Project status

Just a bit of an update on the various projects working their way through the production pipeline.

I've got color coats on the Xtrakit Canberra PR9 (the Hemp upper surfaces) and the first green on the upper surfaces of the Hasegawa F-111. Both will need some buffing followed by a surface coat, but they are proceeding well. I was able to repair the Alclad issues on the Trumpeter Lightning F6 by buffing down the surfaces and reshooting with one of the colors that does not seem to have the consistency problem. Again, it was White Aluminum, which strikes me as a bit bright for a NMF, but I won't have any more Alclad until I can try to source some from Sprue Bros later this week.

I also managed to be hamfisted enough to snap the front portion of the Lightning's canopy while applying the paint masks. For now I've just stuffed everything with paper towels to keep the paint out. I will be able to finish the model and decal it without those bits. I've already been in contact with Stevens Intl, the US distributor for Trumpeter. They will send me a clear sprue for the kit for $10 including postage. Not cheap, but it was my own fault, so I'll pay up.

At the same time I was shooting the Aluminum coat on the Lightning, I put an overall coat on the Toko Sopwith Snipe. A bit of detail painting, such as the wheels and leather surround for the cockpit, and decals are next for it. The decals are coming from the Model Alliance Silver Wings sheet, which I've been making great use of in the last year. This is like my fifth model using those two decal sets (three if you count the roundel sheet), with more to come shortly.

Over the last couple of days, I also got the wheel wells, nose cone, and exhausts painted for the next Eurofighter Typhoon. This is a two-seater, in line for 29 Squadron markings that came in the book/decal combo from Four Plus. I think this will give me models of three of the five squadrons currently in service.

I also got the canopy masked and the upper surfaces painted on the new Airfix Bf-110E. Though I think we'd all like it if the panel lines were a bit more understated, I think they look fine under some paint. And although I've heard that the vertical tail is undersized, the solution I've seen is to wrap a 5 thou strip of plastic around the outside and then sand it down. If the difference is really only 5 thou I guess I don't see what the issue is. Not sure you could even see the difference in two models standing side to side, one modified and one not. I certainly would have more problems trying to attach and sand a sliver of plastic to the outside of a tail surface than in ignoring the error. But that is why I am a Profoundly Average Modeller, I guess.

MPM Gloster Meteor F8

Now on to my other disaster of the week. It’s really in two parts too (these just seem to go on forever sometimes): one that turned out ok and one – well, less so.

The second incarnation of Alclad has been one of the great success stories of the modelling subculture. We all seem to fear the NMF monster, and Alclad has made achieving an excellent finish easier than it has ever been. The stuff really didn’t need a primer coat and generally sprayed on evenly with almost no capacity for errors.

A number of months back I ordered a few more bottles from Hannants to stock up on my Alclad supplies. But when I actually used them, some problems were apparent. It was as if there wasn’t enough pigment (ie metal) in the carrier. The surface was splotchy, the coverage was uneven, every little swirl in the underlying plastic showed through, and I even ran into paint runs because I was unconsciously opening up the airbrush’s paint valve due to the lack of coverage. It seemed to be the worst in two colors: airframe aluminum and dull aluminum. Luckily I was able to buff the model down a bit and reshoot with one of the colors that didn’t seem to be affected, white aluminum. Unfortunately, white aluminum is pretty bright, and is best for accenting individual panels rather than using as an overall color. The crew would have had to have been up all night polishing their Meteor to get it that bright. Still, one works with what one has.

The kit itself was a pleasant surprise. I dearly love MPM and their line of kits; they were one of the first to really take a full leap into the realm of less popular aircraft, producing kits in my scale and to a respectable standard. But you know that there will be some additional fettling that will be required to achieve the same result as you would see out of a Tamiya or Revell box. But their kit of the Gloster Meteor F8 was no more difficult than the DML F3 I recently built. Almost everything fit with a minimum of fuss, almost no filler/surfacer, and (as long as I didn’t let my native impatience get ahold of me) was a generally calm experience all around. Until I got to the paint shop.

Using one of the Xtradecal Meteor F8 sheets, I used the markings for RAF 1 Squadron, with white squadron bars outlined in red. There are a lot of options on the two F8 sheets they have released so far, so I basically just picked a set of markings that I hadn’t used before on any other postwar British fighter. As usual, the decals went on snugly. In general, except for the overly bright shade of the NMF, I was pretty pleased with the model as a whole.

This is completed model #346, finished in February of 2011.

(As an aside, and related to yesterday’s disaster tale, I had another bad experience with AeroSol, this time on Alclad pale gold paint. I was doing an Australian special paint job on a Douglas A-4 which required the gold coloring. When the time came to apply the decals, one part had to try and snuggle down over the Skyhawk’s wing fences. Out came the AeroSol. Which immediately turned that gold paint to a sickly greenish hue wherever it touched. I just assumed it was some weird chemical interaction between Alclad and AeroSol, but now that I’ve got more of a track record I think it was the AeroSol that had gone bad. I’ll find out by buying a new bottle of MicroSol with my next hobby order).

