Lindberg Interplanetary UFO

Lindberg's "Interplanetary UFO" model.  I believe the decals used to be for the "USS Leif Ericson" but now it's the "USS Yuri Gagarin".  Which is okay with me.  The model came in greenish glow-in-the-dark plastic and I was tempted to leave it that way, but the fit wasn't good and I had to do some advanced filing, filling, sanding, and screaming to erase the seams, and that ruined the glow-in-the-dark effect.  So I painted it Fifties-style, all bare metal.  I also plugged the see-through engine nacelles with plastic bulkheads and glued science-fictiony doodads to the bulkheads (domes from an AMT Romulan Warbird on the front, and sprockets from an M113 to the backs to simulate "plasma thrusters" or something).  The paint is highly generic hardware store silver spray paint that I bought to cover up welds on fence panels - it works for models too, but MAN it goes on heavy.  Maybe that's a good thing.

The decals weren't bad.  A little fragile, but workable.  I sanded the raised windows off, knowing that I'd be using the window decals anyway.

A view of the shuttlecraft bay.  The decal sheet includes decals that simulate machinery on the shuttle bay bulkheads, which was nice of them, because the kit parts had scribbly engraving and looked troublesome to paint.  I scratchbuilt new shuttle bay doors out of sheet styrene and bits and pieces of Evergreen strip styrene, as the kit doors lent new emphasis to the term "clunky".

I still have some work to do.  The green paint on one of the engine domes is horribly smeared, and the model needs to be cleaned and overcoated, but by and large, it's pretty much done.  The one-sentence summary:  fun, but stock up on clamps and sandpaper before you start.

Airfix Roland

This is the venerable Airfix 1/72nd scale Roland CII "Walfisch", which must be one of the easiest biplane models to build (no cabane struts!).  I'd been feeling stuck in the middle of too many difficult projects and thought I'd just "do some Airfix", to quote James May.  The Roland isn't a great kit - no interior, and the machine guns are at best vague approximations of armament - but it isn't bad.  The pilot and gunner figures are a little odd-shaped but not bad, and the fit is generally pretty good.  And the decals are quite well-behaved.  I built it over the span of a weekend, a task eased by the fact that I could brush-paint it with Model Master acrylic RLM65 and not have to worry about much else.

Another notch in my "Aeroplanes of the Great War" collection.  Notable gaps are now things like the Gotha, the Handley-Page 0/400, the DH4, and Spads.  I have no Spads.  Why is that?  Poor planning on my part, probably.

Vision Check

Roden's itty-bitty 1/72nd scale SdKfz-234/1 armored car.  I included my hand mostly to show the small size of the finished model.  There is a staggering quantity of parts in the kit - 153, according to the Internet.  I found it a hard build.  Not because the fit is bad, or the kit is badly engineered.  It's just that it consists of a lot of parts, and many of them are desperately small.

Here is a brief summary of the modeling tools you'll find useful in building this kit:

1.  Tweezers
2.  Binocular magnifiers
3.  Roughly a quart of Old Grand Dad
4.  A CD of soothing music

The suspension is particularly alarming, mostly because the wheels appear to want to float on just the central half-axles, and there's no solid connection between the upper and lower control arms and the wheel backing plate.  I attached my wheels with copious quantities of super glue and managed to get them half-assed aligned, but for a while, despair was on the menu and I didn't think I'd ever get them on.

I painted it with Model Master acrylic panzer yellow, but it looks awfully green on the finished model, at least to my eye.  The same paint looks okay on 1/35th scale models, so I think it must be a scale effect.  Next time, I'll lighten it with radome tan or something along those lines.

And there will be a next time, because I also happen to have a Roden 1/72nd scale SdKfz-234/4 "PAKwagen" in my stash.  But I don't think I'll start on it any time soon.  At least not until my eyes uncross and I replenish my supply of whiskey.

Fujimi P-51D

The oldest kit in my stash:  an ancient Fujimi 1/48th scale P-51D Mustang.  It's pretty primitive by modern standards, and the alleged detailed Packard-Merlin engine is pretty laughable, but hey, it's progress.  Mustang aficionados will recognize the markings as Big Beautiful Doll, and will remark "Hey, isn't it supposed to have white and black checkerboards on the nose and wingtips?"  Yep.  But the decal sheet didn't offer them, and I didn't feel like masking and painting them myself.

