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.

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.

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.