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.

Lindberg Snark

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.

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croaked, and since my digital camera only saves on 3.5-inch floppies, well, I was sort of stuck (yes, I know my camera is obsolete, but I'm fond of it anyway).

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

Trumpeter 1/35th SA-2 Missile

The SA-2 "Guideline" has been a staple of Warsaw Pact air defenses since the earliest days of the Cold War. The effectiveness of the missile is debated by experts, but it can be said that an example shot down Gary Powers's U-2, and another shot down an F-117 over Serbia, the two incidents separated by some forty years...

I really wanted the SA-2 missile mounted on the trailer with the ZiL prime mover, but my local hobby shop didn't have that kit. All he had was the SA-2 on the launcher, and he looked like he needed a sale, so I cowboyed up and bought the one I didn't really want. This was my first Trumpeter kit, and it reminded me quite a bit of Dragon - excellent detail coupled with a strong tendency to over-engineer. But with such a simple kit, the over-engineering never got too carried away, except for those molecule-sized knobs that were supposed to go on the access panels on the launcher. I can't see things that small, let alone handle them, so I declared them to be officially over the top and left them off.

Still, the missile didn't take but an hour to assemble, and the launcher not much more. Fit was excellent throughout, the missile requiring only a few desultory swipes with a sanding stick to erase the seams entirely, and the launcher's square-sided boxy nature made seams irrelevant. A couple of hours of assembly and we were on to the painting stage, which took about fifteen minutes - a coat of light grey on the missile and a coat of desert yellow on the launcher (Egyptian service, doncha know). The paint callouts were a bit amusing. Trumpeter has occasional problems with translation like the really old Tamiya and Bandai kits, and among other things the instructions called for the use of "Nary Grey" and "Stian White". I especially like nary grey, which to me suggests such a lack of grey it must be yellow...

The decal sheet contains about four evening's worth of stencil decals, a mixture of actual stencils and bands that wrap around the missile. Something went wrong with mine because the decals kept breaking into chunks, and as I attempted to maneuver them back together, they broke into sub-chunks. I was able to salvage most of the decals, but nevertheless the tedium of having to reassemble each and every decal out of three or four jagged hunks left an extremely sour taste in my mouth. Is this characteristic of Trumpeter decals, or did I just get a bad set?

Still, for all the pain and aggravation the decals caused, they really sell the model - the missile is plentifully covered with stencils in Cyrillic and they really look good. Missiles often end up looking like featureless painted telephone poles, but this one has some nice visual interest with the red and black stenciling. Curiously, one stencil is in English: there's a band at the top of the rocket, just below the radome, that reads "No Photography". Never one to disregard instructions, I elected to not take any photographs. (Actually, my camera battery is dead.)

In conclusion, it's an easy kit to assemble and it builds into a large, striking and nicely detailed model, but I found the decals tedious and annoying.

Von Braun Finis!

Well, I think I'm finally done with the Von Braun Three-Stage Ferry Rocket. This is as done as it's ever going to get, anyway. Please ignore the dinosaur in the upper right corner; he was cautioned several times about not blocking the shot and there he is...

Anyway, what's relevant? Note the cut-down delta wing and the end caps on the shuttle itself, which I think looks better than the humungo-wing on the original part. Also note that I finally did add instrumentation pods to the tips of the first-stage fins. Two of them are cut-down bits of anonymous 1/72nd scale AIM-7 Sparrows; the other two are cut-down 5-inch "Holy Moses" rockets from a Monogram 1/48th scale P-38 Lightning kit. They're faired into the fins, and the fins are faired into the fuselage itself, with multiple layers of white glue.

What else? I lost the tube that represented the third stage, so while I was looking for stuff to make the pods from, I kept an eye out for tubular plastic. I used a 500-pound bomb from a Monogram 1/48th scale B-29 Superfortress; all I did was saw the fins off. It's slightly larger than the couplers and gives the third stage an appealingly chubby look.

The original kit decals failed in a weird way that I've never seen before: the ink was water-soluble, so that by the time the carrier had released from the paper and was ready to go onto the model, about seventy percent of the ink had washed off. I ruined enough of the decals finding this out that I threw them all away and grubbed around in my decal collection until I find a sheet from an old AMT 1/200th "Man in Space" set, which donated some of its Saturn V markings to the cause.