I'm experimenting with a new phase in my modeling career called "Just build the damn thing already."  I know some people who suffer from terrible cases of Advanced Modeler Syndrome, where they can't start a kit until they have at least three different detail sets and twenty reference books.  I don't suffer from that syndrome, but I DO historically have problems deciding what to work on.  I don't know how many unbuilt kits are in my collection - too many, surely.  And sometimes I catch myself standing and looking at my collection and whining because I have "nothing I feel like building."  It's like the old Bruce Springsteen song "57 Channels and Nothing On" - I'm so spoiled for choice that I've become practically inert.

So the new phase:  whenever a kit slides off the pile and falls on the floor, I build it - whatever it happens to be.  Whether I feel like building it or not.  Whether I have detail parts for it or not.  Whether the decals are any good or not.  Whether I can find my airbrush or not.

So here it is.  It slid off the pile, and I built it.  It's brush-painted with Humbrol 56 (flat aluminum, I think) and a little Model Master olive drab.  It doesn't have the checkerboards.  It doesn't really pass muster.  And I didn't even bother with the pilot, who was misshapen to the point of resembling Zira in Planet of the Apes.  But at least it's done.

(I've had the kit for decades.  It's so old that the plastic bags containing the parts were breaking up into millions of tiny iridescent flakes.  I got the flakes all over myself, and when I saw myself glittering in the sun, I thought I was turning into a vampire.)  

Oh, Someday

I've been reading Finescale Modeler and Scale Auto magazines for about a thousand years, and over those years, I've been exposed to a great many really excellent modelers:  Paul Boyer, who I think deserves some kind of Lifetime Achievement Award for consistently great work.  Tony Greenland, whose weathering of German armored vehicles suggests that he applies paint with molecule-by-molecule precision.  Alex Kustov, who makes me want to build cars, and Juha Airio, whose cars are so good they look like miniature people could drive them away.

But today I speak of Lewis Pruneau, who is (deservedly) famous for building very large dioramas to a staggeringly high level of craftsmanship.  Pruneau's work is astonishing, but I rarely want to try to emulate it - it's just so damned big!  The thought of painting 100+ figures for one diorama daunts me, to say nothing of having no idea where I'd find a home for a diorama on such an epic scale.  I say rarely, because I once saw a Lewis Pruneau diorama in FSM that I really did want to emulate:  a diorama of a typical afternoon at the drag races, with a bunch of cars, a bunch of mechanics, a bunch of fans, and a bunch of general drag racing appeal.  Ever since, I've wanted to build something like that.  Not a part-for-part recreation, but my own take on a local drag race, such as those seen at Speedworld in Surprise, Arizona (near enough my house that I can hear the V-8s roaring on Saturday nights from my workbench).    

So here's my starting point:  two drag cars staged on my workbench.  I can't remember who made the kits.  One's a hatchback Nova (a car I'm quite fond of) and the other is a Chevelle, but past that, things are a blur. They've actually been quasi-finished for a long time, but the other day I happened to remember that the Slixx decals I'd ordered had long since arrived, so I washed the cars off and applied the desired Slixx offerings, mostly tire decals.  So there it is.  Not quite a drag racing diorama, but it's a start.

Drag aficionados will note many problems with these models.  The Chevelle has no side windows, and I think that's against the rules.  Neither has a fire extinguisher inside the car.  And there's a dead moth in the Chevelle that would be about three feet long in scale.  And I have no idea how to make sense of NHRA classes; I jotted down some classes and numbers the last time I was at the drag strip and painted them on, but who knows if they're right or not.  Certainly not I.  And certainly not anyone I know.  And if you look, you'll see that the Chevelle has a bracket time of 9.97 seconds, but the driver is wearing a short-sleeved shirt.  I think if you go that fast, you need to be wearing a fire suit.  Or at least should be.

The Nova is painted Testors Fathom Green, and the Chevelle is painted with some kind of dark grey metalflake, but it has a very rough finish and the flakes are way too big - the perils of hardware store metalflake, I guess.  Both have flat black hoods, and drivers cobbled together from Fujimi and Tamiya figure sets.  And just the other day I bought a reissue of the "Mongoose" top fuel dragster, and found that the kit came with an actual 'Christmas tree'.  So I have that going for me too.

