Been A While

It's been a while since I really finished anything. It's just been too fearfully hot. My workbench is out in the garage, and during the high months of summer, working on a model just isn't a lot of fun. And sometimes it's nice to take a brief break and do something else for a change, like float in the swimming pool and drink altogether too much Newcastle brown ale.

But recently (meaning last week) the weather finally broke. It's still hot, but it's just hot, if you know what I mean, not fearfully, brutally hot. I can go outside without feeling like I've inserted my head in a pizza oven. So this weekend I started cleaning up my workbench, which gets a tad dusty when I'm not there every day, and finished a couple of projects I'd started before it got hot and which waited patiently for me to run out of Newcastle.

The top one is the Enterprise-E. I don't remember the scale, since I threw the box away ages ago. And since I also threw the instructions away ages ago, I wasn't entirely sure what colors were called out. So I simply spray-painted it with Tamiya Japanese Navy grey and added a few other shades of mostly acrylic paint. The decals had become damaged. There was some sort of brownish goo on half of the decal sheet. Spilled iced tea? Spilled Diet Coke? Spilled Newscastle brown ale? Ectoplasm? I have no idea. It took me a while to clean up the decal sheet, and I lost a few, mostly some of the escape pod hatch covers on the underside. It isn't my best work by any means, but as they say, any Star Trek model is better than no Star Trek model.

The dinosaur is the "new" Atlantis Tyrannosaurus Rex. I say "new" because it's really a reissue of an old Revell kit; some of the parts still bear the Revell trademark. I don't think it's particularly correct by the lights of modern research, and it isn't all that easy to assemble either. It absorbed titanic quantities of MEK and super glue, and even my largest wood clamps were unable to close up all the joints. It wasn't easy to paint either. Atlantis says it's molded in a color they call "reptile red". It's more like pumpkin orange. And I live in a desert that fairly teems with reptiles, and none of them were ever pumpkin orange (though there are "scorpion lizards" here with upcurved tails that are almost lemon yellow). Anyway, pumpkin orange is a bitch to cover. I ended up using spray cans for the sake of speed and convenience, and sort of feathered three colors for the undersides, flanks and top. I meant to go back and airbrush more detail, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked the spray can feathering.

So I left the airbrush alone. My compressor is set up right now for air tools anyway, and connecting my aging Model Master airbrush to 90 PSI air would probably not be a good idea. So I just detail-painted it and drew in the "panel lines" with a fine brown felt marker.

A while back I bought a new book about dinosaurs, thinking I'd use it for reference material, but I don't think I care for the paintings in the book. I'm sure they're accurate, or at least plausible, but I just have a hard time dealing with the interpretations of various theropods that make them look like big, pissed-off-looking chickens. So I went for something more green and minimalist. The model is far too large to handle during painting anyway, and I decided that a disruptive camouflage scheme would be harder to pull off than it was worth. And whatever the case, I still think it looks better than pumpkin orange. And I like green dinosaurs. Sue me already.

Next up: I bought the reissue of the classic Star Trek Romulan warbird. That sounds like a winner to me.

Zombie Truck

Sometimes I get stuck on various projects. They're either too hard, or they don't interest me, or I don't have the right paint, or the planets aren't aligned properly. Who knows why, but sometimes I get myself in a position where I simply never finish anything. I've been in that sort of rut lately - building a fair amount, but not finishing anything.

To try to get things moving again, I decided to set myself a mild challenge. I'd just written a 160,000-word novel that was my own take on the ever-popular (and very cliche) zombie apocalypse. One of the "characters" in that novel was a gun truck hastily assembled out of whatever came to hand. I decided to build a model version of the truck that appeared in my novel, building it in the same way that the characters in the novel built it - quickly, roughly, and with whatever came to hand.

The basis was Revell's "Tactical Truck" kit, a rough and fairly crude rendition of what I believe is an M34 six-by truck of roughly 1960s vintage. To supplement the truck, I allowed myself to use whatever I could find in one of my Tupperware junk bins, which included some 1/35th scale armor accessories and a bunch of scrap plastic and wood.

So what have we got? Plastic rod roughly welded across the windows and windshield. Pieces of plastic sheet scabbed onto the doors and roof as applique armor. A crude framework "welded" together to support a plywood roof. Heavy wood planks "bolted" to the sides to keep the evil undead from getting handholds and easily climbing into the truck (I ran out of Grandt Line nut-bolt-washers so you'll have to imagine there are enough bolts). An angled "zombie-catcher" made out of scrap plastic sheet and rod that's intended to keep roadkill zombies from getting into the radiator. Extra lights. A CB radio and a US Army radio that I believe came from a Tamiya Humvee kit.

