with the Star Fleet Battles game. Someone does make decals for these two-inch models, but the idea of putting decals the size of an amoeba on a model the size of a Ritz cracker gives me the shakes.

More Amarillo Design Bureau ships, a Klingon D7 in the foreground (flat black with lots of silver drybrushed over it) and a Kzinti battlecruiser in the background (hull red, mostly, with decals scavenged from a Matchbox A34 Comet cruiser tank).

A figure I now refer to as the "Wally Dude", because I think Wally gave it to me. It's mostly a combination of old-school Testors square-bottle enamels and craft store acrylics.

More of the Wally Dude. The skin was medium brown Testors enamel with some orange acrylic drybrushed over the top, and I thought it worked reasonably well.

Revell 1/72nd Sopwith Triplane

2010-08-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

I don't build a lot of aeroplanes from World War One. Part of the problem is that I don't know what to call it. I think "First World War" is proper terminology in the UK and former Commonwealth; "World War One" seems to be a US thing; and "Great War" always makes think of Yoda saying "Oooh, wars not make one great!" But a big part of the problem is that World War One aeroplanes (it doesn't seem right to call them "airplanes") have a great deal of character, which makes them, to my mind, formidable modeling challenges. If a plank-on-frame sailing ship is the Everest of modeling, a good fully-rigged biplane must be the K2.

But I do like World War One aeroplanes. The first model I ever built was a Revell Fokker Dr.1, the light blue one that I think was flown by Werner Voss. And I've built the Sopwith Triplane at least a dozen times. But my absolute favorite is the RE.8; something about the way it looks bent in the middle appeals to me.

So, the Sopwith Triplane. Put on a DVD of The Blue Max and dig in. The molds are showing their age and the fit isn't great. The Vickers machine gun is pretty bad, and the pilot is starting to resemble a Sumo wrestler in a leather flying coat. But it isn't too hard to assemble, and the decals were excellent. I've read a lot of negative comments about the size and shape of the "Blymp" lettering and the serial numbers, and those comments may well be true, but the decals as decals worked very nicely. The decal sheet includes a seat belt decal, but considering that there's no interior detail at all and the only way to hide that fact is to shoehorn the portly flying officer in, well, that decal goes in the spares box.

I used Tamiya Khaki Drab to represent PC10. I think it looks a little too dark and maybe not quite brown enough, but PC10 is a hard color to duplicate; I bet everyone has their own interpretation of it. I used Model Master Sand to represent the clear doped linen. It's about the right lightness, but maybe not quite creamy enough, but it'll do. I painted the wooden fuselage decking Model Master Wood, and the struts Tamiya Desert Yellow.

You'll note two major deficiencies. One is that it has no windshield, something I intend to add later, and another is that it isn't rigged. At all. Maybe someday I'll rig it, but I bet I won't. I don't even know what's good for rigging. I used to rely on stretched sprue because it could be tightened with heat, but sometimes it turns out kind of uneven. Maybe some kind of very fine music wire would work. When I get around to building the RE.8 in my collection I'll probably try that. I can justify not rigging the Sopwith, but not the RE.8.

Curating the Collection

2010-08-15T22:25:00.000-07:00

Way back in my (much) younger days I played Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe even a lot. This was in the days when there was only one edition of D&D, and if you were lucky you had copies of Greyhawk and Blackmoor. Later D&D figures started to come out, though by then I had largely stopped playing, due chiefly to the demands of work. But even though I never actually played the game with the figures, I enjoyed painting the figures. I have probably 150 of them in my collection, including a fair number of Shadowrun figures.

Anyway, at some point I bought the thing above from Ral Partha, I believe, called "Bridge of Sorrows". Or something like that. A largish dragon ambushing a wizard, a centaur and a scantily-clad fighter on a bridge. I built it and painted it, and then for fifteen or twenty years it sat around, getting dusty, paint flaking off, fading, slowly decomposing into dust. But lately I went through my whole collection of figures, cleaning them, touching up the paint, and in some cases repainting them entirely.

I subjected the bridge thing to a fairly thorough refreshing - I repainted the dragon and bridge, renewed the landscaping, added a tree, and painted the top of the base black and poured on a couple of thick layers of Future floor wax to (hopefully) simulate deep still water. The dragon is painted with Model Master acrylic hull red and insignia red, drybrushed with Testors gold. The landscaping is mostly Woodland Scenics stuff I had left over from an abortive stab at model railroading.

(I have up model railroading because even in N gauge I didn't have enough room for it, and when I got right down to the heart of the matter, I enjoying model railroading not because I like trains, but because I like building and painting HO scale trucks. So I skipped the railroad and kept building the trucks.)

Polar Lights USS Enterprise

2010-08-06T23:27:00.001-07:00

Polar Lights 1/1000th USS Enterprise, TOS-vintage. It's a fun kit - not many parts and not many really serious construction problems, except the obvious one of "How the hell do I hold it while I apply the decals?" Speaking of which, the decals were quite good. Many are very large and weirdly shaped, especially the window/racing stripe combo on the secondary hull, and they look like they're going to be awful trouble, but they really aren't. They respond to Micro-Sol, but slowly.

Here we see the only decal problem I had: the tail end of the red "racing stripe" on the starboard warp nacelle folded over on itself, and all my attempts to fix it just made it worse. Some of the other decals folded over, but I was able to save them. But not this one.

My plan was that after painting and applying the decals I would draw yellow and light orange lines on the warp nacelle caps with felt markers (Sharpies, to be specific). But yellow and light orange Sharpies have absolutely no coverage over gloss orange paint. None. Zero. I know they work - I colored my thumbnail testing them - but there's absolutely no sign of striping on the nacelles, either in person or in photographs. Had I known this, I would have left the caps off so I could stripe them with oil paints separately, without having to manhandle the whole steenking ship.

