Angus Tura

Adrian, I'm sorry to hear your news. I hope you're well soon or at least get a diagnosis. Alan

Heollo. I'd like to add this drone. So, this is the Italeri F-104A/C, which I think is still the only F-104A in 1/72. The kit decals are on the left and on the right are Carpena decals for the QF-104A. These are at the top of the sheet and so are for the earlier paint scheme on these. Latterly I think they were international orange with black serials, but initially they seem to have been red-orange dayglo with white serials. There is quite a bit of quite confusing stuff about the colour on-line, as you can imagine. I like the more red colour and have gone for this fairly lurid number: Gunze C171 "fluorescent red". It's still a bit orange in spite of its name. In an effort to complete a GB on time I thought I wouldn't post till I'd got this well started. The box and bits picture above is 11 days old but work kicked off rather last week with Covid-absences and I've only now got this to the point of some paint: In the middle are bits to paint before completing construction. The seat has been brushed up a bit with extra belts and an ejection handle from sprue. The canopy needed some marks polished out with tamiya compounds and I'm sorry I didn't take before and after pictures. The most work has been blending the "A" tail and rear fuselage into the common front fuselage. This was glued on as best as possible and then the join filled/covered with stretched sprue and then sanded back and panel lines restored. I'm sorry I didn't photograph the stretched sprue stuck in but I'm pretty happy with the end result. It hasn't all been polished up because I'll have to repeat that on the centre-line joint and so forth. This week work is not kicking off for me at all. I'm stuck at home caring, covid-19 negative, for my covid-19 positive son...so I might progress this. Thanks for looking, Alan

I can't do any better than repeating what Bertie and John have said. I have had too much on socially and work-wise to get this done this week. Your gentle chivvying has certainly got me further along than I would otherwise have done. I am also inspired to finally do the Dragon "fitted for wading" Churchill III in the Canada GB. See yous there maybe. Alan

Patrice, Hello. Please put me on your list, Alan

Mark, Hi. Please put me down for one. Ta, Alan

So I thought about the DS tracks, and read a bit about them again, and thought I'd use the Modelltrans ones. The kit sprockets are a bit too wide but thankfully they came apart with a bit of help: Then the tracks went on pretty well with heat from a soldering iron to persuade them round the sprockets and idlers. I didn't get the sprockets quite narrow enough and there are some gaps at the sides. I wanted to use the stowage for the glacis from the Black Dog set but its molded to fit the one piece front plate and not the rivetted one that "Carole" had. Here it is stuck on to the hull and then grooves for the rivetted seams carved out, and then a sausage of Magic-Sculp on the stowage and some clingfilm on the lower hull; mashed together and allowed to set and hey presto: There was also a space between the stowage and the glacis which I filled and only then realised that there should be some spare track-links in that gap. So I chipped out the putty and put the links in: The little putty sausages in front of the track-links is to make the edge of the tarpaulin there. Its a lot easier to sculpt after they are set and "fix" the edges. Here it is finished: The bar across the glacis was incompletely molded in the Black Dog set I had so there's a new one here from a strip of, I think, 20 thou. Its a bit bowed to fit, I'm afraid. I mentioned previously that I previously stalled in this kit because of the poor fit of the radio/counterweight boxes behind the turret-bustle. The problem with them is that the rearmost of them has no front wall and the radio box itself, the front box, isn't big enough to fill the hole. I didn't know then what I know now. Namely that bits of scrap plastic are a good filler. Here is the back box with the hole in its front made smaller. I also previously fretted about trying to keep the molded detail on the sides of the radio box. A visit to the "prime portal" Firefly walkaround let me know that the sides are completely featureless. I wanted to use this figure from Milicast, who, I think, is using his throat mike: The few pictures I've seen of the commander of "Carole" show him always in a helmet. So, that's been taken from one of these separate milicast heads and put on the full figure. The additional stowage is from Magic-Sculp and hasn't had it's straps put on at this point. After that it was just a matter of getting all the separately molded, and etched, details on.... There are a fair few, and they're tiny, and without the walkaround pictures I wouldn't have gathered how some of them went on. However, after several evenings slog, I got them all on apart from the guard on the base of the aerial. That ended up as a badly mangled albeit tiny, brass thing. I made a new one out of stretched sprue, which was also something of a trial: So here it is ready to paint: The stowage is based on the photo of the tank with link above. The three crates are by Black Dog and the straps on the stowage are from tomato puree tube. I was going just to use the kit 17 pounder barrel which is very nicely slide molded, but I managed to stick it on twisted. It's been replaced with this Aber barrel. I have massively enjoyed this so far. The kit is brilliant. Now some paint. Alan

Very nice. I like the smallness of these 1/16th busts. Are you in acrylics? Alan

Cheers my dears.