The point is, someday I'll get around to building more cars.  I'm not sure when, but hey, I have to start somewhere.

Monogram P-39

To paraphrase The Most Interesting Man In The World, "I don't often build 1/48th scale airplanes - but when I do, I often build old Monogram 1/48th scale airplanes."  This is, of course, the rather elderly but still quite nice Monogram 1/48th scale P-39 Airacobra, which has a reasonable amount of interior detail, pretty nice fit, and raised panel lines.  It even has flattened main tires, but to me they don't just look flattened, they look flat.  

This was supposed to be a P-39D, with the four .30-caliber machine guns in the wings.  Which, after I'd assembled the wing, I realized that I'd forgotten to install.  DOH!  I read somewhere that the Soviets generally removed the wing armament from their P-39s to improve their roll rate, and maybe certain USAAF pilots did the same.  I couldn't find my airbrush, so I brush-painted the model with Model Master acrylic olive drab, and used some old Humbrol paint for the interior green.  How does one "not find" their airbrush? I store it in a little box, and I think I accidentally threw the box away during one of my intermittent declutterings of the workshop.  Well, since my airbrush was a pre-Aztek Model Master job, maybe that's for the best...

I think there's a goof in the instructions.  This same kit can be built as a P-39D or a P-39Q.  The P-39D markings are for a USAAF unit in North Africa, and the instructions say it should be painted olive drab.  The P-39Q is marked for a unit in the Pacific, and the instructions say to paint it sand.  I think that's backwards.  But since I had olive drab but didn't have sand, I rolled with it.

There are a couple of problems with the kit.  One is that you can't install the nose landing gear after the fuselage is assembled.  Another is that I just couldn't get the car-door windows to fit properly, and in the process of trimming and carving, I dropped the left-side window.  I have a hard enough time seeing dropped model parts on the floor, but a clear part?  Fuggeddaboudit.  I'll find it the next time I sweep the concrete - or not, I'm good either way.

It's not going to win any awards, but it was fun.  And I can't ask for more than that.

Finished Black Widow

Done.  More or less.  I'm not too excited about the kit-supplied base, because it makes it seem like she's off to visit the doctor.  And I swear I put the right boots on the right legs, but they still look like they're on backwards.

The paint is mostly Testors flat black, Testors metallic grey metalizer, and some anonymous dark grey acrylic (the label fell off the bottle, so I don't know what it is).  For the flesh, I generally prime with white spray paint of some sort, then apply a base coat of Delta "AC Flesh", and then apply selective washes of Testors rust.  For the hair, I applied base coat of very dark brown (Testors rubber) and then did a whole lot of drybrushing with various shades of craft paint.  The boots and eyes got a coat of Future floor wax (yes, I know, in the magazines they call it something like "Pledge with Future Shine", but to me, it's Future floor wax.  Period).

In the movie, Black Widow has hair so red it's almost orange, which I personally am not a big fan of, so I gave her a darker reddish-auburn hair color.  Hey, it's my universe.

The FAMAS rifle didn't come with the kit.  Years ago my brother and I went to Home Depot to get some boards for his patio cover, and as we were walking across the parking lot, I saw a plastic rifle on the ground.  It turned out to be the FAMAS, made out of some kind of stiff vinyl-like material, and surprisingly well detailed.  It was probably a weapon for an action figure, perhaps a French commando, and some kid dropped it.  Sorry, kid, but it will comfort you to know I still have the FAMAS and used it to give Black Widow a little more punch in the automatic weapons department.  And I happen to like the FAMAS.  I have no idea if it's any good as a rifle, since I'm not really a firearms expert, but I think it has a groovy shape.

If I were to do this kit again (and I will; I have a second one in the pile o'kits) I'll modify the boots because I think they look pretty awkward, and I'll make a different base.  And I already have a weapon for the second version, an M203 from an old Glencoe paratrooper model.  (I read a Black Widow comic some years ago where the KGB sent a new blonde Black Widow to find and kill the old red-haired Black Widow.  Why not?)