But it's a nice kit and I enjoyed it. Who's up for a battle-damaged Constellation?

PS: I think I like RLM-65 as Federation paint. It's more blue than the actual studio models, which have a distinctly greenish tint if you ask me, but the blue seems right to me. It looks more right under bright halogen lamps and less right under fluorescents, but on the whole, I think it's going to be my de facto standard Federation paint.

PPS: Back when I used to play Star Fleet Battles I collected and painted a few of the tiny Amarillo Design Bureau models - some odd Federation frigate or somesuch, a Kzinti battlecruiser, a Klingon D7 and B10, a Lyran catamaran-hull thing, some Tholian grooviness and so forth. On what amounted to a whim the other night I bought about 40 more on eBay - pretty much a whole Federation and Klingon fleet, plus some oddities, like a pair of Kzinti frigates that are about the size of pieces of breakfast cereal. I could swallow most of the fleet whole, now that I think about it... Anyway, my point was that RLM-65 is going to be way too dark in such a small scale, but I do think I'll "scale" it by adding a lot of white so my Federation fleet will have the same bluish tint.

A Good Time Had By All

2010-08-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

The Haul. Less than I expected, really, but it certainly felt like more when I was hiking back to the car. Clockwise from the top: Anigrand X-20 Dyna-Soar, Miniart 1/16th Roman legionary (and VERY nice too, it appears), Airfix 1/72nd SH-3 Sea King (key to my hopes of one day building an Apollo 11 recovery diorama), Wespe Models Mack 5-ton truck (also very nice based on preliminary examination), Lindberg "Star Probe" reissue, and the Star Trek "Adversary Set" which includes the Romulan "Pierre Cardin" cruiser, a Ferengi horseshoe crab, and a Klingon Bird of Cloaked Prey. Also, in there somewhere, some forceps, tweezers, glue and spatuli. The TV remote control did not come from the convention.

The vendor room. Be still my quivering wallet.

The contest room. I didn't even bother trying to photograph any models with my wretched cell phone camera, but there were some exceedingly meritorious things on display. The dark blobs on the nearest table are a whole collection of Dragon 1/72nd Shermans in US, British and Canadian markings.

IPMS Phoenix

2010-08-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'm going to the IPMS-USA National Convention in Phoenix. I'd like to be all high-minded and say I'm going there to see great models, to witness a great contest, to attend great seminars and learn great stuff... But let's be serious, it's really all about the stuff.

I do what I can to support my local hobby shop (http://andyshobbyhq.blogspot.com/) but after four rounds of chemo, three bone marrow biopsies, two bone marrow transplants and a round of radiation therapy, well, there's only so much money left, and there's only so much time left. (I'd complain about the problems of building models in a garage in Arizona - today's temperature, 114 degrees F - but nobody likes a whiner.)

Anyway, I like Andy's hobby shop. But the vendor room at IPMS is all about the stuff. Rare stuff. Weird stuff. Stuff that Andy can't afford to stock, or can't get from his distributors. Not that I have a tremendously large list. But I'm quite sure that I'll stumble upon things that I simply have to have, and the question isn't really "How long are you going to stay" but "How long can you afford to stay".

A while, hopefully. Wish me luck.

Secondary Projects

2010-08-01T18:23:00.001-07:00

I usually have several secondary projects going while I work on more serious things. It keeps me from getting stuck - when I run out of the gumption required to work on a serious project, I can work on something secondary instead of going inside to eat Cheetos and watch TV. Not that I eat Cheetos very often; that Orange Hand of Doom thing gets to me. (I sometimes have nightmares of picking up a partially completed model while both hands are completely covered with orange Cheetos-substance.)

Here are a couple of secondary things I've been tinkering with on and off while waiting for bright ideas on bigger projects. I don't think of myself as a figure painter by any means, but I kind of like painting them, at least as long as there aren't 34 of them to do at one time...

DML's 1/35th scale 88mm "Puppchen" antitank rocket launcher and crew. Nice kit, mediocre execution of same. Years ago I bought a stack of hexagonal styrofoam pieces designed to serve as terrain in tabletop wargaming (Micro-Armor in specific, as I recall). I never did really do much tabletop wargaming (not because I didn't want to, but because opponents were hard to find). These days I use them as bases for things of this sort. The snow is just Celluclay painted white a bunch of times, and the stuff that's supposed to look like dead winter grass poking up is mane hair snipped from one of my wife's horses. The kit contained no small arms, so I threw in a couple of MP-40s and a Panzerfaust from a generic Tamiya German weapons set.

I think this is a Verlinden figure, a 120mm figure of a soldier from the US 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. It's been in work for a while and the package is long gone, so I'm only guessing that it's Verlinden. The paper towel backdrop may be extra-absorbent, but it's also extra-cheesy.

Polar Lights Klingon D7 Battlecruiser

2010-07-31T23:11:00.000-07:00

This the small snap-together (though I glued-it-together) Klingon D7 battlecruiser. I've always liked the design of the ship, jokes about Klingon warships not having toilets notwithstanding, and the little Polar Lights kit is pretty easy to build. Forget the snap-together features; the fit (as is usual with snap-together kits) isn't great and seams yawn like a tired cat. It's best to glue it together, and even then you'll have to spend some time with putty and sanding sticks, but since it has almost no raised detail at all, it's easy to clean up.

The main problems with a ship like the D7 is getting the warp nacelle angles right, and getting the boom to sit straight. One warp nacelle didn't want to lie at what I thought was the right angle (and anyway, it was different than the other one) so I had to strong-arm it, and the boom kind of wanted to angle off to one side, so I held it straight and then filled the resulting seams with super glue and white glue later. (I remember reading somewhere that Klingon warp nacelles were actually called "graph units", but it's also possible that I only think I remember reading that.) The kit supplies a tiny clear red part that pokes up from the underside of the bridge assembly, but the red vanishes when installed and I dotted them with Testors gold instead.