Not seen in the back of the truck are a 55-gallon drum of fuel, about forty gallons of fuel in jerry cans, forty gallons of water in plastic jerry cans, some MREs, and all the ammunition cans I could find. There's junk on the roof, including a ladder, rope, scrap lumber, and a sand channel I made out of sheet plastic.

There's a .30-caliber Browning machine gun for the shotgun passenger. There's an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon at each "broadside" position. And to deter pursuit, there is a pair of .50-caliber M2 heavy machine guns at the rear corners. There are also various M16s and pistols here and there, and a couple of M60 machine guns thrown onto the roof just in case.

It looks pretty crude, but it was meant to look crude, and it was built in three days. But best of all, it's done. And it made a significant dent in my supply of junk, which isn't a bad thing either.

I think it needs shovels and more spare tires, but I couldn't find any in my junk bin. Life's tough when zombies attack.

And now, Even More Old Stuff

And still more old stuff. At this rate, I'll run out of things to photograph sometime in the year 2045.

This is a 25mm white metal figure of a "mounted wraith". It's probably by Ral Partha, but I don't remember. Oh, come on, who are we fooling, it's a Nazgul, just going by a different name. I thought the skinned, partially skeletal horse was a fun touch, and I liked the idea of mounting this hideous bloody thing on a pastoral base with trees and grass, sort of a "Extreme Cage-Fighting invades the Shire" kind of effect.

A GHQ 1/24ooth scale wargaming model of the Japanese aircraft carrier Zuikaku, as it appeared on the morning of December 7th, 1941. Except that the real Zuikaku probably wasn't mounted on a slab of balsa wood...

A tiny ship model intended for wargaming use. This was made by GHQ, and I think it's 1/1200th scale USS Constitution. Funny how it can sail without any crew or rigging at all... But since it's a wargaming model, it's intended to be moved by a wargamer's thick, clumsy fingers, not wind, so who needs a crew, huh? It used to have itty-bitty flags and pennants, but alas, it turns out that 1/1200th scale flags and pennants have a shorter half-life than atoms of Einsteinium.

More wargaming models. These are 1/2400th scale "Micro-Nauts" sold by GHQ. They're fabulously detailed considering their size, though they'll drive you half-mad in assembly, and fully mad in painting. The ship in the foreground is the light cruiser USS Phoenix, CL-46. It survived World War Two and was subsequently sold to Argentina, where it was renamed General Belgrano and eventually sent to Davy Jones's Locker courtesy of the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror. The ship in the background is the USS Montana, BB-70, a proposed "super-Iowa" battleship with an additional triple 16-inch turret aft. Though some metal was cut and welded, none of the super-Iowas were ever finished, though if memory serves the bow of one was grafted onto one of the Iowas after it was damaged.

Delta Schwarz! I think this was a Dragon or DML 1/16th scale "Delta Force" figure. I built it pretty much out of the box, but decided that I wanted to experiment with a "night urban" camouflage uniform of light grey, intermediate blue and black, with gunship grey webbing.

More Older Stuff

More of my older stuff, posted mostly because I don't currently have anything new worth putting up.

The Ray Harryhausen homage. I had 25mm white metal skeletons. I had a plaster casting of a rock that I picked up during a camping trip in northern Montana. I combined them. The rock casting was going to be a rock face in my oft-contemplated but rarely-worked N-scale railroad layout. Yes, Virginia, there was a time when I thought I'd turn into a model railroader, despite the fact that the only thing I know about trains is that they snarl morning traffic something awful. But in the end, I realized that I liked building the vehicles and structures and didn't particularly enjoy the actual railroad part of the model railroad. Besides, you can't put 25mm skeleton warriors on a model railroad layout. Oh, I suppose you could, but you wouldn't have much credibility with the trainspotters afterwards.

And now, a scene from the movie The Land Before Common Sense. It's a 25mm vignette of a mostly-naked warrior woman type with three "hunting velociraptors", as they were described on the package. Well, why not, I guess. Once you've crossed the line and started making dioramas using Dungeons & Dragons figures, you might as well stop quibbling about things not making a lot of sense.

More 25mm figures, mostly because I like the one in the middle. Women, futuristic motorcycles, and automatic rifles - it's like a "guy movie" all by itself. The one on the left is supposed to be a witch, I think, but mostly she looks annoyed, as though she's tired of having to sweep up after the others all the time.

This is the oldest figure in my collection. It was called "The Ultimate ATV", but that's all I remember. It's top-heavy and it falls over a lot, and every time it does, another piece flies off and vanishes.

The oldest "serious" historical miniature in my collection. It's from Post Militaire, and it purports to be a Japanese general somewhere in Korea, which I imagine makes him unpopular with the Koreans. It's so old it was painted mostly with old Polly-S paints - remember those? I copied the Japanese characters on the banner from a book about the samurai. It supposedly reads "The Men of High Purpose Stand for Such-and-Such A Thing" but my inexpert copying probably turned it into "Onionskin Underpants Make Terrible Umbrellas".