I should have said too that I was inspired by this: Fantastic! Alan

Hello. I'm a bit late to this party. I had hoped to do a British Mark 2 at Alamein by converting the Dragon 1/72 with bits from the Mirage Grant/M3 but the build for the Bombardment GB has taken/is taking a lot longer than I'd hoped. I was going to give this a miss until the Jubilee GB appeared. I had planned to do the Ace Model FV4005 for the Big and British GB but that can go in the Jubilee GB being completed in 1952. So I thought I would try to get this done/finished: I have in fact started it a lot of years ago as you'll be able to tell from the Modelzone price tag. I hope you'll think it doesn't break the 25% rule: I've assembled the hull and the road wheels. I think I stopped because I got completely bogged down with the counterweight boxes on the back of the turret. There are alternatives to these bottom right from the MR Modellbau equipment set which I'll probably use. I think I'll probably use the kit sprockets and tracks but the DS tracks don't get a good name, to put it mildly. I've got the MR Modellbau ones if the kit ones are as bad as some say. The subject is a bit done to death but I thought I'd build "Carole" as she appeared a week after D-Day: Carole-Scan-1.jpg (995×578) (ww2in172.com) Alan

Thanks very much Col and James. I was looking in the chat a couple of weeks ago for an extension, Col, but didn't see one. Now it's only a week! So, I don't think I'll get done but will definitely do more. I was logging on this evening to post one last, completely built, photo and to say I'll continue in WIP in "Figures". I'll postpone that for the week anyway. Here's the photo: I thought I'd solder the flag to the mast as the soldered joints can be really small but still quite strong. Unfortunately the previous flag, of tomato puree tube isn't solderable, at least not at the temperature of my soldering iron. This is a new one of 0.125mm (5 thou) brass by Albion Alloys, flame-annealed on the cooker. The staff edge is rolled over a bit of 15 amp fuse wire leaving little sockets at top and bottom for the lanyard to go in. It took me three sessions of soldering to get the jack attached to the staff because of the heat-sink problem, but I'm really happy with it. Now...PAINT! Alan

Ah me! Yet another DNF. The dread Mrs.T has egged me on to solder the jack-staff. I think she has designs on me doing some jewelry making. Here are the parts of the jack-staff soldered. I have to say that Mrs.T was right. I now love soldering. David Griffiths says one should tin each part with solder and then rig them up together and just touch the soldering iron on the joint and it fuses together. Mike McCabe says one should coat the iron tip with solder and then just run it into the joint. I couldn't get anywhere with either of these techniques. On line I found this: https://davidneat.wordpress.com/tag/guide-to-soldering-for-model-making/ . This worked. In short, this says to make a jig to hold the bits together and hold the iron such that it is touching both sides of the joint and then, when it's hot enough, just touch the solder into the fluxed joint. On the bigger bits there is a lot of heat sink into the part and I was surprised how close to the joints one needs the iron to get this to work. David Neat suggests tinning the tip of the iron with solder in that case. That does make the heat transfer to the parts better. I was worried that doing each joint in turn would loosen the joints already done but the proximity of the iron to the joint for the heat to get high enough seems to prevent that problem.....usually! Where I had two joints close together, such as where the crossbar sits on the joint of the upper mast and lower tube extension I got pretty hacked off with it. I hope I'm not teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, as it were. Here is the jack-staff in place with its stanchions held in place with a matchstick scaffold epoxied to the brass and trued-up with a new, and rather brilliant toy: a 36cm set-square. I could then take the jack-staff and stanchions off the boat but still held together at the correct angles, and solder them together. I hardly need tell you that this took more than one go. Here is the scaffolding half-off: Here is the jack-staff finished: The details of how the stanchions join to the staff with the cross-bar for support is from the piccy of SMS Hindenburg mentioned above...and that's as far as I've got. Here is my current state of play: I've started making the brackets to hold the stanchions of the jack-staff. The flag hasn't been wrinkled but I'm happy with how it rigs up of the jack-staff. Thanks Dave Swindell for that. Once it's properly on and painted I'm hoping that some tiny beads of epoxy in place of the blu-tac will work to hold the flag still. Once the stanchion-brackets are done I just need to add the outside walls of the guttering/tops of the hull plates, and it'll be done apart from the railing/cable, which can only go on once the jack-staff is permanently fixed. In looking at many photos I've come to the conclusion that the crest being on a separate shield is wrong. This is how it's portrayed in the Kagero plans but all the photos I've seen would suggest that the crest should be painted directly onto the hull plates. I do think that the separate part will have a better appearance and it'll certainly be a lot easier to paint. Sorry not to finish on time. I have massively enjoyed this GB. Making something from scratch is great and soldering is also great, albeit there both a bit time consuming. Thanks Dave for the gen and Col for the GB and thanks for looking. Alan