Other than a few issues with seams and alignment, the only real problem was the fit of the torpedo launcher tube in the lower bridge. It doesn't fit very well and cleaning up the seams isn't much fun. If I were do this again, and I will, I'd superglue in a piece of thin-walled brass tubing and sand it flush with the hull, and then poke some gimologized piece of nonsense into the tube to simulate the torpedo launcher itself.

I was at Wal-mart a while back, looking for God knows what. Charcoal briquettes, probably, but who knows. Anyway, I bought a pack of the old Testors square-bottle paints and used them extensively, applying them with a variety of cheesed-out old brushes that I'm too cheap to throw away. (I guess that's the reason.) The gold-colored parts are actually Testors Bronze (as a general rule, anything on the model painted bronze was chrome-plated in the kit originally) and I used a little Tamiya dark grey on the bulbous underside of the bridge section, and a little Tamiya NATO black on the boom buttresses.

The decals are thick and glossy, but are at least sturdy, and the lack of raised surface detail makes them easy to apply. There was a little silvering here and there, but less than I had expected, given the thickness of the decals and their refusal to yield to Micro-Sol. The kit also comes with stylized Romulan bird of prey markings, and a great plenty of spare Klingon letters so you can name your ship whatever you like. I used the basic decals so I wouldn't have to piece together separate letters. (Amusingly, the basic decals look like the stylized letters "TCS", which in my car happens to stand for "Traction Control System", so every time I glance at the D7 I think "Oh, it's the Traction Control Ship.")

Upshot? Well worth the trouble. You can't have too many Klingon ships around the house, and I could see this being an interesting canvas for all sorts of unusual paint schemes.

Emhar Gokstad Viking Ship

2010-07-31T22:52:00.000-07:00

And so, the entire population of 9th Century Tromso puts to sea. Was Tromso around in the 9th Century? I honestly don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.

This is, of course, the Emhar 1/72nd scale Gokstad Viking longship, with the additional Emhar Viking ship crew. It was actually a fun kit to assemble, and I thought it offered good fit and good engraved detail. The figurehead is especially nice, but I didn't capture it close-up in any photographs. I generally find ships fiddly and hard to build, and sailing ships especially so, but as sailing ships go, this one was actually pretty easy. Not a whole lot of rigging and no ratlines, which usually drive me to fits of screaming madness.

But the lack of rigging was offset by the plentitude of crew. I count 34 crewmen (one oarsman had to be deleted because the unusual yard arrangement was in the way), and 34 Vikings is a heap of painting for someone who doesn't consider himself to be a figure painter. I don't know that Vikings were really this colorful - sources appear to disagree, and a whole load of guys wearing brown in a brown ship would have produced a sort of brown hole, if you will, that would capture color and prevent it from escaping.

The Emhar figures are made out of some kind of plastic that is softer and more flexible than styrene, but harder and more poseable than polyethylene. The mold parting lines tedious to clean up, but the poseable nature of the figures made it somewhat easier to match them to the angles of the oars than I had feared. I only broke the arm off one Viking while posing him, and was able to adjust their arms a bit after they were painted without losing too much paint, so on the whole, I think I approve of this new Emhar mystery plastic.

The sail was a very shiny and smooth vacuum-formed thing. I painted it by hand, without too much regard for coverage or straightness of line, theorizing that a real sail would look pretty sad after a few days at sea anyway. To produce a halfway realistic "billow" in the sail I had to drill a small and highly ahistorical hole in the bottom of the sail and tie it to the figurehead with a piece of fishing line, which is painfully obvious in the bottom picture. Eventually I'm going to replace it with something finer and less noticeable, but I have a lot of "eventually" tasks that I never seem to get to.

All in all, yeah, Vikings. It's cool!

PS: The odd board-like oddment is their gangplank, I believe, and I stowed it on the raised oar storage trees even though I'm not sure that would have been actual Viking practice.

PPS: I painted and am in the process of weathering the overlapped shields that the kit supplied. I may or may not install them. The instructions say that the shields were only overlapped along the wales when the oars were shipped, but I've seen models (by better modelers than me) that show them both ways. We'll see.

Progress

2010-07-25T17:36:00.000-07:00

The Polar Lights Enterprise, such as it is. It isn't finished - some of the small parts haven't been added and I haven't finished painting the deflector dish assembly, or done any striping on the nacelle caps. I include this picture mainly to show the color I picked for the model, Luftwaffe RLM 65 light blue out of a Tamiya lacquer spray can. By Jove, I think I like it. I still think it's a little too dark, but it captures the blueness of the original as seen on my old TV. Astern of the Enterprise is the Klingon D7, painted entirely with Testors enamels in the funky old square bottles. It isn't done either; I haven't applied the decals. Maybe tonight.

Here's why the Star Trek models aren't finished. I started building a Cousteau Calypso about a hundred years ago, before I got sick. Then it sat for about two years, untouched. When I finally started working on it again, I found that a major superstructure part had gone missing and the plastic had become very brittle and difficult to work with. It was so bad that I bought the Revell reissue of the kit, now called the Neptun "Ocean Exploration Ship", and combined the two. The hull, decks and superstructure parts are mostly the new issue; the small parts and decals are from the old Calypso. The new issue parts are much easier to work with (that is, they weren't so brittle they broke into a thousand fragments at the slightest touch) but the molds are apparently wearing out because some of the parts, especially the life raft canisters, were misshapen to the point of being useless.

I managed to save the old Calypso decal sheet by cleaning it with cotton swabs and overcoating it with Micro-Scale decal film. It took many applications of solvent to get the decals to lie flat, but they eventually did, even the tiny "Cousteau Society" lettering on the helicopter tail boom. The kit is mostly out of the box. About all I did was drill out the portholes and windows, and subsequently fill them with gooey white glue (my Micro Krystal Kleer had solidified) after painting. I also used a punch and die set to replace the malformed portholes on the "observation dome" in the bow, and I added some rigging and some signal flags that spell out the name of a friend of mine. Partially, anyway; I only had one "E" on the printed flag sheet so the signal flags spell out "PRUDENC". It's also carrying more mini-submarines than it normally would, but I thought it looked better with more stuff rather than less. One of these days I'll get around to building the second shark cage (the first is on the foredeck).

In the background can be seen the Calypso's escort, a 1/72nd scale S-100 schnellboot.

Star Trek Colors

2010-07-08T20:05:00.001-07:00

I'm slowly recovering from shingles - probably more slowly than most people do because my bone marrow has been completely killed twice this year. The worst problem from a modeling point of view with my shingles is that my eyesight still isn't very good. Better than it was, but I still find intense close-range work (like painting figures) uncomfortable and, frankly, unrewarding.

But over the Independence Day holiday I watched a minor marathon of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes on BBC America. This compelled me to dig out a couple of newish Polar Lights Star Trek models from my collection, and I've found them pleasant to tinker with - they don't require much in the way of intense focus or concentration, or at least not yet, and I can work on them inside, out of the 115 degree heat in the garage, where my main workbench resides.

One of them is a Klingon D7 battlecruiser from The Old Show; the other is an Enterprise, also from The Old Show, which comes with a breathtakingly large and complete decal sheet. They're snap-together kits, and you know what that means: low parts count, simplified surface detail, thick plastic, and a tendency toward poor fit. It means a lot of gluing, clamping, filling, sanding, regluing popped seams, resanding, refilling and so forth, but I happen to enjoy that. (If scribing panel lines is one of my least-favorite modeling tasks, filling and sanding is one of my favorite.)

I also got to use up most of the scrap sprues; I cut them to random lengths and glued them inside the Enterprise to reinforce the mortises that the warp nacelle pylons fit into, a joint that looked pretty rickety to me in the basic kit.

I'm almost at the point of painting, and now I have to confront the issue of color. I've already decided that I'm doing to paint the D7 my way. Decades ago I built a D7 and painted it with a combination of blues and greys that really appealed to me, and that's how I'm going to do it again (and in Klingon markings, naturally. I've never liked the Romulans). Besides, I have my own vision of what Deep Space Fleet ships look like, and it doesn't seem to mesh with the Trek authorities.

But the Enterprise is a slightly different matter. For one thing, it's fairly iconic, and wild ahistorical paint schemes look strange. For another, it's important to me that models of the Enterprise look like the Enterprise. So what color is the damn thing? According to Internet sources, it is best matched with a greenish-grey color that WalMart calls "Concrete". Others insist on white. But on my TV, and on the TV that plays in my head, the Enterprise was always light blue. The preserved studio models aren't light blue, but the ship as it appeared on my clunky old TV was light blue.

So I've made my decision: I'm going to paint it RLM 65 light blue and see how it looks. I suspect RLM 65 will be too dark and I'll end up repainting it RLM 76 or even Model Master "Duck Egg Blue" (I painted an Enterprise-D once in an Aztec scheme of light gull grey and duck egg blue, and I thought it turned out very nicely). But that's my plan, at least for now. I just have to finish all the sanding and filling first.

Editorial Comment

2010-06-13T18:48:00.001-07:00

I'm known to occasionally moan and cry about how much kits cost these days, but I don't really do it with much verve. I sometimes wince and grumble when I have to fork over $60 for some Tamiya or Academy armor kit, mostly because I remember when I was a kid that armor kits rarely cost more than $20. But then again, I have a lot more money today than back then, and a $50 kit is much easier to afford now than a $20 one back then.

The truth is that price alone rarely deters me from buying a kit. If I'm really interested in a kit, I'll buy it whether it costs ten dollars, twenty, or fifty. The Academy Ontos is a case in point: I knew I would have one no matter how much it cost, so I didn't even look at the price tag. Cost only really becomes a factor when the price tag approaches one hundred dollars, which is my cutoff. Below a hundred, it's a casual purchase. Above a hundred, it's getting to the point that it must be planned and may be so expensive it just isn't worth it. I've always wanted to have a nice 1/32nd scale F-15C Eagle, which to my mind is what an air superiority fighter should look like. But the last time I looked, the Tamiya kit was going for $135. Ouch. That's getting hard to justify.

I'm more prone to grouse about the number of parts in modern kits, especially armor kits. I was reading a review of some Chinese MBT in Model Military International that claimed that included 22 sprues of parts. Wow! I've built entire kits in the past that didn't have 22 parts, let alone 22 sprues of parts! Does an M4A1 Sherman really need 400+ parts? An M1117 Guardian with 300+ parts? A Flakpanzer-IV with over 900 parts??? Holy cow. I don't really want to sound like I'm complaining, because when it comes to models, more detail is better than less. But a 400-part Sherman, that's starting to sound like serious work! And the Flakpanzer? Never going to appear on MY workbench, I can tell you that.

Yes Eye Can't

2010-06-13T18:37:00.000-07:00

Ugh!

I haven't done much modeling for the last couple of weeks. Almost none at all. And this is why. I developed shingles on my face which, unluckily enough, involved my right eye. I can force my eye to open if I really have to, but it hurts to do so and I suffer from such appalling double vision when I do that I prefer to keep it closed. It's anyone's guess when this will clear up - it's been two weeks and though it hurts less, it remains uncomfortable.

Worse, I have no binocular vision and basically can't use a knife or a paint brush.

I've had an old Revell Calypso model in my stockpile for years, and after watching some 1970s-era Cousteau specials on TV, I decided to dig it out and have a go. It's a nice kit, full of all sorts of interesting features - various kinds of boats and exploration submarines, some divers, a shark, a shark cage, a Hughes 300 helicopter. But my particular version of the kit proved to be in an extremely bad way. It was missing a major piece for the upper superstructure, and the plastic had become extremely brittle and unforgiving. After trying to piece the broken railings back together (no easy feat when you've only got one eye on-line) I finally had to conclude that the kit was beyond repair. I'd repair one broken part, only to have four others break in the meantime.

Fortunately I kept all the Calypso-specific parts, so I can buy the generic "ocean exploration ship" release and still have a Calypso without having to resort to eBay.

Zvezda Trireme

2010-06-11T15:37:00.000-07:00

An overall view of the Zvezda 1/72nd scale trireme. It had been hanging around for the longest time in an almost-done state, and after a couple of years I decided to wash off the dust and finish it. Note that I finished it rigged for war, with the mast and bowsprit removed and no rigging at all except for the ropes that hold up the hinged end of the corvus.

The kit itself is very nice, and has excellent engraved plank and joint detail. Even the decals were nice, though they only amounted to two eyes for the bow, with a small printed paper banner for the standard at the rear.

I wanted to give it a full crew, but I didn't have enough Roman figures to pull that off. So I plopped on two light ballistae from Haet Industries and their respective three-man crews, a couple of infantrymen and a gesticulating centurion forward, and a command group including an Imposing Centurion, a standardbearer and a cornicen aft. I can't remember what sets most of the figures came from; I have a bad habit of consolidating multiple figure sets in a single Tupperware bin and can't remember who made what any more. I painted the figures on their stands, but then sliced them off the stands and superglued them to the deck.

A notable goof: you may note that the trireme is missing its ramming beak. Years ago the thing slid off a shelf and the beak broke off, never to be seen again. Someday I may carve a replacement and glue it on, but for now, I'm done with it.

Lindberg Snark

2010-06-11T15:12:00.001-07:00

My stab at the 1/48th scale Lindberg Snark. I built this for the most part while I was waiting to start radiation therapy on the tumors in my groin - my had had swollen up to near-uselessness and it was pleasant to sit on the bed with a towel on my lap working on this model.

It's big. Surprisingly big. It'll eat up a lot of storage space, so be prepared.

While I was by and large pleased with the kit, it had a few flaws that required work. The flat top of the fuselage, especially between the wings, featured a large step, as one of the fuselage halves had developed a strong inward warp. I cut about fifty lengths of sprue anywhere from a quarter to a half an inch in length and glued them inside the fuselage so they would force the warp out when the fuselage was glued together. It worked for the most part - it eliminated about 90% of the step. The rear fuselage is supposed to be removable so show off the jet engine, but this left sizeable gaps, so I glued the rear fuselage on.

Then came putty. Lots and lots of putty. Most of the seams required filler and sanding; all required sanding. The rudder didn't fit well at all, so I covered it with putty and sanded it flat, preferring no hinge line at all than the Grand Canyon of hinge lines the kit came equipped with. It took me about six prime-sand-fill-prime cycles to get the seams acceptably flat and smooth, and in the process I destroyed a good deal of raised surface detail, but I was prepared to live with it and made no effort to restore any of it. I just don't enjoy scribing panel lines. At all.

After all this fitting, filling and sanding I sprayed the whole thing with Tamiya Italian Red spray lacquer, which I thought worked well - it's much brighter than the red I normally use, and I liked the subtle fluorescent nature of the paint.

Decaling the beast was a trip, in that the instructions don't show you where any of the decals go. All you can do is guess from the box photos where things go. Once you understand the scheme it makes sense and isn't impossible to figure out, but it might throw some people. On the plus side, the decals themselves were pretty good. I broke a few, but mostly through mishandling; the decals themselves were thin and sturdy and settled well with a few treatments of Micro-Sol. You may note that I applied the fuselage-side star-and-bar insignia parallel to the white stripe and not canted so they're sitting level while the Snark is on the launcher. It's incorrect and ahistorical, but I think it looks better this way, and it's my model, dang it.

The launcher, work stand and tractor were pretty easy to assemble. The workstand looked like it was going to be trouble, but it went surprisingly well, and the launcher was quite straightforward. The tires and tracks, however, were tough. I couldn't seem to find any way to sand the prominent seam out of the vinyl tires, and ended up carving it off with a single-edged razor blade. Most of the tires are hidden by blast shields, but enough of them are out in the open that I decided not to weather them and thus call attention to their hand-carved nature. The tracks were impossible to join together, but it turned out to be irrelevant. The gap between the return rollers and the fenders was so tight it was possible to jam the two ends together and trap them atop a return roller without glue.

A final note. Somehow I lost the nose boom, so I replaced it with a piece of round toothpick, sanded smooth and painted silver.

So, it was a lot of work, heavy on the sanding, filling and tire-carving, but it's such an unusual model I really didn't mind the work. I may build another one in a more restrained grey SAC color scheme, but then again, I may not.

I haven't painted any of the crew figures yet (though I'm going to) so I can't comment on the quality of the figures.

Zvezda Trireme

2010-05-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

Work in progress on the crew of the 1/72nd scale Roman trireme. The trireme itself can be seen in the background - I epoxied the oars into their sockets and now they make a semi-musical twanging sound when strummed. Some people play the guitar or xylophone; I play the trireme.

In the foreground are some random Roman figures I pluckedo out of my collection to serve as "deck clutter". Mostly Revell, and the standard-bearer is particularly nice. You can read "SPQR" on his standard, and that aint bad for 1/72nd scale at all. I'm not in love with soft polyethylene figures, but small-scale Romans aren't exactly thick on the ground.

I'm experimenting with Krylon "Fusion" spray paint as a primer. Normally I just use whatever flat white I happen to have, but I heard that Fusion worked well. It goes on in agreeably thin coats and doesn't clog detail, and Delta Ceramcoat seems to stick to it pretty well. Further details as events warrant, but so far the portents are good.