Older Stuff

I don't have anything new to post, so I thought I'd post some pictures of some of my older work.

Countess Karnstein. I think the manufacturer was Soldat, alas, long since out of business. This was in a brief phase where I thought I might specialize in largish-scale resin fantasy figures. The main downsides of these sorts of figures are that they're fairly expensive, and they're somewhat hard to explain to friends who don't actually go in for this sort of thing.

A German 120mm mountain soldier, manufacturer unknown (but it might have been Verlinden). Yes, he's missing the barrel of his MP-40, which one might say ausgeschnappened off. This was in a phase where I thought I might specialize in largish-scale resin historical miniatures (or "toy soldiers", as some in my family insist). As a matter of personal choice I don't often do models of SS soldiers or equipment, but this is one of my exceptions.

Another one of my quirks - I like to make small dioramas out of small models that are normally intended for tabletop wargaming. Here we have a European Combine Cyber-Tank (foreground) bypassing a disabled and burning Ogre. The Ogre has a couple of shot holes through the glacis, and the smoke is steel wool. I modified the Cyber-Tank by hacking off the two blunt and unimpressive main guns and equipping it with a new main gun made out of brass tubing. I don't remember who made these white-metal models, but they're intended for use with the classic wargames from Metagaming called Ogre and GEV.

Say it isn't so! A small sampling of my extensive collection of 25mm white-metal figures intended for games like Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowrun. Yes, I have played a fair amount of D&D in my day, but I never actually played Shadowrun because I could never figure out the rules. But they had great figures, like the greenish Mohawked ogre who's carrying the Vickers machine gun as his primary weapon.

More of my 25mm figures. I think most of these are from Ravenloft and Shadowrun. I don't paint many of these figures any more since my local game store did my budget a huge favor and went out of business. I bought a boxful of their old stock for pennies on the dollar when they were closing up and I still have a few I haven't painted, but for the most part 25mm figures are a taste I rarely indulge these days.

AMT Payhauler

Another old soldier who wouldn't die - the AMT 1/24th scale International Payhauler 350 mining dump truck. I like mining trucks and mining equipment in general, and I wish there was more of it - but if a 50-ton mining truck occupied that much space on my bench for that long, imagine what a Caterpillar 979 would be like! I get the vapors just thinking about it.

It's a big kit, with a lot of parts, and it sucked up a sizable quantity of paint and cement, to say nothing of an awful lot of time spend sanding and scraping seams. And then, even after all that, when I was done I saw giant ejector pin marks on the upper lip of the dump box, and had to stick a couple of sacrificial boards to the upper edge to hide them. Why is it that such egregious flaws only become apparent after you've taken the pictures?

I started this giant quite a while ago, and worked on it in little fits and starts for probably two years. It spent so much time in storage I had to evict a colony of beetles from the wheels.

I tried to represent the banged-up appearance of the bed by painting it with a patchy coat of red-brown and then another patchier coat of steel. I don't know if it worked or not. And sharp-eyed viewers may note that I haven't installed the hydraulic dump ramps yet. I will - just as soon as I find them!

Phew

What is this? The battle of Wolf 359? Looks like it, but no - it's the whole collection of small-scale AMT Enterprises, more or less finished and hung from an upside-down base from a larger Enterprise-E kit. These have been hanging around the workbench for a very long time, getting in the way, getting broken, getting dusty, and generally getting nowhere. I still intend to build a somewhat more formal base for them, but this morning I decided to just hang them up for now so they'd stop accumulating unnecessary wear and tear. And, perhaps more important, so they'd be out of the dang way so I could work on something else.

Another problem child. This is the Revell 1/72nd scale DH.2. It's actually a fun kit to build, its rather spindly appearance notwithstanding, and other than the dreadful Lewis machine gun, it's actually pretty nicely detailed as three-buck Revell kits go. Don't get me wrong, this is no Roden kit, let alone a Wingnut Wings offering, but considering what you pay, it isn't bad. Unfortunately, I misplaced its decals. I'd confess that I lost them, but it seems that in the 21st Century, we aren't required to take responsibility for any mistakes we make, so I'm going to insist that society stole my decals. For a while I was going to apply a set of Belgian roundels to it, simply because I had them, but they were a bit too large, and I dithered, and the kit went nowhere for a long, long time.

Then I bought a Gloster Gladiator, which just happened to have spare RAF roundels that would work. HUZZAH!

So there it is - done enough that I can say it's done so I can finally work on something else. Like the 2001 Moonbus, which calls to me.