Woodo79

Airfix 1/72 Mosquito NF.Mk II Build thread here

Big push to the finish line! Canopy masked and painted then in position! Painting done while rewatching Season 1 & 2 of Twin Peaks, ready for the new series... Did the main body of the aircraft entirely in NATO Black with Flat Black for the prop blades to provide a bit of tonal difference. Finally some stretched sprue antenna wire, the decals, an oil wash and various varnishes (again to add a bit of subtle tonal difference to a very plain colour scheme) and we're calling it done! More images in the gallery. Thanks for tuning in. That was fun.

Ancient kit I picked up on the cheap at Edinburgh show last year just as something to play with. Finished ages ago just never got around to taking some pictures. Thanks for looking.

Right. Wings. Lots of bits... Moulding on the tailplane wasn't great. Uneven panel lines and a bit of deformity, nothing major but another symptom of age I guess. Also like a lot of parts, a lot of minor flashing around the edges that needed sanding off. Problem... the engine nacelle. This one has an outie where it should have an innie...! Cue a bit of creative drilling... That's better! Undercarriage wasn't bad. struts for the mud guard were badly warped though and took some gentle persuasion and gluing to get in place. Overall not a bad fit. It almost looks like a plane now...

Suspect some of the gapping might've been caused by my shelf modification being fractionally to wide, but yeah there was a definite lip too, you can see that on the pic of the top.

Did I really say "next the wings"? Don't be ridiculous. Look at the state of this fit... Deploy the filler! A few layers and sand downs later and it's going to look much more presentable once some paint's applied. It also now has a nose. OK, so maybe *now* the wings...

Nice work as ever. I think it suits the grubby look.

Yep, the void was bothering me too much so I decided it needed a shelf bodge job (scratch build is a bit grand for what follows) Lacking anything as refined as plasticard I cobbled together a basic shelf using packing cardboard, some CA and model filler. A few layers of filler and filing then a coat of paint and it was passable for the job at hand. Not a bad fit at all. Radio box painted up and in place and whole thing can now get closed up... Next: wings...

OK, first thing's first. Cockpit sorted. The pit in this kit basically has zero internal detail aside from a stick and the instrument panel (showing it's age) but when sealed up you're not going to see much anyway I guess (which is why I also cheated and couldn't be bothered dealing with the myriad ejector pin marks either) so there's that. A quick spot of cockpit green and a wee brown wash to dirty it up a little anyway because it would be rude not to. It was sunny today, so made the most of it with some al fresco photos... Then the instrument panel. Coloured for fun not for accuracy, and given some spots of Clear for glass bits. And finally, our good friends the crew, including what appears to be a guest appearance from Douglas Bader as the pilot! Of course in true Woodo style, despite taking increasingly more care with every build I somehow still managed to break the stick off. Again we'll pragmatically claim that won't be seen anyway when it's all sealed up and move swiftly on. Next we'll seal things up, but before that I'm going to ponder whether to fill the massive void left behind the seats (again another symptom of the age of the tooling I guess)...

Thanks. Not sure I trust my skills with even that basic level of body-modding however it probably won't be my last attempt at a Mozzie so I'll bear that in mind for future builds! Think I'm going to go with the Night Fighter variant. Challenge for me in that is that I'll probably try to mix up a slightly lighter shade for the body so that I can show up details with a pure black wash during weathering.

Been a while since I've been on here, thought I'd catch up on these as I enjoyed watching the WIPs. Your work continues to be amazing.

Managed to pick up a Mozzie for half price at ScotsNats yesterday so I can finally throw my hat in to the ring. Hardly original but been wanting to do one so now was as good a time as any, plus it was a good chance to make my GB debut. Multiple birds and all that. Box, sprues etc... Due to various constraints of real life and what-not it'll be an OOB job. Tempted to go with the NF.Mk II as something different from the standard scheme on the Mk.XVIII option, and I've cried enough doing a couple of NMF birds recently to put me off trying the Aussie Mk.IV option. Let's go...

Emerging from the wilderness to post my debut Yearbook. First up was the one that started it all. A Hurricane Mk.I starter kit gifted somewhat tongue-in-cheek by Stosh65. Mostly just like riding a bike although quickly discovered things have come a long way since the days of making up a red arrow hawk in the parent's dining room table in the late 80s. Went in strong on the weathering, perhaps too strong given my lack of practice and managed to royally cock up the matte varnish finish, but all in all not a bad start, I thought. Next up was a Vampire T.11 simply because I consciously didn't want to be cranking out just WWII stuff and some brazen part of me decided that yeah, how hard can doing metal finish in hairy stick be? Well... After lots of gritted teeth, lots and lots of very thin layers of Tamiya's finest chrome it mostly came out ok. Guess I'll learn my lesson, eh? Next up, again a concious decision to do something "different" and also because I had an urge to do a specific project; a battered up old car. So I got my hands on a VW Beetle kit and got to work. A bizarre little geriatric tooling; very sparse interior detail but a crapload of fiddly axel and suspension parts, I got to work weathering and generally abusing the poor little bug. Rather proud of how it turned out if I'm being immodest. So it was then back to planes. Did I say something about learning my lesson earlier? Yeah, which is obviously why I decided that another metal effect bird was the way to go. I just really liked the contrast between the metal and the bold gloss red tbh, but for reasons I never quite worked out, the paint took against me and just wouldn't sit right and took a lot of effort to get to come together. The kit itself is wonderful and goes together really well, but painting it up turned in to a nightmare. I also experimented with oil washing for the first time, to mixed success, though it did definitely give the plane a grimy, fume spattered look that worked out alright in the end I think. Oh and there was those horrible moments where some rogue Decalfix stripped half the paint off a wing and one yellow stripe decal fell apart and I had to quickly paint the other one in. I needed a beer. Lastly, just crossing the finishing line in time was an Academy Spitfire. Really nice kit (unless your a stickler for accuracy I'm told, but I'm not) and went together well. Some fun custom mixing the camo scheme as the out-the-pot paints I had never seemed quite right. Complete decalling disaster though. A perfect storm of ridiculously thin decals and my clumsy paws saw one of the serials literally come to pieces as it went on. Tried to fudge it by attempting to weather the whole bird far more than I originally planned to make he serial disaster look like fuselage damage but I don't think it entirely worked. A bit gutting as it was looking to come in really nicely initially. Not a total disaster but not what I had planned in my mind when I started. Oh well onward and upward... So there it is... 2017 will start with me finishing up a Japanese Oscar, then get cracking on an ancient P-47D kit (raised panel-lines and all). Will I dare look at the Lancaster taunting me from the high shelf at some point in 2017? I'm not so sure.