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.

Airfix Hs 123

This, of course, is the Airfix 1/72nd scale Henschel Hs 123. The Hs 123 was a rugged and reasonably reliable sesquiplane (one-and-a-half wings) dive bomber used the Luftwaffe. It saw action with the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, but as the war progressed, it mutated out of its dive-bombing role and into general low-altitude attack missions, and ended its days on the Russian Front, flying alongside (and against) vastly more modern airplanes. But it was eventually phased out not so much because it was obsolete, but because the production line had been shut down for years and spare parts were hard to come by.

The Hs 123 is just odd enough to appeal to me, and I've always liked the Airfix kit of it. And a good thing to, because up until fairly recently the Airfix kit of it was the only kit of it there was. Like the real airplane, the Airfix kit is cheap, rugged, and undemanding. This is a relatively easy biplane to build because of the immense gluing surfaces on the rather monolithic interplane struts, but it's covered with rivets and the fit elsewhere isn't great, so you gets what you pay for.

I sawed off the enormous pilot headrest fairing because I think they look better without them, and painted it in a more or less fictitious Condor Legion scheme. The kit decals were very thick and a bit crispy, but at least they didn't blow apart like some Airfix decals I've tried lately.

I took the pictures on my wife's table, but they came out a bit dark. I was going to relight the airplane and try again, but I have such a headache right now; I'll try again later.

Lindberg Star Probe

Various views of the Lindberg "Star Probe". It must drive kit collectors halfway bonkers to see hacks like me actually build vintage kits like this one. Or maybe every time I ruin a vintage collector kit, the value of theirs, hermetically sealed in dry nitrogen in a radiation-proof safe, goes up.

Either way, I like models like this. I can't get enough of that vintage future-factual space stuff, perhaps because it takes my mind off our current near-futility in space. (And it probably drives the fans of unmanned space exploration bonkers when I say things like that, because unmanned space exploration seems to be enjoying a sort of Renaissance. And that's cool. But for me, anyway, what's the point of having a space program if somewhere in the fine print it doesn't have a manned landing on Mars as a long-range objective?)

I didn't use the kit decals, obviously. They'd become as brittle as the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the only way to save them would be scan them, clean up the digital image, and reprint them on decal paper. Given that my printer is being stubborn and my scanner went to its reward ages ago, I figured I'd use scavenged decals for the time being and, when I've worked out my office problems, I'll repaint the Star Probe and apply the refurbished decals. And I painted the portholes blue instead of red because I think the red ones are altogether too insectoid.

I love the little "specimen" (if you've seen The Right Stuff you know what I'm talking about) in their metalized Michelin Man suits.

One question, though: how exactly do the little specimen get from the habitation part of the ship to the ground? Am I to presume that somewhere there's a really long ladder lashed to the outside of the ship? Or maybe they shinny up and down on ropes? Probably no big deal on the moon; even I could handle that. But suppose Commander Falcon lands the thing on Mars - four tenths of a gee might be more than my slack forearms could deal with. But the alternative, I suppose, is to imagine a tunnel going through the middle of the propellant tanks and emerging somewhere between the clustered rocket engines, which doesn't seem like a good solution either.

Maybe the best approach is to open a beer, forget about it, and leave it all in Commander Falcon's capable hands.