Nomore Shelfspace

Continuing on our Blade Runner theme, Nomore Shelfspace now proudly presents the Police Car, also kitted by the honourable Fujimi Company. I got this one from Hobby Link Japan - and had to pay import VAT, so beware... In the box, the kit is moulded in white with one matt and one gloss chrome sprue, and coloured clear for the beacons. The chrome is nonsensical as the prop cars have no chrome... I detailed this one up a lot, using photos of a prop car found on the internerd. Most of the detail is in the interior (hard to see even with all that glass) and in the engine bay. Here, I used scrap and Wave V-spring and V-pipe, alongside the kit parts, to build up something more like the "real" one. It looks a bit of a dog's dinner because these cars are supposedly decommissioned Spinners - an earlier type of flying car that has had its flight engine and lift surfaces taken out and replaced with an unspecified type of power plant (in fact the prop cars were on VW chassis - you can see the outline of a VW if you look underneath this model!). Probably a lucrative used trade in the BR universe... I also detailed up the rear of the indicator/brake light panels with connectors from brass wire. In places I backed up the transparencies with Hasegawa mirror foil. After painting, the car was heavily weathered with thinned acrylic black and ground-up pastels - considering the rain and grime of the Blade Runner metropolis, this seems the right thing! The roof symbol and number are exactly what you see on a modern police car, although I'm not sure what "POLICE LICENSED" means... also note the "VEHICLE IS MONITORED" - futuristic in 1981, but today police cars are riddled with cameras etc... all great, atmospheric detail. These kits do not have "Blade Runner" anywhere in the packaging - this one is just called "Police Car no. 27" and the Spinner is called "Spinner"... but BR is so iconic - especially in Japan - it needs no title - also they avoided paying licensing fees! The only other kit in this scale is Deckard's car - it's the same kit, but without the decals and light bar. It also contains a 1/3 replica blaster, which is cool. You don't know about my 1/1 blaster replica yet.. oh, just told you.

I wouldn't let the wheels stop you building the model. Even if you could find some rubber tyres exactly the right size you'd still have to find a way of getting the hubs into them. The kit itself is very easy and enjoyable to assemble (take care to use PVA glue when fixing the canopy though...) so as I say, don't let a not very noticeable detail get in the way!

Hah, another gaijin smitten with Tokyo's pla-mo stores! Yeah, Volks is interesting, although they have some weird stuff. I used to visit Japan about once a year, and didn't buy much during the more recent visits, so didn't notice Tam Tam's hidden tax, although maybe I should have. However the worst thing was buying a posting box and posting my booty back to my own address, because latterly I went with only hand luggage. Mistake! The postage cost was massive, and I had to pay VAT on the parcel once back home - took a month to get through! So the Spinner probably cost twice its retail price anyway. I don't like to think about it...

That lighting sequence is brilliant. Not seen that done before!