The paint is mostly of the hardware store variety. The yellow is "Marigold", while the white is plain old hardware store semigloss white, and the red is hardware store barn red. The black is Tamiya semigloss black lacquer, while the silver is Testors two-part lacquer, a color I believe is called "Plymouth Silver" or something like that. I'd go look, but last time I checked, there was a wasp buzzing around in the garage and knowing the exact paint color isn't worth risking getting stung.

By the way, I like the Testors two-part lacquers a lot. They spray nicely even out of a spray can, they cover well, they have a good semigloss sheen without the gloss sealer, and they are hard and durable once dry. I especially like them on natural metal aircraft models, where they are much tougher than Metalizer and dry much faster than Chrome Silver.

New Ware Last Men on the Moon

Here is New Ware's 1/24th scale vignette of Gene Cernan (with the red stripes) and Jack Schmitt (sans red stripes) prospecting on the surface of the moon. Everything you see here comes in the kit, except for a few pieces of wire that I snipped out of the innards of a defunct radio. Each astronaut consists of a mere handful of parts - a main body including boots and gloves, a separate helmet, a separate backpack, two sample bags, and a camera. The casting was quite good. Note the shaft of the scoop in Schmitt's hand. That's a resin casting, not a piece of wire, and that attests to the quality of the casting, the relatively supple nature of the resin, and the restrained nature of the pour plug.

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This was one of the first models I finished after my heart attack and surgery, and I chose it because it was easy to work on in bed. The mold parting lines didn't require a lot of work, there wasn't a whole lot of assembly, and the pour plugs were not difficult to deal with and didn't require heavy machining.

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Painting, on the other hand... After assembling the figures all the way (except for the scoop) I sprayed them with eight or ten coats of hardware store flat white paint, which helped to fill in the few tiny holes and tooling marks I found on the figures. It also accounted for about 90% of the painting, since the astronauts are, as a first approximation, entirely white. As a second approximation, they're almost entirely white. I used acrylic paints for the recognition bands, connectors, gloves, boots and Velcro bits, and stainless steel metalizer for the camera cases. Then it was time to shadow the figures, which I did by mixing up a wash of Testor's Engine Grey and basically dunking the figures. I find white very hard to shadow. I always end up turning the white highlights into dull grey, and these figures are no exceptions. They are more grey than they should be and they don't "pop" like the astronauts in full sunlight did in photographs, but in this case I think I prefer the overly grey appearance because it shows off the detail in the suits better than a whiter and more monochromatic finish would have. Rather than paint the helmet visors gold or black, I tried to paint reflections of the sky and lunar surface onto the curved surfaces, and then covered them with several coats of Future to give them a gloss sheen. I'll leave it to viewers to determine how well I did.

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I painted the base with Tamiya "deck tan" acrylic and subjected it to a heavy wash of the same Engine Grey color (using a different color might have made the figures and the base appear to be lit by different light sources) and then after it dried I scrubbed the base with various tan, brown, black, orange and iron oxide red pastels. I use heavy white-bristled brushes for this sort of work and usually don't have to scrape or sand the pastel sticks; the brush does a good job of removing the material. I tried to produce an uneven blob of patchy oranish soil around their feet to simulate the volcanic glass beads that the astronauts found in real life, though overcoating with Dullcote took some of the brightness off of my orange patch. While I was at it I brushed pastels on the the astronauts' legs, boots and gloves. The last construction step was assembling and painting the scoop stainless steel, and then gluing it into Schmitt's hand.

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The decals were comprehensive, very well printed, thin, responsive to Micro-Sol, and tiny. So tiny that I lost a few in what amounts to thin air. I plucked them off the decal backing sheet with the tip of a #11 knife blade, but then they simply vanished. Fortunately New Ware provides two identical decal sheets so there were spares, though to be honest I didn't put on all the decals on the front of the PLSS backbacks, and I never did figure out from the instructions where decal #15 (a fairly large stencil) goes.

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All in all, I was quite pleased with this kit. On the good side, it featured easy assembly, good fit, modest pour stubs, flexible resin, very few pinholes, good surface detail, a nice base, excellent decals, and good instructions as far as they went. I could have used more comprehensive decal placement instructions, myself. But on the whole, very well done and a hoot to build.

