Gorby

Exceptionally nice use of a garage @Neil. I've heard that sometimes people put cars in them... ... weird.

Excellent job on both of them Steve!

Thanks Chris. I is der boss!? I keep telling the puppy that but she still doesn’t believe me.

Exactly, and think of the weight on that stupid little caster. But that's only the start of a very long list of why the 'designer' should have been taken to a secure room with padded wallpaper. But I'm still itching to scratch it.

I take it it'll be quite a loooooooong phone call. A very, very long phone call. Once I'm over the plague of battyness I'll be back to scratching. I keep thinking about another American big wheel tank that would be even BIGGER than the whopper. Not even the Yanks were deranged enough to even conciser building it. https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/category/ww1-american-prototypes/ It makes the whopper look reasonable in comparison.

Thanks mate for all the comments matiepoos. Damnit I don't need any encouragement! But hell yes those cranes look the biz. Did I mention I've got a thing about cranes… did I just say that out loud?

Just when you think it can't get any more impressive... WOW! I don't know how you manage to keep going after so long.

Thanks everyone who has commented and everyone who has 'liked' or 'laughed' or even just looked (and didn't want to fatigue themselves unduly by making the Herculean effort to click 'like' – bless. Perhaps you should just go and lie down, those eyelids must be really heavy). @Redcoat2966 : Yes it is airbrushed, I was all out of paint rollers. @Mike : Apparently the idea was to have a gearbox for each wheel, so that theoretically, each wheel could be going at a different speed or even a different direction to the others. I should imagine that it would have to stop before any change of direction could be organised. In reality it would probably have ripped itself apart even if they every did find a way to coordinate the manoeuvres. @stevehnz : probably more out of the padded box... @Pete in Lincs: He's thinking 'I know I left my whopper here somewhere'. You can always tell who the officers are. @Jasper dog : That's the one thing I'm not sure about, they do look more like exhaust pipes. If I were to do it again (no bloody way) I'd do the smokestack more of an upwards slopping angle. @Bullbasket: I think you might be waiting quite a while John – and then it'd be in the wrong scale. Thanks again mates.

Thanks John... I think. If anyone is interested, the final pics are here:

Holt 150 ton Field monitor Let me introduce my entirely 1/48 scratch-built whopper – the Holt 150 ton Field monitor. During the Mexican boarder war (or was it the Mexican revolution – it's so bloody confusing) the Americans seriously considered building these monstrosities, and arming them with two 6” naval guns. It seems the main reason they decided not to, is because the metal monsters wouldn't be able to keep up with the cavalry horses. There are no contemporary pictures or diagrams and only a pretty confusing written description, from which a modern side view has been cobbled together (see WIP thread). My model is mainly (but not slavishly) based on these. I've had a stern word with my camera ( words like “get a grip” and “snap out of it” were used) and managed to get some pics. As I said in the WIP, I'm aware the base looks more like Blackpool beach than the Mexican desert and I know it's a bit of a let down that it isn't displayed as a Whopper versus Mexican donkey stare-off, but hope you like it anyway. Thanks for having a ganders. This is the work in progress, although at 17,000 words you may need to wait until you retire before you tackle it.

Zvezda's earlier kits can be more than a little challenging to build, but their latest stuff is really excellent - almost as good as Tamiya for a fraction of the price. Again, Scalemates is the best place to see when the kit was tooled: https://www.scalemates.com/kits/

Thanks mateypoos for the damn spiffing comments. Well that's a first – me right! I'm off to tell Mrs Gorby this instant. I know, I've let everyone down. Having said that, I'm part way though building one and sold one this morning, so it's nine now. I have a policy when buying kits, to only buy stuff that I know what the hell it is.

