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Striking Back (1/72 Trumpeter Wellington Ic)


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5 minutes ago, Procopius said:

Re: Open University, it's always been hard for me to grasp -- could people actually get a degree from it, by correspondence or something? The whole initiative seems radically egalitarian.

with some summer school time, and examinations, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University

 

 

 

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3 minutes ago, Troy Smith said:

with some summer school time, and examinations, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University

 

 

 

"The average cost of one full-time year or 120 credits rose to £5,000, bringing the cost of an average Bachelor's honours degree for an English student to £15,000."

 

I had to take out something like $50,000 in loans for my Bachelor's degree. :hanging:

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3 minutes ago, Max Headroom said:

Harold Wilson the Labour PM at the time of the OU’s set up described it as his finest achievement.

A Baroness Falkender joke is just eluding me right now.

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Just now, Procopius said:

A Baroness Falkender joke is just eluding me right now.

When you remember jot it down on lavender coloured notepaper.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Prime_Minister's_Resignation_Honours

 

.....and with that I’m sliding away from anything even vaguely political. I don’t want to end up on Mike’s naughty step :crying:

 

Trevor

 

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3 hours ago, Procopius said:

I was aware! The 1970s in Britain strike me as being one of those fin-de-siecle-type decades, before the radical changes of the 1980s, and I'm fascinated by them. Here also, the whole decade reads like birthing pangs for the one to follow.

 

It was an 'interesting' decade to live through, that's for sure.

3 hours ago, Procopius said:

Re: Open University, it's always been hard for me to grasp -- could people actually get a degree from it, by correspondence or something? The whole initiative seems radically egalitarian.

 

Yes and yes.

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Good evening, chaps! (And others, if others there be.) I had a lovely and very spontaneous date with Mrs P this evening -- we left the kids with my parents, who of course did not charge us for babysitting, but we paid in other ways: when I picked him up, Winston informed me he had "ice cream and pizza and pop and bein' crazy" -- which is probably one of the few things, along with reading, finer than modelling. I did manage to sneak some modelling in. (Also some reading, earlier: for my own amusement I'm reading my way through the Kindle versions of Arthur Bryant's WWII-era trilogy on the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars -- he was, curiously enough, a favourite historian of Churchill, Attlee, Harold Wilson, and Michael Foot, though not of Andrew Roberts -- mostly to get the sense of it as a period document, rather than for a ton of new information on the era...though I welcome book recommendations.)

 

Anyway, the Wellington!

 

It's still mostly just f...affing about right now. I did some more work on the cockpit:

 

20171121_224224

 

 

 

And some bits I'm pretty sure were wooden:

 

20171121_224242

 

20171121_224230

 

I should have used Clear Yellow over the oil paints vice Clear Orange, I think this made the wood look too red. 

 

I also painted what I assume are spare oxygen bottles, using AK XXXXXXXXXTreeeeeme Metal and a black enamel wash. My understanding is that they'd be silver at this stage of the war, but if anyone knows what colour all the little bits should be (including the case holding them), I'm all ears.

 

20171121_224356

 

 

 

 

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28 minutes ago, Procopius said:

I'm reading my way through the Kindle versions of Arthur Bryant's WWII-era trilogy on the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars

By coincidence I took an old copy of 'The Years of Victory' with me to Telford :)

 

28 minutes ago, Procopius said:

XXXXXXXXXTreeeeeme

MST3K homage? :D 

 

28 minutes ago, Procopius said:

My understanding is that they'd be silver at this stage of the war

I'd go with Aluminium too, for the oxy bottles, not sure about the case/rack, that might be interior grey-green but no-one will see it so ignorance might as well be bliss.

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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10 hours ago, Stew Dapple said:

By coincidence I took an old copy of 'The Years of Victory' with me to Telford :)

That's the one I'm on! I wanted to get hardcopies, but unfortunately almost none made it over here, so they're a fair bit pricey to get to the USA. I expect I'll hunt them down in 2019.

 

10 hours ago, Stew Dapple said:

 

MST3K homage? :D 

Always.

 

 

4 minutes ago, Cookenbacher said:

That's nice interior work PC, and thanks for the wood grain instructions (again!)

My pleasure. I think I first saw it over here, and it's probably my favourite "technique" (I don't recall where I learned about the clear orange/yellow trick, but it REALLY sexes up wooden propellors).  My most commonly-used technique, however, is installing a part wrong side 'round and hastily reversing it while leaving gluey fingerprints everywhere.