Und Jetzt!

2010-05-14T22:38:00.001-07:00

A sudden profusion of dinosaurs. With the Lindberg stagecoach finally done and off the workbench, I decided to amuse myself with painting a bunch of dinosaur models that had piled up over the years. I think these are all Revell kits; the allosaur on the left was modified slightly by carving the goopy drool off its tongue. Otherwise, they're pretty much out of the box, though I glued the legs on and skipped the animated leg feature. For filler, I pretty much relied on multiple layers of Testors liquid cement, the gooey kind in the vaguely triangular black bottles, and instead of sanding, I scraped endlessly with an X-acto knife while watching episodes of Lost, Treme and The Pacific. The seams aren't perfect, by any means, but that's okay. I have enough hard projects going on as it is without making simple projects hard too.

I remain blissfully unaware of what dinosaur experts say they should really look like. I just fiddle with them because it amuses me when the neighbors come over and suddenly realize there are small dinosaurs glaring at them from under the bushes. And after a mammoth struggle with a stagecoach, I like to decompress a little.

It's Done!

2010-05-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

It's finally done! Or done enough that I'm putting it on the display shelf for a while until I have any further bright ideas. The pictures aren't great - normally I don't photograph models under the regular fluorescent lights in my garage, but it wouldn't fit on my workbench! My modeling workbench, anyway. There are still some things I want to do, like scratchbuild some more luggage and cargo, but for now, it's a wrap. Not a moment too soon, either. I feel like having a beer!

The base is a pine board, stained and varnished, and covered with Celluclay and small rocks I screened out of my dry wash. The tufts of grass are actual horse hair - clippings off one of my wife's horse's mane, actually. I thought the horse hair was much easier to use than the Woodland Scenics stuff I've bought in the past, and the real horse hair is a better color too. And it's free. I kind of ran out and couldn't lay on as much grass as I would have liked, but now my wife knows to save the clippings and soon I'll have more "grass" than I'll know what to do with. Maybe I'll sell it on eBay for a buck a bag.

The only part of the kit that I didn't use - couldn't use, really - was the heavy black vinyl (?) stuff they supplied for reins. It was far too thick and burly, so I made replacement reins out of doubled black electrical tape. It's much thinner, I could cut the reins to a smaller overall size, and they were much more flexible, easy to work, and thread through the driver's hands. It was a little tedious, all that careful snipping with a pair of scissors, but definitely worth it.

I read somewhere that many of these kits had been shipped without all of the required harness parts. I must have lucked out because mine contained a full set. As far as I can remember, the kit was only missing one part, and there's every chance that I lost it myself (many of the harness parts had fallen off the trees while still in the plastic bag, and I probably threw away the plastic bag before making sure I'd recovered every last part.

So what's the final analysis? The subject is unique, the figures were pretty good, and the rest of the kit could be made presentable with a little work. The reins were unusable and the horses required a mountain of work. The whole project was a LOT of work, and to be perfectly truthful there's more work to be done. So. Not a beginner's kit, not a weekend kit, not a kit for those who aren't comfortable with a lot of filing and sanding. But very worthwhile in the long run; where else are you going to find something like this?

Lindberg Stagecoach

2010-05-02T16:59:00.001-07:00

Here are some random views of the Lindberg 1/16th scale Stagecoach, which am I getting pretty close to finishing after what seems like an eternity of work. In this picture, we see the worst part of the kit: the horses. They come in two halves, and I had to resort of huge quantities of MEK and actual woodworking clamps to get them to fit together reasonably well. Even then I had to do a lot of actual heavy-duty filing to get the seams even close to smooth, followed by about four fill-sand-prime-sand cycles. BUT, having said that, the horses themselves aren't bad in terms of proportion. I decided to make them all bays, the theory being that pintos or palominos or greys would be ridden by cowboys and not used by a stagecoach operator. I painted them a very dark brown with spray paint (made by Krylon to camouflage boats, pickup trucks, and other outdoorsman-type transport). Then came a lot of sustained drybrushing with Liquitex burnt sienna, which I though gave the horses a reasonable dark reddish bay color (I varied how much I drybrushed them, so none of them quite match in redness). Then came the harnesses, which I found fiddly and troublesome to assemble and attach - I painted most of the harness parts off the horses with Testors Rubber (which despite the name actually looks more like leather than Testors Leather) and attached them with five-minute epoxy. Note that the horses haven't been detail-painted; I decided to leave all that until after the horses have been harnessed. The brass rings were supplied in the kit, by the way.

A frontal view of the stagecoach, awaiting the completion of the horses. At first I thought the figures were made out of plastic, but now I think they're some kind of resin. Note the way that the guy on the right seems MUCH larger than the guy on the left - I'm going to have to make a chest or something for the boyish-looking shotgun rider to rest his feet on. I tried to paint them so they looked dingy and faded, but I still have a little detail painting to do (for this reason I haven't glued them into place yet). In the background, behind the hand sanitizer and under the Viking longboat box, is my latest tool purchase, a micro-table saw from Micro-Mark. Haven't used it yet, but it's ready when I am. Notice also the headless Triceratops... Poor thing. Not finished at the time of writing are the whip, the brake "pedal", and the Winchester rifle. I'm thinking of scratchbuilding a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, and I wish I could find some suitable pistols to cast replicas of and make pistol belts for.

A side close-up on the stagecoach, mostly to show the three other figures that came with the kit - a US Army officer on the right (I made him a major-general), a well-heeled townie on the left, and his wife beyond him. The paints were a mix of things - craft paint, Tamiya acrylics, Testors enamels, and even a little Liquitex here and there. The red and yellow on the stagecoach itself are barn red and marigold Krylon spray paints. Notice also the enormous ejector pin marks on the inside of the door that I failed to properly fill and sand! The kit is full of enormous ejector pin marks and obviously I didn't get all of them. Fortunately the door is operable and will be closed when it's all done - the kit supplies some brass pins so you can drill out the hinges and have operable doors if you like.