The model that didn’t quite survive as nicely as the Meteor is a Trumpeter Lightning F6. The paint is still pretty splotchy on that one. Overshooting with white aluminum does not seem to have done the trick. I may need to primer this one in grey and then try again. More details when I decide how to proceed.

Huma DFS 228

This is the first part of my tale of twin modelling disasters for the week. They involve two normally very reliable aspects of modelling techniques: Micro/AeroSol and Alclad.

The Micro/AeroSol disaster involves a recently completed model of the DFS 228 rocket powered experimental vehicle from the end of WW2. That would be the Huma kit, of course. It was one of the first kits where Huma pioneered the use of extremely fine plastic parts. These things were thin; more like a plastic version of photoetch than traditional short-run plastic parts. The parts were mostly for the cockpit, and unlike photoetch they used regular styrene glue. That is a vast advantage in my mind. But they were exceptionally fiddly, and are almost completely hidden when you install the cockpit into this particular aircraft.

I have always liked experimental aircraft, so I decided to use the decals for one of the test planes. It was in overall RLM02, no disadvantage either. The decals, like most from Huma, had a dead matte surface. Not an optimal choice, since it always seems to look a little different from the surrounding paint surface even if you bomb it with a top coat of semigloss. Huma decals are also notorious for being pretty thick and unwilling to conform to the model surface. I figured that a bath of decal softener might take care of that. And that is where I got into trouble.

I trimmed the decals down to reduce the amount of uncolored carrier film that was going to be on the model. So far so good. They went down well onto the Xtracolor gloss surface. Then I put on some AeroSol to soften them up. I noticed after a few minutes that the solution was actually changing the reflective surface of the paint. It was almost a slightly different color. Sensing disaster, I tried to daub off what was left of the liquid solution. And up came the paint along with it! Now I could see this happening if I were using acrylics, but these were enamels thinned with lacquer thinner. They should have been hard as a rock. I was able to soak up any remaining liquid by just touching it with a paper towel corner and left everything to dry overnight.

The next day I could survey the damage. A couple of thankfully small spots where the paint had come up, and some discoloration in a couple of spots. I was able to brush paint some patches – though these never end up being exactly the same shade as the sprayed paint. Hopefully the photos won’t show the problems.

The reason for the disaster? Beats me. This was in an AeroSol bottle (as in, produced by the late Aeromaster), so it is definitely an old bottle of softener. And Sol is a stronger formula than Micro/AeroSet. But strong enough to affect dried and cured paint? That is a new one on me. I will definitely be more careful to keep any setting solutions on the decal itself in future. Many modern decals don’t even need setting solutions, though I still use them in order to really get the decal down into the panel lines. Maybe the solution was old enough that it had evaporated a bit and distilled down to something stronger. Maybe it just needs some bottled water to thin it a bit. I’ll have to keep an eye on the issue in future models.

This is completed model #347, finished in March of 2011.

Hasegawa PBJ1

I need to get caught up on some of the models that have been finished over the last few weeks. First up is the Hasegawa B-25. I decided on the PBJ1 version used by the USMC, with the advantage of being painted an overall Gloss Sea Blue. The model went together as well as any other contemporary Hasegawa kit, and there was even an interior to work with, something that has not always been the case with this manufacturer. I used Xtracolor for the exterior paintwork. Paint masks by Eduard, but no photoetch.

The only odd engineering choice I noticed was all those tiny little bumps (each molded separately) on the two engine nacelles. I’m assuming that one of the variants that Hasegawa is making doesn’t have those particular bumps, though I’m no B-25 expert. Otherwise it wouldn’t make a lot of sense.

This is completed model #343, finished in February of 2011.

More snow in the Emerald City

The snow has landed here in the Emerald City. Not like they’ve been getting it in the Midwest and East (and even to the far south of us in the Sierras) but enough to send the drivers of Seattle into a panic. Barely enough to cover the roads right now, but we’re expecting more overnight. It’s a running joke that the Weather Service loves to try and make us panic ahead of time; they had predicted 6-10” out of this storm, when the total is likely to be more like 3”.

So that made the garage a pretty chilly paint room, but I did manage a marathon session. Six colors, which with prep and cleanup takes some time. I tend to plan on at least two coats (in two distinct sessions) when I’m laying down a color. The first is the color coat, meant to go on somewhat more concentrated so that it covers the plastic well. Then I hit the area with some high-grit sandpaper to take down any dust, uneven paint, or orange peel (though I really try to avoid that). Finally, I put on a highly thinned surface coat to bring everything back to gloss. As you can imagine, this makes preshading difficult – since the theory there is that you apply the paint thinly enough to allow the darker shading to show through – but that isn’t a technique that I use anyway. I’m not one for weathering. Besides, the backstory is that this is the world’s largest air museum, so I’m not trying to reproduce military field conditions in any case.

I should point out that even the color coat is not terribly thick. I learned from a longtime modelling cohort that the secret to paint is consistency: lots of stirring beforehand and a significant bit of thinning before you shoot. And I have to say the advice has served me well over the years. Sometimes I get lucky and the first coat doesn’t have enough imperfections to require buffing and reshooting, but more often than not I’m doing two layers.

So what did I accomplish tonight? The RLM78 undersurfaces on the new Airfix Bf-110E, the overall RLM02 coat on a Huma DFS-228, the Black lower surfaces on a Hasegawa F-111C, the overall RLM05 cream coat on a CzechMasters Olympia Meise glider, the Light Aircraft Grey lower surfaces on the Xtrakit Canberra PR9, and some tail and wheel Red on a Sopwith Snipe (for use with the recent Model Alliance Royal Navy sheets). Even with a respirator, that’s a real cloud of paint droplets!

In the last couple of days I’ve finished up a couple, which I’ll bring to the site shortly.

A new 1:72 website and forum

Before I go another step I need to give some love to another website I’ve just run across. It is a site and forum designed specifically for 1:72 modellers, called 72 Scale Aircraft. Here is a link to the forum:

http://z15.invisionfree.com/72nd_Aircraft/index.php?act=SC&c=7

There is a link to the home page on the forum, though the content there is still in the early stages. The forum is the primary point of interest, and for anyone that casually runs across this blog it will be right up your alley. It is run by Robert Rensch, who is adopting a light and casual style, though he is obviously interested enough to devote the time needed to make the site successful.

I post there under the name of "kingofmen". Just in case there are any Freddie Blassie fans out there.

Thoroughly recommended.

Production rate

I've got like half a dozen newly finished aircraft to catch up with on this site, but I wouldn’t want anyone to get the impression that the admittedly impressive model production of the last year is going to continue indefinitely. There were times while working fulltime that I couldn’t scrounge up the enthusiasm to glue two pieces of plastic together in the evening, let alone manage a paint session with three or four different paint colors. Now at least, with my biorhythms taking over and restructuring my sleep patterns (up at 10am and down at 3am), I have more energy in reserve in the evenings to devote to the hobby. Once I return to wage slavery, things will slow down noticeably, though I’ll try my best not to let it stop completely. In any case, according to my records I haven’t finished anything in the summer months, roughly late May to August, in the last 4 years anyway. Too much going on in the Great Northwest – whatever focus I have is being taken up by house, yard and garden maintenance, the occasional hiking trip, and of course our annual vacation. But I’m enjoying the ride while I can, at least until the financial ramifications catch up to me.

Construction today centered on the new Airfix Hawk T1. As I’ve said before, I like the engineering of the kit. Good fit, decent detail. One curve ball it threw at me was that it is caused a change in my decal choice. I had planned to use an Xtradecal sheet of an RAF display aircraft – the one with the roundel on the tail and underside. But the sizing and location of the gear bays on the new Airfix kit are a bit different than that of the Italeri kit, which the decal sheet was clearly designed for. And since that underside roundel has to fit amongst the gear doors and flap fairings, I think I will wait until I can apply those decals to an Italeri Hawk. The kit is already painted black, so it has to be one of the newer training squadrons. Maybe that 100 Squadron example with the skull and crossbones on the tail and the yellow-and-blue checked squadron bars. It all depends what I can find in the decal stash. At least I seem to have solved the paint problem on the fin – after sanding it down to the plastic and reshooting, it seems to have resolved itself. I’ve been building and adding the landing gear prior to decaling the model.

I also put a load of putty on the Xtrakit Canberra PR9. This was bought before the Airfix kit was available, and is a much more difficult build, even though the panel lines are considerably more restrained. Some of the fit is rather indifferent, and the wing gap needed help. I’ll be buffing down the putty over the next couple of days. Then it’s on to paint.

I’ve also resurrected the Huma DFS 228 from the boneyard. I had assembled the cockpit sometime in the distant past, but then lost interest. But yesterday I did some detail painting and got much of the nose together. Next up is the landing skid and fuselage/wing assembly.

Some people will chuck a kit if they haven’t finished it in a certain timeframe, or run into some obstacle that forces them to put it back in the slush pile. But I don’t typically do that. There have been some models that have been partially assembled for literally years, gathering dust in the garage, that have been cleaned off and finished, if only to get rid of my own guilt feelings. I can only recall two models that I ever chucked as being too frustrating to finish: the Roden He-111C airliner and the Kopro L-4 Cub. I mean, I’ve finished two Merlin kits, so bad kits don’t usually scare me off forever.