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20 minutes ago, Max Headroom said:

MST3K???

 

:pardon:

 

Trevor

 

(always wanted to use that one!)

Mystery Science Theater 3000. It's easier to show you than it is to explain. 

 

 

 

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There are certain things on the interweb that make me sad, MST3K makes me happy, I will go to my grindstone with a smile today, oh nice Wimpy by the way, a bit red on the woody bits IMHO.

Box on

Strickers

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I started  my turkey day MST3K marathon off tonight with my absolute favorite, the Riftraxx Samurai Cop. We went to theaters and caught that one, still kicking myself for not driving to Tennessee to see it live. 

 

 

 

Then Miami Connection 

 

 

 

I finshed up with the best of the Netflix season Cry Wilderness, no trailer for it I'm afraid.

 

Tomorrow we start with all the giant monster movies.  The kids want to watch Godzilla vs Megalon first. I'm looking forward to the Giant Mantis and The Giant Spider Invasion.

 

 

 

 

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12 hours ago, Thud4444 said:

Then Miami Connection 

Miami Connection is the rare movie I feel is almost better without the riffs. It's so perfect in the totality of its failure that I just like to watch it straight. And on that slightly earnest note, I'm thankful for all of you, my friends on Britmodeller (and often in real life too):

 

"You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, 
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find 
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, 
(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! 
How keen you are!) 
To find a friend who has these qualities, 
Who has, and gives 
Those qualities upon which friendship lives. 
How much it means that I say this to you — 
Without these friendships — life, what cauchemar!" 

 

-- T S Eliot

 

And now...DRAGON SOUND.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Finn said:

You can see some oxygen bottles being put into a Wellington here:

 

note they are a dark colour, green?

 

edit: here is a Hurricane getting a O2 bottle installed:

 

http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205224624

 

Jari

 

 

Hmmm. The Hurricane one could almost be silver or metallic-coloured. But yeah. Dang it!

 

And some further perusal of the IWM archives (which I should really be doing anyway) shows that the geodetic structure visible through the large starboard side nose window should be the pale grey interior colour as well. Humbug,

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On 17/11/2017 at 5:16 PM, Procopius said:

That's Chauncey. My sister made him in a chemistry class about ten years ago and gave him to me.

 

Yep! Thanks, Troy.

 

I've spent much of my work week at Social Media Week Chicago, which is a conference for people in my field...most of the people in my field, however, represent ad agencies (sociopaths) or brands (soulless reptiles), rather than struggling, byzantine not-for-profits like the one I work for. As such, they're radically different in personality, outlook, style, the whole thing. It's had me seriously questioning whether I want to remain in my field, the only thing I'm halfway good at professionally, when it seems to be hellbent on destroying everything about life that's worth living. Did you know the average human attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight in the last decade? Actual statistic I heard to today. Our job, collectively, is to get this number lower, basically. I listened to a gym-chiseled fortysomething jerk in jeans and t-shirt featuring a super-woke slogan so you knew it was okay that he came off as a heartless, soulless caricature of a human being, because you know, he cares. Not that you'd know it from hearing him talk, mainly about his own greatness. I'm in my thirties, and I was one of the oldest people in the room. People there couldn't imagine "spending 106 minutes doing anything," and this is the nightmare world we're headed for, a wholly ephemeral future.

 

Oh well. This is how every generation feels when the torch is passed. Those of you who've been patiently waiting for it to happen to those irritating teenagers from the late 1990s: it got us. It got us good.

 

Anyway, I've gotten the kit parts all washed, and it occurs to me: I have no idea what the interior of the Wellington was like, aside from the black front office. The kit instructions aren't super helpful in this regard, either. In this photo, the geodetic structure looks almost silver or pale grey, with dark brown/blotchy pinkish-red fabric.

 

post-634-0-95757400-1424320909.jpg

 

I'm glad I looked, because I was originally going to try and use Misterkit RFC/RAF clear-doped linen as my interior colour, with a red-brown oil wash over it, but this looks much more straightforward...if I'm correct.

 

 

Interesting observations on your professional colleagues.

 

Suggest you do a Yossarian and run.

 

I did and it mostly worked!

 

Enjoying the build.