Monogram 1/32nd Apollo CSM

This is a classic in spacecraft modeling, though most serious spacecraft modelers seem to be less than enthusiastic about the transparent panels and the gold-plated CM exterior. I like the see-through panels, though I concede that comparing the model to photographs reveals that the kit's interior detail leaves a lot to be desired. One of the most annoying aspects of the CM interior in particular is the way Monogram chose to put most of the "detail" on self-adhesive stickers. And that leads me to the main modification I made to the kit.

The top photograph shows it best - this is RealSpace Models' Apollo CM interior detail set, which consists primarily (but not exclusively) of the instrument panel. It's a vast improvement over the old Monogram sticker, though inserting and trimming the forest of switches almost drove me to strong drink. No, who am I kidding, it DID drive me to strong drink. But it's work well spent, even though the finished detail set is almost invisible from most viewing angles.

The middle photo shows the other modification I made. The kit supplies three spacesuited crewmen who are very nice from the helmet seal down, but awful from there up. Their heads are simple globular blobs, no doubt meant to show that they are wearing their bubbletop helmets, but I never figured out how to paint such things realistically. Instead I sawed off their bubbleheads and fixed up the resulting carnage with epoxy putty, then borrowed three heads from an Airfix 1/32nd Multi-Pose US Infantry set and worked them over with sandpaper and putty until they looked like they were wearing the proper Apollo headgear. Then I attached said heads to the figures, adjusting their angles so none of them were quite looking in the same direction. In the middle photo you can just barely make out a blurry head.

One will also note that the SM is missing several RCS thrusters, and the heavy coating of "space dust" on the high-gain antenna. The model has been in storage a couple of times and has been knocked off a shelf by a cat at least once, and it's accumulated its fair share of minor damage.

If I were to redo this kit, I would do the things I did before (use RealSpace Models' interior detail kit and replace the bubbleheads with Multi-Pose heads) but I would add several more things to the list. First, I would drill out the CM RCS thruster ports and replace them with tubing of some sort. This would be a lot of work, but it would look better than red-and-black decals. Second, I would strip the CM skin and cover it with strips of Bare-Metal Foil. Third, I would seek to tone down the beefiness of the high-gain antenna, perhaps by using photoetched parts. And fourth, I think I would skip the transparent panel on the SM, either that or add extensively to the SM's interior detail. As it is, it looks almost disturbingly empty aside from the huge brown hydrazine tank.

Revell 1/24th Gemini

Here's a rather nasty overexposed picture of my Gemini spacecraft. The older I get the more light I seem to need, and my workbench incorporates an overhead "light rack" with two halogen floods and a central halogen work light, and I also use two incandescent lamps as side fills. It gets a little hot, not to mention a little buggy, under all that light, but I have a hard time building in the dark.

I took a four or five year hiatus from modeling a while back, for various reasons (getting married being high on the list of reasons) and the Gemini was one of the first things I built after getting back into the hobby. Consequently, it isn't terribly good, and spending a year in storage and going through a couple of house moves didn't do it much good either.

I built it entirely out of the box. The finish is hardware store flat white and hardware store flat black, though I lightly sanded the flat white until the grey plastic of the raised hatches, screws and access panels just started to show, and I rubbed the flat black with graphite I harvested by rubbing a common pencil on a piece of sandpaper. I like the graphite-over-black look; it looks more metallic than just flat black, but it doesn't look overly metallic either. The crew and interior were painted for the most part with acrylic craft paint, and I used red craft paint, an extremely stiff brush, and masks made from masking tape to stencil on the red Velcro strips.

I'm pleased with it because it represents my return to a hobby I love, but I'm displeased with it because I think I could have done better.

Tamiya 1/48th V1

Tamiya's 1/48th scale V1, shown here in postwar US markings when the US Air Force and US Navy launched a number of captured examples to gain experience with jet-powered cruise missiles (and yes, the V1 was a cruise missile, just a fairly primitive one). The kit is very easy to build and features good fit. Building and painting the V1 are about as easy as falling off a log, so long as you leave the pulsejet off until everything has been painted. I painted the V1 itself hardware store orange paint, which turned out to be pleasingly glossy, and sprayed the pulsejet with Testors burnt metal and the innards of the pulsejet with Testors steel. The ground-handling cart got a coat of Luftwaffe schwartzgrau and some fairly sustained silver drybrushing to recreate wear and tear, especially on the steel wheels.