Please note: This is my new 'WARNING Waffle Ahead' sign: There won't be an 'End of Waffle' sign as the waffle never ends. Perhaps I should use it to replace my 'Man at Sleep' avatar. It'd be just as appropriate. More apologies for the length of time posting this update. Still recovering from the batty plague fatigue, which is currently making me feel twenty to thirty years older than I actually am. Apparently it takes a 76 year old a lot longer to do stuff than us spring chickens. The lurgy has also been upon me with the flipping hay-fever, causing me to be in the mood for pretty much nothing other than feel really, really sorry for myself. The hairy, hungry hound has also been feeling sorry for herself, although no bats were involved. It was gastroenteritis and any dog owner who has a dog thus afflicted will attest – a dog squirting out of both ends ain’t a lot of fun for anyone involved. A couple of nights with little to no sleep effectively neutralises any stray brain cells that may have survived my nightly dram habit. Which all adds up to being unable to write anything without it being mistaken for a Dan Brown book. Who'd have guessed that my usual dubious output would require effort. I've had some nice comments about my writing, which gives me cause concern as I didn't realise that care in the community was so widespread. Finally we're FREE! Free to do what I'm not exactly certain. Probably the 101 things we said we'd do if we weren’t in lockdown and now that we can, we'll have to make excuses so we don't have to. Wuhan flu or not, we still think we've been luckier than many. It's good to know that we've still got a roof over our heads. It'd be nice if there were walls as well, but it's a start. It does make me wonder that if we had 20/20 vision, would we have seen this coming? I fear the lockdown has caused me to loose hard earned skills, such as the memory of exactly which button to press amongst the dozen or so controls on our unnecessarily over complicated alarm clock. On the odd occasion that I now have to set it, shutting the bloody thing up early in the morning when my brain is still comatose, is like trying to shut down Chernobyl number 4 while mentally channelling a trout. More importantly, I appear to have lost my ability to translate female time, into earth standard time. When Mrs Gorby (and every other female human I've ever encountered) says “I'll be five minutes”, the last thing it'll be is five minutes. But as you're probably aware, converting a female five minutes isn't necessarily always, for example, quarter of an hour. It depends on the circumstance, time of day, the urgency of the deadline and most of all, the mood of the female in question. Getting to grips with female time has taken me years to acquire (although not 'master'. No man will EVER master this unfathomable skill) but we haven't been going anywhere and the tenuous grasp I had, has slipped away. Yesterday she said “Five minutes” (why is ALWAYS bloody 'five minutes'?) and I guessed ten and it turned out to be 25 minutes! Quarter of an hour wasted when I could have wasted that quarter of an hour online. Me saying “Are you ready yet?” every two minutes prompted yet another brownie-point mass extinction event. And another thing, I'm not sure if yours is the same but mine has taken to mumbling. If I ask her what she said, she just says “Oh, I'm just talking to myself”, but if I don't ask, I get “Your not listening to me”, I can't bloody win! Aaaaaanyway… we've reached the 'Oh no, it was all going so well' stage, otherwise known as painting. In a frankly, laughable attempt to improve my painting skills, I've bought a new airbrush. Not because I'm fool enough to think a better airbrush will make me a good painter, the old one was playing up and I was running out of insults to hurl at it. I tend to prefer to paint in the winter because there is more in the way of excuses for me making a total hash - “The light wasn't good enough”, “It was a tad too cold for the paint”, “My brain stops working and I feel very, very tired if there isn't any sun”. It's not winter, so no excuses... First off, rattle can primer: I've just noticed it it looks like the photo was taken one-tenth of a second after the Mexicans set off their first limpet mine. Months ago I considered what 'scheme' to go for. Camouflage or not. Lets be honest. It's about as subtle as an elephant trying to hide behind the microwave. It's tempting to just camouflage it as the principality of Liechtenstein and put a heard of sheep on the top. In reality, no amount of paint is going make it blend into the background. From every angle it's a festering carbuncle on the landscape. As it's classified as a 'Landship', I briefly considered doing a dazzle type camouflage, but what the hells the point? Would they be deranged enough to thing that painting jazzy patterns on it would make something blend into the background, when it is frankly, less discrete than an illuminated neon billboard advertising fireworks and travelling slower than an arthritic sloth. Lets be honest. If you were aiming your canon using only a white stick and a Labrador, you're still going to hit it. What would be the point? This