 

Michael

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A major feature of my childhood was that my parents, who spent most of my formative years teetering on the brink of divorce (largely on account of radical differences of opinion on how best to raise me; they mostly settled on swatting me until food came out the food intake end), used to wage a sort of cold war hot on major American holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, sometimes Memorial Day if they were at the top of their game, wherein one of them ("Parent A") would decide they didn't want to see the other's family and retire to the fastness of the parental bedroom, followed closely by the other parent ("Parent B"), who would then angrily and fruitlessly argue with Parent A, while their four children sat silently in the minivan in the garage, generally for an hour or so, until Parent B stormed back to the car, alone, and drove us all to see our relatives, while also mercilessly dispensing punishments to their children for the rest of the day, since this was the closest they could get to punishing Parent A for the next dozen hours or so. I turned out perfectly fine, ha-ha-ha. (Parent A and Parent B celebrated 39 years of marriage today, so perhaps this is one of those marriage secrets that never makes it into the self-help books.)

 

Anyway, I was delighted to discover that I could pass this experiential gift on to my own children, when Parent A (whose name rhymes with "Ulysses Tea") had a catastrophic meltdown that made Chernobyl look like running the microwave on low power after Winston got peanut butter over an outfit that only in a very tenuous way was even remotely similar to the one worn by his younger, more sessile brother and had to have his clothes changed, an unforgivable sin on the part of Parent B, who was under the mistaken impression that it was more important that loose items didn't stick to Winston's clothes as he passed them by. So Parent B and Winston trudged grimly off to see Parent B's parents, while Grant and Parent A remained behind, drank all of the margarita mix (one directly, the other indirectly), and watched Valerian, so perhaps at least there was some form of punishment for all of this. The rest of the week so far hasn't been much of an improvement.

 

So that may be why, at 1:40 AM in the morning, my time, I'm posting this minor update. It is now only possible to live a life even vaguely worth living when everyone else here is asleep. If we had ductwork, I would be living in it now, like that kid in Aliens. 

 

20171125_010303

 

I know it doesn't look like anything is painted here, but in fact I've repainted the lattice behind the large starboard side nose window, as well as that behind the long windows on the fuselage. I've used a Gunze grey I found kicking around, as that looks (to me) closer to the colour we see in the photos of restored and period examples.

 

I've also repainted the interior cockpit lattice for the same reason:

 

20171125_010318

 

 

Neither with skill nor enthusiasm, but I did it. A subsequent black wash, not shown, seems to have covered up the most egregious bits of stray paint. 

 

Anyway, hopefully more soon. 

 

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Life sounds a bit fraught at present PC but glad that you have a Wellington to hold onto during the turbulence. Owning this kit myself I'm enjoying see you at work upon it and must apologize for not making more regularly supportive noises.

 

What's your reading of the strength of the rear geodetics on the kit? I was considering doing one of those terrifyingly flak-damaged aircraft that came home with the rear fuselage stripped of fabric and reckon that it might be possible to drill/carve out the central diamonds.

 

BTW I saw Debs' build of this kit on the Bomber Command table at Telford and she'd done an exquisite job on it.

 

The artist Paul Nash had some interesting comments on the aircraft based on his experiences as a war artist:

2017-11-25_08-36-21

Continued best,

Tony

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Today (well, today in the USA, I think it's already tomorrow in the UK, if you follow me...greetings, men of the future!) is Churchill's birthday, so there's no way I could forbear to do at least a little modelling. As an aside, I think the greatest tribute ever paid to Winston was by Goebbels, who wrote of him in his diary on 7 May 1941 that ""[t]his man is a strange mixture of heroism and cunning. If he had come to power in 1933, we would not be where we are today."

 

Anyhow, ready to model, here's yr. corresp. as of late, with Grant in standard travel positon:

 

20171126_194534

 

As you can see, there's increasingly more of me to love with each passing day.

 

I decided not to get fancy and sprayed the rest of the black interior bits Mr Color H2 Black:

 

20171130_175557

 

20171130_175611

 

20171130_175614

 

20171130_175618

 

 

I have the Steve Bond book on the Wellington due probably tomorrow or Saturday here, and I expect it will tell me all of these parts were a different colour, but once we close up the fuselage, who will know? Me, and you, that's who. Are you gonna talk? Snitches get stitches, you know.

 

 

 

 

 

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