I don't remember if the markings came from the Tamiya kit or not, to be perfectly honest, but if they didn't, then I have no idea where I came up with the checkboard rudder marking.

Monogram 1/48th Lunar Module

Monogram's 1/48th scale Lunar Module, believed by many people (all of them smarter than I am) to be one of the best mass-market plastic spacecraft models ever made. It models (somewhat inaccurately) an LM from an early mission, perhaps Apollo 11 or Apollo 12, and would need extensive modification to represent later and (to my mind anyway) more interesting missions.

I built it straight out of the box with only one exception - I replaced the kit-supplied foil with a bunch of gold foil taken from Rollo chocolate candies. At first I used gold foil from a subspecies of Hershey's Kisses, but before I got very far into it I found that the Rollo foil had a somewhat deeper and more coppery color.

The kit isn't hard to build, though the legs and thruster blast shields in particular take a bit of patience. The hard part is putting on all the foil (which always reminds me of Slapshot). I attached the foil using Alleene's Tacky Glue (I think that's what it's called; it amounts to sticky and thick white glue), and tore the foil rather than cut it so when small pieces overlapped nobody would be able to spot a straight trim line. It took a long time, probably longer than building and painting the rest of the kit in its entirety, but the foil is such a characteristic feature of the LM it seems a shame to not try.

Of note are the recessed areas in the base. These are meant to be painted flat black and would reproduce the stark, deep-black shadows seen in lunar photography. Under the right lighting conditions (especially when "real" shadows don't cross the "false" shadows) it can be quite convincing, though I found jet black too stark and drybrushed it with light grey to relieve the Stygian darkness just a little. In this picture the shadows don't look very dark, but it's mostly an artifact of the photograph; on my shelf they look plenty dark, but on my workbench (where the photograph was taken) there are enough halogen candlepower to make even black velvet look grey.

Academy 1/288th SCA

This is the Academy SCA ("Shuttle Carrier Aircraft") with Shuttle payload. I can't remember the scale, actually, but comparing it with an STC-Start Buran suggests that it's 1/288th scale.

It's an easy kit to build. Neither the 747 nor the Orbiter consume a lot of parts, and the only real trick is getting the combined blue cheat line and window decal on straight. I laid down a strip of thin Tamiya masking tape to establish a straight line, then masked the white so I could spray the grey. Once the masking tape was removed, I used the ege of the grey line to help align the cheat line decal. It didn' want to fit terribly well at the nose, so I mixed a little blue acrylic paint to match the decal to tidy up the mess. I elected to leave off the main engine fairing and marked the Orbiter as Discovery. If I have any real complaint with the kit, it is that the main windscreen for the 747 is molded in transparent orange plastic, the same stuff that the stand is made from. If I were to do it again, I'd fill the windows entirely and replace them with bits of black decal film.

It's not a wonderland of detail and the decals, while acceptable and workable, are not profuse. But still, it builds into a nice-looking model without making one gnash one's teeth. One may want to replace the vertical fins on the ends of the horizontal stabilizers because the kit-supplied ones are probably about six feet thick in scale, and if (like me) you didn't drill out the holes for the pylons, you're left having to eyeball their placement and alignment. But there's nothing in here to daunt a halfway competent modeler.

Airfix 1/72nd Bristol Bloodhound

I've always been fascinated by the British Bloodhound and American Bomarc missiles, and that's not very surprising since they have a lot in common. They were both big ramjet-powered surface-to-air missiles, and they were both plagued by development problems. Bomarc left the US inventory fairly quickly, but the Bloodhound served as Britain's primary home defense missile until it was finally phased out in the 1980s in favor of the Rapier SAM and the Tornado interceptor. Now most surviving Bloodhounds serve as gate guards outside RAF bases and museums.

I happened to be on a business trip in England many years ago and was wandering through Harrod's when I happened to see the old Airfix Bloodhound kit on the shelf. I bought it - how could I not? - and packed it home in my suitcase, and after many years finally got around to building it.

It is an entirely typical Airfix kit with one welcome exception: they left out the heavy fuzz of rivets that they always seem to put on everything else. But by and large, it's classical Airfix. It's simplified and blocky and even a little crude, but it's also easy to build and very inexpensive.

The missile itself is quite simple and builds up very quickly. The fit was pretty good, and the only real improvement I made was inserting pieces of thin brass tubing in the ramjet exhauts, which were oval and ragged. A little white glue filled the gap between the tubing and the stock ramjet exhausts, and after that, it was just a matter of masking and painting. I left the solid-fuel boosters off so I could mask and paint thems separately. Attaching them later reveals that there are no positive alignment features for them. Once again I used my calibrated Mark I eyeball for alignment, and it came out pretty well.

The launcher isn't as nice as the missile. It sports a bit of rivet fuzz and the shapes are heavy and coarse. I couldn't think of a convenient way to fill the gaps so I dabbed white glue into them and elected to ignore them. Still, given a coat of RAF dark green paint, it looks okay. It doesn't draw attention away from the missile, and I guess that's the main thing.

The kit comes with a Land Rover, a Rube Goldberg trailer, and a few figures including a dog. The figures are actually pretty good, and how many 1/72nd scale dogs do you see? I put them in storage pending better uses for them, and slammed the trailer and Land Rover together in finest quick-and-dirty fashion. The Land Rover in particular isn't very good and I didn't feel like putting much time into it. I filled its gaps, sealed the yawning holes in the wheel hubs with tiny disks of plastic, and painted it and the trailer very dark blue to hide as much detail as possible.

But don't get me wrong, I do like the kit very much. The Land Rover is bad, the trailer is fairly bad, and the launcher is fair, but the missile and figures are pretty good.

1/48th Pegasus XL

And who said print is dead?

Here's a 1/48th scale paper model of a Pegasus XL booster, in this particular case dressed as it was when it launched HESSI. The kit is available as a PDF from Philippus Lansbergen. I can't provide a direct link to the download as the artist asks one to not link directly to the model page, but it can be found by going here:

http://www.lansbergen.net/eng/index.htm

And then clicking on the "Models" button on the left side of the page.

It is pretty complicated for a paper kit, involving a lot of layering and creasing to reproduce the proper thickness of the fins and wing, but it's certainly not impossible. And frankly, as one can probably guess from the serious mess I made of the payload fairing, creasing and layering are something I can handle; making rounded or ogival nose cones is something I can't handle.

This particular example was printed on a Epson Stylus C66 printer, certainly not a high-end printer, on 67-pound stock. I enjoyed the built a great deal, except for the flush of shame that the wretched payload fairing gives me. Don't let the payload fairing deceive you; this is an excellent kit.

Condor 1/72nd A4b

The A4b can be thought of as a manned V2 with wings. Apparently it didn't excite von Braun as much as the more elegant A9, but I still find the shape of the A4b rather evocative. Like Condor's A9, it consists of a V2 with a sprue of extra parts, mostly the large wings and the enlarged fin trim tabs (yes, I know they aren't really trim tabs in the modern sense, but that's how I think of them. Sue me already).

Assembly was pretty straightforward, except for adding the wings. They are butt-jointed to the fuselage, and whenever you butt-join a flat surface to a cylinder, you get gaps. I filled them with auto body filler and sanded them out, and replaced the basic seat with a better one I found in my junk box. I decided to show the canopy open, but I couldn't find any source that told me which way the canopy opened. Despite my hunch that it was a clamshell-style thing, I cut it in half and hinged it forward, like early MiG-21s, because I happen to like that look.

Oh God, another launch table! The same comments pertain. It's not easy to build, and most of the small parts are afflicted with parting lines, and I was never sure if I was putting the right parts in the places, but if you keep it all aligned and don't mind scraping a lot of tiny parts, it builds into a nice table that is actually sufficiently square it won't require any shimming.

I decided to build a "launch complex". The complex is entirely fictitious, as I never found any photographs of what a real A4b launch facility would have looked like. Guessing that the Germans would have mounted the boarding and umbilical tower on rails, I sacrificed a piece of HO EZ Track for its rails, and took a truck off an HO boxcar. I added a platform to the top of the truck, and then added a wooden dowel to that as a platform. This was dressed up with random bits and pieces of wood and plastic. The "boarding ladder" was snipped out of quarter-inch hardware cloth, and the various boxes and whatnots at the base of the tower are (I think) interior parts from an old 1/48th scale F-105. Not accurate at all, but they convey a reasonable sense of accuracy, I think. I drilled the A4b and added fuel and drain lines made from ordinary insulated wire (I like using that because one can eventually convince it to take a fairly accurate droop, something that one can't do with rubber tubing).

The base is a piece of plywood, and the raised launch platform was carved from a piece of Styrofoam. The whole works was covered with Durham's water putty and scribed to resemble concrete. The vehicle is the old Hasegawa Mercedes staff car, the six-wheeled one with the figure riding shotgun who isn't in any way meant to resemble Adolf Hitler.

Oh God, another splinter scheme... This one was entirely made-up; I picked a scheme of light grey, grauviolett, and black, and spent a week picking all the tiny slices of 3M tape off my fingers. The black was dead-flat out of the bottle and looked strange and rough compared to the other two colors, so I sat for a while with an old t-shirt and a tub of rubbing compound until the various colors had a similar sheen (even though I overcoat my models as a matter of course, the black would have looked rough and pebbly even under a clear coat).

The decals were a mixture of Condor decals (mostly colorful circles that ring the points where the hoses connect to the rocket) and stuff out of my supply of spare decals, which by this point was virtually depleted of white Balkan crosses and swastikas (no great loss, one might say).

Condor 1/72nd A9

The Condor A9 kit can best be described as "the Condor V2 kit with an extra sprue of stuff." The only real change in the main fuselage halves is the provision of a hole where the cockpit goes. Construction is identical to the V2 kit except that instead of adding two fins at the base, one has to add two long wing-like chines that go almost the whole length of the rocket. It turned out to be less troublesome than I expected, though I did a lot of dry-fitting because there is no practical way of forcing ill-fitting chines against the fuselage (at least that I could think of). They aren't quite the same length either; I dressed the leading edges of the long one to bring them to the same length.

The interior parts consist of a couple of bulkheads, a seat, a stick, and a tiny vacuum-formed canopy. I somehow lost the canopy, so I filched a canopy from the Condor A4b kit and made a push-mold by pressing it into a block of warm clay. I let the clay cool overnight and pulled the canopy out, then poured in JB Weld. The resulting canopy was sanded, cleaned up, painted gloss black, and added to the model.

I couldn't face masking another three-color splinter scheme, so I decided on a hard-edged "vein" scheme of grauviolett and schwartzgrun with red fin tabs. The decals are a combination of Condor and spares; the swastikas in particular were taken from a Ministry of Small Aircraft Fw-190 sheet.

For some reason I didn't want to pose it on a launch table (or perhaps I just didn't want to build another launch table) so I scratchbuilt a Vidalwagen trailer out of brass rod, ABS "angle iron", wheels filched from an old Airfix tank transporter, and a variety of junk salvaged from the spares box. I added an old Hasegawa Sdkfz-7 prime mover and made a base out of a piece of pine and a bunch of Sculptamold.

Condor 1/72nd V-2

Here is my stab at building Condor's 1/72nd scale V2. The problem with photographing rockets is that their height requires me to stand quite a ways back, which means that no detail is visible. But I guess that's okay.

This actually is a fun to kit to build, within certain limits. The V2 itself only consumes a handful of parts, and the fit is pretty much what you'd expect from a limited-run kit - if you check, sand, fiddle and fuss, the fit is excellent. If you don't, well, be sure to have some putty on hand. The main corrective work involves butt-splicing two of the fins so they don't leave gaps, and doing something about the rather substantial offset between the two halves in the region of the nozzle. The nozzle insert and the steering vanes hide a lot of sins in this area, but some work is still called for.

The launch table is much harder to build. I didn't think the instructions exactly suffered from an excess of clarity, and there are a decided lack of positive locating features. I spent a lot of time eyeballing things and adjusting the alignment. It's fiddlesome work and there were some small parts I just couldn't figure out at all, but in the end you're rewarded with a pretty detailed launch table (if you build carefully, it'll even revolve, but I wasn't that careful).

The kit instructions include a four-view drawing of a V2 in splinter camouflage, but I used a scheme I found on the Internet. Is it accurate? I don't know, but it looks the part, and I half-suspect that no two V2s were quite identical anyway. I used Model Master panzer buff and panzer yellow, and Krylon olive drab, and lots and lots of sliced-up blue 3M tape. Have I ever mentioned what a drag masking a hard-edge splinter is?

I painted the launch table basic dark grey and oversprayed it with Burnt Metal metalizer, concentrating on the flame deflector in the bottom of the table.

To show some idea of scale, I threw in an old Hasegawa Schwimmwagen and a couple of figures on a base made out of Sculptamold and MDF.