A three-quarters view of the assembled stagecoach. Most of the metalwork on the stagecoach is either Tamiya NATO black or Tamiya dark grey, intended to convey the idea of blackish wrought iron, but I touched some of the nuts and bolts with with Tamiya metallic grey. By and large the stagecoach itself wasn't hard to assemble. The instructions are not particularly clear, but most of it is pretty obvious. The most time was spent eliminating pin marks, flash, mild parting lines and other flaws. Note the large jug of Round-Up (it must be spring!) and the hitherto missing head of the Triceratops, upside down next to the Round-Up.

I've used an awful lot of Testors Rubber on this kit, as it turns out. I hunted around for a good leather color before settling on Rubber. Testors Leather is too red. NATO black is too green. Flat black is too stark. But Testors Rubber is a nice non-reddish dark brown that I think looks a lot like old leather. My wife drives horses and carts (two-wheeled sulkies) so I'm not unfamiliar with the look, feel and arrangement of horse harnesses and harness leather.

Revell-Germany Tank Transporter

2010-05-02T16:52:00.001-07:00

Here's a picture of my recently-completed 1/72nd Revell-Germany Faun tank transporter and Leopard 2A5, also by Revell-Germany. Nice kits, both of them, though I still don't like link-and-length tracks! This was painted almost entire with Tamiya paints - NATO Green lacquer out of a spray can overall, and red-brown and NATO black Tamiya acrylics. The grey tires are Delta Ceramcoat craft paint, a color called "charcoal".

In the background can be seen the old Revell PT-109 kit, in this case with the White Ensign Models 37mm AT gun barely visible on the foredeck. Behind it is the Airfix MTB, and to the left lies the stern of Revell-Germany's S-100 S-boat. I'm in the process of revising and expanding my shelving so I don't have to display armor models and torpedo boat models together, but that project isn't done yet.

But at least they're all the same scale!

Progress

2010-04-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

I've made pretty good progress lately. It seems that the more I do, the more I feel like doing. My skills never seem to atrophy much when I take a break from modeling, but my willingness to tackle hardish projects certainly wanes. Consider the NATO three-tone camo on the Revell-Germany Faun tank transporter. Turns out that it wasn't as easy as making buttered toast, but it wasn't as bad as I had dreaded.

It helps that I'm getting used to acrylic paint. I'm an old enamel user from way back, and it takes a little while to get the hang of acrylic paint (mostly Tamiya in this case, but I also learning how to use Model Master acrylics).

In the last week I've finished the Dragon Wagon, the M19 tank transporter, the Scammel tank transporter, an A34 Comet, an M7 Priest, a Star Wars AT-AT and snowspeeders, the Trumpeter selbstanhanglerbangladesher whatever it is tank transporter, and a fairly unsatisfactory Sturmgeshutz IV, which mostly reminds me of why I don't like link-and-length tracks all that much. I also have the Faun and Leopard 2A5 right next to done.

But all of this work got enough enough room cleared out on my workbench for me to pick up the Lindberg Concord stagecoach and a brace of dinosaurs.

I should perhaps point that I don't really weather my armor models very hard. I know the "Spanish School" is all the rage with its profusion of paint chips, accumulated crud, rust and whatnot, but I rarely weather a model to that point. I guess I prefer a more gently-used appearance, or maybe I just lack the skill to pull off all that heavy Spanish style weathering.

But every now and then I weather a model very heavily, just for fun. But not often. But I have a Vietnam-era M551 Sheridan that, when I get around to building it, is liable to turn pretty messy.

Pink Polka Dots

2010-03-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

I was reading the March 2010 issue of Scale Military Modeller International today and came across a remark so annoying I'm strongly tempted to stop buying the magazine entirely. Actually, the issue has a number of problems, which I may or may not expand upon later, but for now, I'm simply going to talk about Gary Hatcher's review of the Swash Designs photoetched set for some 1/35th scale motorcycles. The set isn't cheap - about $21 according to the review - but here's what Gary has to say about it:

The choice is yours - but if you want to settle for less than the best then maybe you might like to paint the thing with pink polka dots as well.

What the hell is this? All of a sudden if we don't buy every possible detail set for a model we aren't serious and we're infantile losers who daub pink polka dots on our armor models? Oh calm down, you say, Gary was just joking. Was he? I think any regular reader of his "Panzerschreck" column would have grounds to argue otherwise. This is the sort of anal bullshit that puts me off most model contests too, by the way - I simply don't accept the notion that I'm a loser because I don't buy detail sets.

Tell you what, Gary - you build your models the way you like, and I'll build mine the way I like, and I'll thank you to keep your holier-than-thou remarks to yourself. What really torques me about it is that in an indirect way I'm actually paying you to insult me. Well, I can fix that readily enough.

I'm also strongly tempted to stop buying Scale Aviation Modeller International because of a comment I read in Volume 16 Issue 2, to wit:

We do not issue bad reviews, and we shy away from negative comment. If a product has issues so great that we cannot justify published a review we prefer to contact the manufacturer and explain why we cannot cover their product.

Meantime, while these guys are busy protecting the reputations and egos of the manufacturers, the modelers (the people who pay the goddamned bills) are buying a crappy product even though SAMI knew it was a crappy product. Doesn't that make SAMI complicit in a cover-up? What's the point of pretending to review anything if you as a matter of editorial policy refuse to make negative comments? Why not just change your name to Scale Aviation Manufacturer International, since it is clearly the manufacturers you are pandering to, not the buying public who keep all of you in jobs in the first place? I rarely make buying decisions on the basis of what SAMI (or any other magazine) thinks of a given kit - I'm much more likely to buy on the basis of subject. But if someone knows that a kit has some serious problem with engineering or accuracy, I think I'd be interested in knowing that. I'll probably still buy the kit anyway - I paint pink polka dots on my models, after all - but I'd still be interested.