Here's Nomore Shelfspace on part of the forum he isn't seen often, this time with the Fujimi 1/25 (or maybe it's 1/24..) Spinner from the classic Ridley Scott SF flick Blade Runner. Designed by Syd Mead, these memorable and iconic flying cars were built in several versions for filming, a driveable one (just about, as various cast members managed to crash it) on a VW chassis, a not-driveable version for lift-off sequences, and various other iterations. Apparently only one survives, in the hands of a private collector in Japan. There were also various scales of model. As Blade Runner was shot as being at night most of the time, they had to be riddled with lights - even so, the model needed a dirty great xenon light on the roof to make it stand out. Remember, this was all done with miniatures and mattes, no CGI cheating in 1981! For more (and more accurate...) info, just google Blade Runner... OK, the model. This is the second issue of this kit with the pre-painted body shell and interior. I bought this in Tokyo in 2012 (not to boast or anything...). Japanese model shops are the places all good modellers go when they die. The shop in question was Tam Tam Hobby in Akihabara, although others such as Yellow Submarine, Laox Hobby and Yodobashi probably had them as well. The kit itself is eye-watering just in the box. I expect anyone with more patience than me could rig some LEDs to light it, as there is a load of space in the engine compartment at the back for batteries etc. I left the factory finish as it was, even though I thought it was too light a blue. The only detail I added was seatbelts. Which was a mistake as the "real" car doesn't have them. I don't think you can actually roll or loop those things anyway... I must admit I was a bit disappointed in the lack of detail in the wheel areas - you have a choice of lowered or retracted front wheels and that's it. On the prototype the front wheel fairings rotate 90 degrees for flying or ground mode. The wheels themselves are also just featureless drums, whereas the "real" one clearly has ordinary car tyres. The interior I left in its factory paint, just picking out details in various colours. I painted the inside of the two roof windows black, and the inside of some of the lights on the wheel fairings white. The canopy frame had to be painted - quite hard to match the body colour! I also added lengths of plastic rod in the front lamp below the windscreen, although this wasn't strictly necessary. The decals are very nice, these were sealed with Klear after drying. Fujimi have obviously done their research. There are tiny etch metal "Spinner" logo badges for sides, and rear, which is a nice touch. To display the model at some sort of interesting angle I made "ramps" from heat-bent perspex sheet and rod. "He say, 'you under arrest, Mr. Deckard'!"

Nice! I've built 2 of these. Probably the nicest 1/12 bike kit you can build that isn't a "sponsor hoarding" race bike. I find the "tank" (it's a dummy on these...) and side panels need a good finish to make this model really stand out.

Just getting my older photos onto Photobucket... here's my 1/72 Hawk of course. Like most people I also found the bulkhead behind the back seat was 1mm or so too tall, the decal for the blue area on the fin is too small, and the underwing flashes are very hard to get on if, like me, you stuck the strakes on before painting everything. Ahem. White trim round the canopy was prepainted strips of decal, I later found this was a bit overscale but I wasn't going to change it. Stand was made of perspex rod and sheet. I went for a very clean finish with this one.

Those photos had me fooled as well! Only things missing are the wheel chocks, tags etc... and the way the dispersal seems to be on a slope! But I only noticed those after a while! 1/32 can look highly realistic, as this does.

Nice one. I built this kit years ago, I agree it was a pig. I finished mine in JAL livery. It's also very large even in 1/144.

A neat buildup of this very good looking model... I think the first step towards diorama building happiness would be to chuck that oval picture frame. If the ground was level with the top edge it might look better though...

Looks like you could climb into it and fly off. Very good modelling indeed.

I looked through these photos with my mouth open. That kit is intimidating, once it's on the shelf (if there's one big enough) you will find all the other models cowering in the corner. I built the old Airfix 1/24 Spitfire, Hurricane and Bf109 back in the day, and although they were good they did not have, for example, detailed interior framework, or seatbelts for that matter. This is absolutely brilliant.

That is a nicely done Hurricane - I've got one of those in my small stash. Great brush painting job. I never had any luck brush painting apart from the Dinah I posted here recently!

Thanks for giving me the idea to use orange as a base for dayglo... didn't think of that... and it's a nice model.

Thanks, the other photos are just of the other side... but I will upload some. I used Humbrol flat alu and light grey, a bit of a mistake... Another photo or one. PL

And another of Nomore Shelfspace's enthusiastic but basic builds, the new Airfix Folland Gnat in trainer colours. (You know what I'm going to say next... I built the original one, bagged, silver grey plastic, 2/6d from Woolworth's, about twelve parts, stuck together without painting, promptly thrown across the garden, etc.!). Nice kit, although getting the over complex underside insert to fit was a minor nightmare. Also the underwing tanks and air intakes needed a lot of filling and sanding - I think Airfix's new CAD designers are very clever, but I wonder if they actually build the kits they design?... apart from that I can only admire the huge amount of detail they've packed in to such a tiny model. The alu areas are a bit too grey, my fault. The dayglo areas were sprayed over a white base - I used Humbrol acrylic for the dayglo, this stuff is so translucent it needed most of a pot to cover this tiny area! One thing I missed before I took the photo, the lower edge of the windscreen hasn't been painted properly. I corrected that after the photo. There's also some cement bloop visible - not correctable unfortunately! PL

Part of the British tradition of warplanes that verge on the comical... but a very nicely done model. Yes, MPM have improved a lot in recent years, I built their X-15 and was very impressed.