Hello all. Not for the first time I realise that posting frequency is inversely related to amount of modelmaking done. Thanks Will. That is a fantastic website! I wonder where all these photos are found? IWM I suppose. I found the website a bit strange as it was very difficult to access any general page to understand what is being built. I think its a 1:200 Hood? Anyway, what a reference. The deck photos would certainly support the idea of sawtooth-shaped edge planks. I had a lot of trouble getting this to be symmetrical, such that the saw-teeth on the two sides were the same size, before realising that I needed to draw it based on the central plank. That's on the right here: I used a wikimedia picture of Von Hipper standing on deck with his staff to figure out the width of the planks. I've made them 3.5mm in 1/32. I also thought that the first effort (the centre one here) had too deep a division between planks. The second effort right and final deck left were done with a 0.5mm Tamiya scriber and look better. The scribing across the saw-toothed planks has been filled with styrene rod and then sanded flush. I had hoped to make the stem-post in such a way that there would be a panel line between it and the plates of the hull but that was never going to work. Instead I've stuck it on, filled with rod melted into the spaces with liquid glue, sanded it smooth and cut a new panel line just in front of the join with the P-cutter. I've cut another panel line on the lower plates as well. The step between the plates has been filled with a triangle of 40 thou edged with half-round 40 thou strip. The strip extends forwards to the stem-post. This worked really well further back but the front bit needed several attempts with plastic rod and 5 thou card fillers to get the starboard side symmetrical with the port. Eventually I resorted to Mr.Surfacer 1500 to try to mold the shape and not have to carve back so much. I also found that the p-cutter wasn't controllable enough here: the plasticard texture is different after multiple soakings in liquid glue. I've cut the horizontal-ish panel line with the tip of a rat-tail file. Here's the easier port side. I've painted it with Mr.Surfacer to compare more easily. I've also tried out stippling on the Mr.Surfacer 1500 here to see if that would work for replicating the "Krupp cemented plate". There are some not very good pictures of that on-line. I think its OK: It's going to take a bit of time to cover the whole thing in this. Here is all of the plasticard-work, as it were, finished. The strip above the step was a strip of 20 thou cut with the knife held at 450. Easy-peezy. It's a bit bowed unfortunately but the ship's crest which sits over the middle of this covers that quite well. On top of the stem-post is a block of bollards. This is well illustrated in the Kagero plans. The same web site as has the picture of the bow of Derfflinger (SMS-navy.com) has a close-up of bow of the Derflinger's sister-ship, SMS Hindenburg: SMS_Hindenburg-stbdbow-drydock.jpg (840×619) (sms-navy.com). This would suggest that the top of the stem-post should be much wider than the Kagero plans suggest. Whether the two ships were the same here I don't know. It's too late for me to change it anyway. Here's a box made to be the outside of the block. Then I built up what I could with plastic card. The tops of the bollards are two thicknesses of 40 thou. Then the spaces filled in with magic-sculp shaped with a wet finger and paint brush handle. The very nice people at the Leeds Model Shop let me rummage about in their back shop where I found these Billings-boats type fittings, albeit not by Billings Boats: These are two-hole railing stanchions and masts. I made this rivet factory out of magic-sculp with holes made with a rounded off bit of 1mm rod. Then rod melted with a cigarette lighter and shoved into the hole, and then the rivets cut off. Historex agents do have some rivets one can buy, but they're from Russia. Here is a bracket for the railing stanchions which is a bit of plastic rod, layers of 20 thou card and rivets: The figures are free-standing which is cool, but they're not sanding very straight on the shear of the deck. So I've sawed through their ankles, but not right through, and bent them about a bit. I tried sawing them with a hacksaw initially and it was making a terrible mess. Thankfully an X-acto razor saw worked fine and was a lot more controllable. Here they are with the gaps filled and arm on. The gaps have been filled with Devcon for stength and then drilled through to made a handle of brass rod to paint also. Here they are ready for paint. I've started their eyes. The jack I'm going to make out of my last bit of tomato puree tube. I must remember to eat more. I thought I should strip it of its covering which was easy with cellulose thinners. The inside of the tube is plated with some yellow metal or other and I can't shift it, but I don't suppose it matters. It's sized from photos at SMS-Navy.com at 45 x 73mm and the rope is a Caldercraft 0.75mm rigging cord also found in rummaging at the Leeds Model Shop. It's stuck on with epoxy resin. As long as the rope is taut, it holds the flag well but I'll need to fix the rope in some way when the flag's up or it wants to rotate about. So, so far it looks like this: Next up will be the jack-staff: The bits and pieces are the commercially made mast at the top. This is not long enough so the lower bit is some 3mm tube which will be the bottom of the staff. That will sit on the finial bottom right on top of the round bollard in the prow. The holes in the brass tube are for the two stanchion-tops so that the rails can run back both sides from the jack-staff. The hole in the mast is for the top of a smaller stanchion to take the top of the lanyard of the jack. The shallow-U shape is a cleat to tie on the lower end of the lanyard. It's made out of a bit of 1mm brass rod. The other bit is a bit of mashed up brass square to join the 3mm rod to the filial. I spent an entirely wasted day yesterday trying to solder. I'm going to start epoxying the bits of Jack-staff together today and should hopefully be able to complete the building over the next week. I doubt rather that I'm going to get it all painted by the 13th May but I can probably get the basic colours on the ship. Thanks for looking. Sorry for the length of post, and see you shortly, Alan

Hello. This has been going on while work allowed. The next job was to get the panels on. For the upper panels I made a paper pattern and used a rolling set to get the flare at the top: Then ample slow-setting epoxy on the stringers and the panels were clamped at the front, and taped at the back and finally liquid glue lathered into the joins to bits of plastic: This worked well. I filled the whole of the flare on both sides with epoxy to make sure the curve stayed on. Paradoxically the lower, flatter panels have been a lot more trouble. I haven't put enough stringers in the lower part and the panels detached themselves from the stringers and needed clamping back on and more glue from the inside. More problematic has been convex, bowing-out of the lower panel on the port side. That was the first panel I put on and I hadn't learned that it was best to put the epoxy on the stem-post and the rear bulkhead after the panel was clamped on. Putting it on before the panel was in place made it difficult to get the panel to sit down in a straight line on the plastic formers. I think at least that that's why I had this problem. I've sort-of made a new stringer by clamping again with the panel already in place, and then feeding in 5 min epoxy from the inside to meet up with panel. This is not the easiest to photograph: This was really tedious, indeed is really tedious: I'm still doing it. It takes a lot of applications of epoxy before the glue makes a bridge between the centre line-plywood and the panel. Once it does it gets a lot easier and quicker. I could have saved myself this grief with an additional stringer. Thankfully the starboard side is OK. Meanwhile I've made up the ship's crests. These were cut with a compass cutter and a scalpel from 40 thou card and then edged with half-round 40 thou strip: Here they are with the hull plating nearly done and with the stem post with its new, 30 thou sides: The fit of the stem-post is poorer than I hoped and needs sanding flush with the panels on the hull. It has also needed a bit of fattening up in places. Here it is with 10 thou patches welded on with glue and stopped from sticking to the panels with baking paper. The strip at the bottom is the top of the hull panels where they form the outer side of the gutters that run along the deck sides. Here is the little bit of deck on which the figures will stand. This was 40 thou card with planks cut with an Olfa P cutter. I've made a paper pattern for it and then cut it to that size while trying to keep the planks centred. They're not quite right but I'll fatten up one side with a strip of 20 thou. I've marked the ends of the planks which don't reach the front of the deck, and cut those with the Olfa-P cutter also. Here it is in place, -ish. The Kagero book shows the planks on the edges to have a saw-toothed appearance to fit with the planks that don't reach the front. I'm not sure how accurate that is but its a pretty nice appearance. So, some of the plank-joints have been filled with 20 thou rod and then I can smooth them out. The deck is resting on a box composed of the cross member at the front, a cross piece at the back and the inside surfaces of the guttering. I will be some glad to get the deck finished, which will let me get the figures started, which was the point of the build. Thanks for looking, Alan

Col. You are right, of course. Thanks for it. Alan