There's apparently no pleasing me, infantile loser that I am. I'd list some of the other things in the latest issue of SMMI that really cheese me (I mean really cheese me) but it occurs to me that I'm almost out of pink paint and I have to run to the hobby shop before it closes.

Ontological Crisis

2010-03-13T10:10:00.001-08:00

I see Academy is releasing a 1/35th M50 Ontos, which excites me in my dry, sterile way.

The Ontos is an odd six-gunned tank destroyer, one of those US Marine attempts to achieve maximum anti-tank firepower with minimum weight - when all your armor has to come ashore in landing craft or sling-loaded under helicopters, weight is not an irrelevant issue. The Ontos looks like it's a jumped-up pedal-powered tractor, like the driver's knees can be seen furiously pumping up and down as it trundles along. But don't laugh too hard; its armament of six 106mm recoilless rifles is not to be sneezed at, at least for the first six shots. (I find it curious, though, that my memory indicates that the Marines also operated hand-me-down US Army M103 heavy tanks, which combined maximum firepower and maximum weight, kind of the antithesis of the whole Ontos mindset. A 120mm gun and two loaders? Oh my.)

I recall building an Ontos in my younger years. I suspect it was a Renwal or Adams kit, a contemporary of that magnificent 280mm Atomic Cannon. Also a contemporary of the T92 light tank kit - remember those? I remember them as being fabulously detailed and lifelike, but they were probably crude and toy-like by today's standards. Still, where are you going to find an Atomic Cannon or a T92 or - until now - an Ontos?

I happen to like Academy's armor kits. Academy's kits in general, actually. There's no particular price break on an Academy tank kit. They aren't quite as expensive as later Tamiya stuff, which I find quite pricey, but they aren't exactly cheap either. But they aren't as ridiculously over-engineered as Dragon, DML and Trumpeter kits. I suspect that the Ontos will turn out to be a nice kit indeed. Now I just need to keep an eye out for the old Revell M56 Scorpion. Does anyone make an LTVP-5, now that I'm thinking about early-Vietnam-era US Marine Corps armor?

That Explains That

2010-03-08T18:44:00.001-08:00

Yeah, but where's Waldo?

A view of my workbench, taken just yesterday. The dinosaur, Star Wars models (note the tiny snowspeeders on the orange things that will become their bases eventually - Gatorade caps, by the way - and the AT-AT) and the stagecoach are fairly old projects that just generally clutter up my workbench without ever being finished. (To paraphrase a magnificent line from the novel The Coffee Trader by David Liss, "they are the hard turd in the ass of my forward progress".)

Also perhaps worth mentioning is the PM Models Su-15TM Flagon on top of the stagecoach. Not a great model, not up to your Hasegawa or later Revell-Germany standards, but where else are you going to find an Su-15, and for that low a price?

But what I really wanted to show off was the sudden profusion of small-scale tank transporters. It's like a regular cancer. One minute I had no tank transporters, and all of a sudden, I've got four. They aren't clearly visible in the photograph, but they are, from front to back, an Airfix 1/76th Scammel, an Academy 1/72nd "Dragon Wagon", a Revell-Germany 1/76th M19, and a Revell-Germany Faun Elefant (with its proposed load, a Revell-Germany Leopard 2A5, in place). The Dragon Wagon and the Elefant are very nice kits, by the way, as is the Leopard 2A5, but pay attention to the instructions - the kit includes the turret and track shields suitable for both a 2A4 and a 2A5, and they aren't impossible to confuse. Ask me how I know. That's what I get for watching The Mummy while building it, I guess.

So whatever else I was working on, like the Skybow WC63, got pushed back by this sudden eruption of tank transporters. And I'm not even done; I have to build loads for three of them, probably an A34 Comet for the Scammel, an M4A3(76)W for the Dragon Wagon, and probably an M7 Priest for the M19. And the thought of hand-painting that NATO three-color scheme on the Elefant and the Leopard 2A5? Brrr. It scares me. Three-color schemes on small-scale armor aren't exactly my cup of tea, but at least the green color was easy.

Revell-Germany Katyusha

2010-02-23T17:18:00.000-08:00

I've been working on Revell-Germany's 1/35th scale Katyusha multiple rocket launcher lately, gluing it together while watching the Olympics on TV. I think it's a reissue of an older kit by someone else - Italeri, maybe - but I don't know that for certain. All I know is that it's hard. The engineering of the chassis and drivetrain is particularly difficult. Who asked for two-piece working universal joints? I certainly didn't, and wouldn't have wanted so many of them if I had asked! It looks okay once it's together, but putting it together takes some doing. The front wheel and tire assemblies are okay, but the duals are tricky; the outer and most visible part of the rims have four gates that are difficult to clean up because of their locations. I like the idea of the black vinyl tires, which seems to argue that painting will be simplified, but there's no way to fit the tires onto the completed rims, so I assembled them entirely and painted them as a unit and will repaint the tires by hand later.

It doesn't help that the styrene in the kit is kind of rubbery and strangely tough. I found it hard to shave cleanly with a knife, yet all too easy to tear. The two-part cab is hard to assemble cleanly and I had to resort to putty and sanding to get rid of the major seam where the roof fits onto the rear wall parts.

But it's coming together. I just came inside from painting, where I sprayed the completed chassis with hardware store flat black paint and the cab and rocket launcher subassemblies with Tamiya RAF green lacquer. Now I just have to finish assembling the sight unit and launcher pivot tube, and paint the tires and cab interior details. Oh, and install the steering wheel, which can't be installed until after the cab and chassis are glued together.

I don't think I'd characterize this kit as a lot of fun to build, but how many Katyusha models do you see?