Welcome to another Nomore Shelfspace epic, this time the tiny Revell Boeing P-26A. This is the old mid-60's kit reissued - very reasonable price, as Revell reissues seem to be. However I wanted to do one of those smart olive green/yellow wing marking ones (like the first issue kit markings in fact...), so got a sheet of aftermarket decals from Hannant's, plus a lot of pics off the olde Internet. First job was, as you might guess, sanding off all those boiler rivets. Revell outdid Airfix in these at one time. I use a fairly fine grade of wet or dry to prevent scratching. I also built a new interior - this is quite simple, bucket seat, stick, panel and headrest. These seem to have been unpainted aluminium. I also added the rather prominent exhaust stubs behind the engine using Evergreen rod bent by gently heating (a bit trial and error...). The cowling was a bit rubbish and needed filing and sanding to a respectable shape. Painting is quite straightforward - I used all gloss colours on this.... because of all those decals which make the aeroplane look like something from one of those great pre-war pulp magazines! I can't recall the make, but they were rather thick and not very well designed, so I had to do a lot of cutting and repainting to make them fit the complex curves of the spats, cowling etc. However, the results are worth it. Then I did the rigging. Well, its okay, but the two wires from the mast to the wingtips are supposed to be aerial wires, and look more like poles. Me and rigging do not get on well. The wing rigging is supposed to be thick however... all stretched sprue. Final job was a spray of matt acrylic varnish, just enough to give a bit of a sheen and "pull it all together". Hope you like it! PL

Yes, the instructions have some very clear rigging diagrams. Most helpful to someone who has actually not tried rigging a biplane before... PL

Hello again, this time it's my Airfix Gladiator. This is a very nice kit indeed, but in some ways I feel the new Airfix kits are designed by people who are a whiz on the Computer Aided Design, but not really modellers. Otherwise their kits wouldn't have so many tiny parts... not that I'm complaining as this makes up into a model where it's hard to tell what scale it is from the photos! Only problem I found was the part with the inner struts had been slightly squashed in packing, so I had to very carefully bend them into the correct angles before the wing would fit. Also the wheels would not fit onto the pegs on the landing gear without trimming the pegs, and the engine cowling was awfully fiddly - just a two piece moulding would have done! See comment above... the guns either side of the fuselage fit from inside, which means when you paint the fuselage, they get painted too, and it's tricky to paint them by hand... so I cut the barrels off and stuck them in after the main paint was finished. My "silver dope" (that stuff again) is a mixture of the old Humbrol 11 and matt white. The markings are what I think is the archetypal Gladiator, as flown by those doughty chaps at Hendon Air Pageant a few years before the whole world went mad for five years. The only bad thing about this is my own fault - I thought I could rig a biplane, but as you can probably see, my attempts using stretched sprue fixed with the thick Deluxe Materials cyano (in the tube) do not look good. Blobs of glue looking like silver, well, muck. I got all the wires in though, some of them are a bit bendy looking... the myriad tiny stencils were a major job, I just took it in stages. I did have trouble with the larger decals however, when coating them with Klear some of them bubbled, even though they were completely dry. Not encountered that before. As I say, a very nice kit but one that needs a lot of patience! PL

Captures the bizarre appearance of the old Gannet nicely! I built the Frog kit hundreds of years ago. I think it had about ten parts.

That is really nice. Very clean finish, nice interior and transparencies.

Sadly I only took photos from that angle, maybe I could do some more. i deliberately underexposed them to get that shadowed effect with one light source. The Bandai astronaut is really cool looking - might see if I can get that one! PL

That's a really impressive model. I like the work lights! The face is a bit like someone from the anime "Space Brothers", don't know if you've seen that.

Thanks forum people. Glad you like my '66-style build! PL