is all an attempt to let you down gently when I say it's going to be grey, a sort of 1914 battleship grey. If it's time to paint grey, I'll need a grey t-shirt. Too many items of clothing have paid the ultimate price for my cack-handedness, so now I take precautions. It isn't just paint that blights my attire, anything I encounter is equally likely to inexplicably become smeared over my clothing or boots. Mrs Gorby sees it as a major plus if I remain blemish free by lunch, but that rarely happens to the point that she's given up buying white t-shirts for me now, it's just too upsetting for her. Shame really. White doesn't show up toothpaste. Although when you have a poor memory you need ways of telling when you last changed your top and toothpaste is ideal. One toothpaste stain down the front means I put it on that morning; two stains means it's been on the whole day etc. Ideally I need to swap clothing nine or ten times each day to suit each task or meal. It doesn't happen as I'm too lazy, which is just as if Mrs Gorby found the laundry basket full every day, I'd very quickly need to change into head to toe red. It gives a whole new meaning to dressing for dinner – may I enquire as to the predominant colour of dinner? It certainly isn't the superpower I would have chosen for myself. 'Super Stain' … 'The Blemished Man' … 'Sergeant Splatter' … 'Dirty Old Git', no it doesn't work for me. I'd probably have gone for something like premature hindsight, or instinctively understanding what the hell is going on when Mrs Gorby says “No… There’s NOTHING wrong”. In a (likely to be futile) attempt to give the grey some interest, I've tried something that I saw online a few years ago and have attempted before, but with little success (read: 'no success') – the three colour thingamabob. Three shades of grey which is the British budget porn version of some obscure, execrable Hollywood excretion which you probably won't have heard of and probably wouldn't admit to if you had. I was quite pleased with my days work as I did all the spraying in one day but typically screwed it up right at the very end by dropping some Tamiya thinners onto a completed wheel. Damn. And then attempted to paint myself brown with chocolate milk down my front of my grey T-shirt. I decided that I may have pushed my luck and gave up (sobbing softly). Next morning I checked the screwed up wheel and it had cured itself overnight with just barely perceptible outlines where the thinners had dropped. Buffing them out with tissue paper worked well enough for me. Sod it, that'll do. I did tone down the lines the following day to make it less cartoon like, but you'll have to make allowances for the painting, the light was much too bright and a tad too warm for the paint. Also when it's warm my brain stops working and I feel very, very tired (EVERYTHING makes me feel tired, even caffeine makes me want to have a nap). Being unsure if the big guns would be the same colour as the rest of the beast, I considered seeking the advice of a naval expert (sounds like a pretty specific medical speciality if you ask me). I couldn't be bothered and went with grey, which shows that I can't even make the effort to send a message to achieve accuracy. Although I was very tempted to paint the whopper with flames down the sides or a boy-racer speed stripe over the roof, I exercised restraint (adhering the government guidelines of no more than 5 miles from the house). I wondered if early American armour would have had any national symbol, but a quick Googlise it seems that in general, their WWI tanks didn't tend to have anything more than a number (usually in a old looking fancy style in white). Makes sense that they wouldn't have bothered, if the Yanks had whoppers and the Mexicans had donkeys it would have been pretty easy to tell the difference. I mean this whopper couldn't be more American if it was wearing a ten gallon hat, eating doughnuts for breakfast and singing Yankee doodle dandy. It isn't likely to be mistaken for an Italian ice-cream van just passing the battlefield. Just a number it is then. Would it have had some sort of identification on the top? The Aeronautical Division, Signal Corps (1907–1914) was the first heavier-than-air military aviation organisation in history and the progenitor of the United States Air Force. Which obviously I knew without having to resort to Wiki (you could have knocked me down with a steam shovel when I found out that sentence is the exact first line of the Wiki entry. What a complete coincidence that is). Which shows that America had long since embraced the 'death from above' ethos. I was under the impression that in 1914 the Mexican air force consisted of a squadron of psychopathic death budgies and a disillusioned parrot called Keith. No, apparently they had at least one, toilet paper and string constructed Curtiss biplane (lets get this right, American was at war with Mexico, but still selling them aircraft?!). Even with that knowledge I decided against putting a number on the top as they probably wouldn't be able to communicate with them anyway. I went with number two, not because as a military vehicle, the whopper would be a great steaming