Emhar Gokstad Viking Ship

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.

Zvezda Trireme

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.

Zvezda Trireme

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.

Airfix "E-Boat"

I have problems sticking to a basic collection, as one may have noticed already, but I do happen to be pretty good at collecting 1/72nd scale torpedo boats. As in all of them, meaning all of the commercially available ones. The newest and arguably the spiffiest is the Revell S-100 Schnellboot, the last and biggest of the torpedo boats the Germans used in World War Two. But not too far down on the spiffy ladder is the old Airfix S-7, rather unhelpfully called an "E-Boat" on the boxtop and requiring reference materials to figure out exactly what kind of Schnellboot it is. Well, it's an S-7, decidedly prewar and almost unarmed compared to the S-100. I bet the guy out ahead of the fairwater on that single MG-34 feels confident...

Anyhow, it's a good kit. I don't know why, but Airfix's 1/72nd scale boat molds just don't seem to degrade over time. The Revell PT-109 is getting pretty ghastly - the figures alone are worthy of the Cryptkeeper's cackle - but the Airfix molds still seem to be in pretty good shape. Did they use better metal? Were they stored in a better environment? Did Airfix just make fewer of them? (Not on my account; I've disposed of three of their "E-Boat" kits over the years, and I do place emphasis on "disposed".)

Anyway, it's a nice kit. It's also relatively easy to paint. After finishing the minimal assembly of the hull and deck and spending several quality evenings sanding out the joints on the lower hull while watching Dr. G Medical Examiner, I spray-painted the whole works flat white. I decided that I would build it as though it were in the first year of the war, that is, very light in color, mast lowered, and no hull numbers. So flat white it was, though I had to take a black felt marker and scribble the word schnellbootweiss on my can of Krylon flat white so I could prove to quibblers that I really HAD painted it the right color.

Then I fixed up a card table by the TV and fetched some craft paint and painted the deck with a dark grey called "Charcoal" to represent the anti-marring coating the Germans used. Charcoal seems to be too dark. Compared to the white hull it's practically flat black. But it's what I had, and I figure once I apply a light grey wash over the ersatz schnellbootweiss it won't look quite so stark. It took about three coats to get good coverage, but that's why they make more than one episode of Dr. G Medical Examiner, isn't it? (I watch a lot of that show, as it turns out.)

It's been fun. And best of all, no grasshoppers.

My workshop is extraordinarily filthy these days. It's full of dust, grasshoppers, spiders, dead leaves, cigarette ashes, hair and God knows what all else. It needs to be thoroughly and vigorously cleaned before I can really contemplate doing much work out there. It needs the leaf blower, but running the leaf blower in the garage is hell on my respiration unless I wear a dust mask, and I seem to be fresh out. Damn!

Airfix 1/72nd Vosper MBT

Airfix has a fair to medium-bad reputation in the United States for making fairly unsatisfactory airplane kits. I happen to like them - they're inexpensive and readily available, and who cares of the engine nacelles on the Bf-110 aren't the right shape?

I couldn't tell you if the Airfix MBT is accurate compared to the genuine article, because I really don't know much about British MBTs (or much else). But as a kit, I think it's really very satisfactory and it builds up into a nice model that seems to positively brim with realistic deck clutter. It also has nice figures, which is fairly rare in boat kits - the old Revell PT-109 could take lessons from the Airfix kit in this regard in particular.

I have three complaints to make about the kit. The first is that the painting instructions are deceptive. They're accurate if you pay attention to the paint callouts, but if you naively assume that the tones of grey on the painting diagram model real life, you'll end up painting the boat as a photographic negative. The second is that when it comes time to assemble the hull, you need more hands than I seem to be equipped with. Four would be handy, three to hold the parts and one to apply the cement. And finally, the instructions are very vague on exactly how the ammunition drums fit on the forward 20mm twin Oerlikon. I eventually just glued them on and forgot about it, but I know my interpretation is incorrect.

But having said that, it must be said this is a very nice kit and a must-have for people who like largish-scale boat kits.