Time To Clean The Bench

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.