pile of number two's , but partly because I liked the '2' font and also to imply that there was more than one built in this freaky alternative universe. When I weather a model I endeavour to achieve the best bodge job I can (for any non Brits 'bodge' means the pinnacle of excellence, really it does, would I lie to you?). By time this stage arrives, mentally I've moved onto the next build and just want this one over and done with. Weathering is one of those dark arts I've never got the hang of, so I went with minimal, applied with minimal skill. From the start of the build I knew that I would have to display the whopper with figures to give an idea of scale, otherwise I could fit a saddle on the back and it could pass as a tooled up quad bike for Action Man. Why oh why don't manufactures produce historical twilight zone figures for things that never never happened? It's as much a mystery to me as how women can got shopping all day – for enjoyment. I want 1/48 American tank crew from a time when America didn't have tanks – what's the problem with that? I needed to change WWII figures into US Cavalry as the whopper was intended to be used alongside the Cavalry, I assume they'd crew it as well. I could be wrong, but I'm past caring. The silly hats were a bit of a problem and an attempt to make them from Sillyput made them look ten times sillier. Back to the drawing board. Studying the shape of the hat ... it's circus tent for fleas (come on guys, a little more hair care!). These are the parts for the next attempt (the big bit on the right is the but-coin/bog roll cover). Assembled like so: PVA soaked but-coin then draped over, one single ply at a time. It took five layers before it reached the 'Yheeeer, whatever' stage. Shown mainly for comedy value, the figures before a small part of the naffness is covered up by paint. It's staggering how many hours have gone into making them look this duff. I have no idea why they’ve been collecting pollen. They'll have to do. Fortunately the other seventeen crew are busy inside or standing just outside the dioramas perimeter. Oh dear what a shame. They’ll probably need more practice with the 'Y.M.C.A.' dance moves. If I'm using figures, I needed some sort of base. The pangolins revenge has drained all the energy, vigour and enthusiasm out of me – which took about 1/10 of a second as there wasn't much to siphon off, so I went for quick and simple (and not necessarily accurate). Lovingly crafted roughly hacked from insulation board. Brushed PVA and very finely sieved and sand was dumped on. I also ground down the sand a bit in Mrs Gorby's granite mortar and pestle. Brave, you're possibly thinking, but I half inched it a couple of years ago and she hasn't noticed yet. I'm not showing you the completed base yet, although I will say I'm well aware that it looks more like Blackpool beach than a desert of any description, but I'm looking for the sympathy vote here. None of this suffering in silence nonsense, I want pity. Here endeth my whopper. I hope to get the final photos posted sometime in the next few days when I've slapped my new camera across it's face and told it to pull itself together. It's got a touch-screen and I appear to have given it a nervous breakdown by changing a setting that I shouldn't have. I've no idea what I've altered. I'll try and get some decent pics when I've talked it down off the ledge. Why does new technology have to so bloody touchy? This may be the last waffle-fest for some time. My next projects are 1/1 scale and the next foray into modelling is likely to be a KIT! I've decided to whittle down my ridiculously over inflated stash, I mean, eleven unbuilt kits. It's just madness, I'm sure you agree. At the moment it's unlikely to have a WIP. If you've read every word of this WIP then all I can say to you is “WHY?”. About 17,000 words! Go and do something more constructive with your time!

I think you may need to change the title of this thread to 1/72 rather than 1/48.

I'm glad you've revived this thread, it might make it more likely others will show off their work-spaces.

I've always hated the chunky stands that models used to be supplied with, which is one of the reasons I've never done a wheels up aircraft. A couple of months ago I finally did a wheels up, and made the stand out of a cork mat and a brass rod. Personally I think it enhances the model and has made it much more likely I may do a wheels up in the future.

That's seriously neat work Steve. Your bloody showing me up again!

Errrmm.... He's feeling a bit better now.

I'm sorry to say that after reading that, Gorby died of a ruptured wallet. RIP Gorby Feeling guilty yet?

Yes, but is it the best WWI land battleship?

That looks like a very successful experiment - they look great. So is it the 0.6mm balls you decided to use in the end?

Welcome to the site Katfood. Don't worry about quality. I don't. I'm not sure if you've seen this:

You must have steadier hands and better eyesight than me - that's much better than mine. Excellent fishy thing!

That's an amazing result! Most of the photos could easily passed off as the real thing.

There are loads of other free ones out there, just have a look at this: