gamevender

Berkshire Junction, a model RR company, makes EZ Line in several colors and thicknesses. You can also get it via MicroMark, a good hobby supply company here in the U.S. You will need to pre-drill holes where the lines end however and use super glue to hold it in place. For smaller, simpler projects, I use stretched sprue. Easy to work with and is almost free as you make it out of the sprues from other models. Put it on with some slack and then put the line in question into the smoke trail from a glowing matchstick or some such and it will spring up tight. Or melt. If it melts, just do it again, like I said, sprue's cheap. As to fuzzy thread, model ship builders draw the thread they are going to use across a tin of bees wax. The wax serves several purposes. One, it eliminates the fuzzy look. Two, it seals the thread so it is less vulnerable to humidity that might cause it to shrink or go slack. And three, it makes the thread a little stiffer. Here's some stretched sprue rigging on an old Aurora 1/48 Spad.

Nicely done and kudos on getting that camo done. Very intricate painting. You can get a lot out of those old Airfix ship kits with a little work. Here's one I did. The Airfix HMS Ajax became the HMS Ulysses. Unlike you, I didn't have to worry too much about being accurate as it's a fictitious ship.

In the photos I have seen, of those ships that have antennae between the fore and mainmast you can just make out the first and last spreader bar, but there don't seem to be any in between.

Oh, don't go by my rigging. I do what I call "representative" rigging, not necessarily accurate but it gives a general correct impression. The split antennae is called for in the instructions. They even give you the spreaders. Don't know if it's correct, but it looks cool.

Just for a flash from the past, here's the Revell 1960's take on the same subject. Good kit in it's day. I gotta believe your's will be an improvement on it.

71chaly. Sorry for any confusion. The original post in this thread was asking about WG774's color.

This is what she looked like at Cosford last fall.

Dejukuju vam.

This is the Rubicon kits of the Morris C8 Quad and 25 prd. I spent as much time on the inside as the outside. I decided to include a "crew" so all those seats in the Mk III Quad wouldn't look so empty. Unfortunately, you only get a driver and one passenger. I dug into my "spares" box and came up with the rest of the figures, but the ones in the cab needed some significant modification to sit correctly. The commander has dismounted and is taking a look around. I lost the rope coil on the gun shield (twice actually) so I made one out of thread and I added the tarp on the gun trail from the rubicon Sjerman stowage set. These are very nice kits and went together easily with only a dab or two of putty here and there.

Hey, a lot of the people on this forum are pretty tightly wound as well. ( 😉 Just kidding.)

Picture hanging wire annealed. Heat it up (I use the burner on my gas stovetop) til it's glowing red hot then drop it in water. Wait a minute for it to cool, then fish it out and see how stiff it still is. If you need it softer, repeat but leave it in the flame a bit longer then plunge again. You can get it soft enough to bend and hold all sorts of shapes. When annealed, it also takes on a more "scale" base color that with added washes looks quite good. Photo is of a 1/72 M4. The cable may be a bit out of scale, but still looks better than a plastic blob or thread.

Is it my eyes or the lighting or does the next aircraft in line have a different style roundel on the top wing?

Ian, Yes it did have a full crew, but not being much of a figure painter, as is obvious, I did it in towing configuration.

I wanted to add a little detail to the Quad interior, but got carried away and you can't see most of it anyway. I also added the glazing in the windows. It is actually a nice model. You could get the gun and Quad separately boxed, but I got mine as a set.

I think I see what you mean, but I wish I could find a picture of it engaged so as to know how it actually looks/works. And thanks for the response.

When in it's towing configuration, is the 25 pdr's barrel locked in place some way and if so, how?

This is the towed version of the Rapier low level anti-aircraft defense system. The launcher, here in travel mode, is a resin kit by Matador with all the challenges that brings to the modeling bench. The towing vehicle is the JB toylike long bed Landrover. The reload trailer is an adaption of the trailer that comes in the Airfix Halftrack kit. I was working from limited references on the trailer and reloads so some of it is "imagineered". The missile is from the Matador kit.

Unlike the other Rubicon kits I have built, this one was a bit of a challenge fit-wise, especially in the cargo bay and the rear ramp. It took very careful assembly and some putty and shimming to get a "water tight" seal on the ramp. Also, the tracks are hard to get to fit down on to the sprockets. I had to shorten the front rising runs and remove the first and last locator pins from the top run and even then I had to fudge a bit. In all the test fitting and putting the tracks on and off over and over, despite trying to be very careful to keep things straight, in the end I screwed up when I finally glued them in place and got the top runs reversed! What a clanger. Fortunately, its only really obvious where the top and bottom meet at the front and rear, so I'll just live with it. I added the after market Rubicon crew, stowage and Polston gun and the decals are from my spares. To get the Polston gun mount to sit correctly, you have to remove one of two boat hooks molded into the top, a tedious task. Oh, and even though there is an antenna mount at the front, one is not provided nor called for, so mine is from stretched sprue.

A Google search for UN Landrover ambulance turned up several in white UN markings.

I'm working on a Matador towed Rapier launcher and I'm doing it in the towed configuration. The instructions say that the when towed, the missiles were not mounted but rather transported in a truck, yet all photos I can find with one being towed the missiles are on the launcher. Bu the photos seem to depict either some sort of demo and/or parade so I can't be sure what operational practice would be. Anyone have some insight?

Wasn't that also known as a "Patturion" from mixing an M-60 Patton engine and engine deck with a Centurion?

Noel, There were no decals in my bag. I scrounged some up from my spares. The "5" is actually a racing aircraft decal and the flag is a 1/35 British AFV marking.

I picked this out of a vendor's box of bagged Airfix kits at Scale Model World along with several other ancient gems. The original kit dates back to the 50's and this release is an early/mid sixties version. I don't 'do' cars that often so this was just to be lark. Turns out it was no lark but more like a bedraggled old buzzard. There was extensive clean up, few parts fit together well which was complicated by very vague instructions of the "put this on that" type with an exploded kit view that showed all the parts but not really how they fit together. I struggled on and built it straight out of the bag, the only modifications being I added the fishtail exhaust end and modified the windscreen part which portrayed the folded down part as a solid block. Photos showed me that this part was either a screen like material that was suppose to be a guard against flying stones or was a more typical fold down windscreen. I chose to depict the latter. Another thing photos revealed was that the coachwork/passenger compartment was covered in some sort of material as it had a textured surface and it was not a gloss finish as were all the other metal parts. I have no idea what the deal is with this, but I depicted it with a flat finish to distinguish it from the glossy metal. Finished, nothing is in alignment and it would probably go down the road crab-like, if at all, but it makes a decent display and was a break from my usual braille scale AFVs.

This is the old Revell kit of a Wickes/Clemson class destroyer released as the USS Buchanan and HMS Campbelltown. For a kit of it's age, it's actually pretty good. The 4" guns are pretty nondescript as are the torpedo tubes, but the single greatest flaw is that the decks have simulated wood planking and these ships did not have wooden decks. Due to its age there is a lot of parts clean up/seam and injection pin marks filling involved, especially the searchlight tower. It comes with molded on stanchions to make railings out of thread, but this is difficult to get right and looks too out of scale. Work that I did: deepened all the port holes, drilled out and busied up the guns and torpedo tubes, removed all the molded on stanchions and replaced with PE railing, sanded/filed/scraped all the molded in wood deck planking off. In the end it builds up into a nice display model. There were many Wickes/Clemson class built and they all had minor differences here and there but were basically similar in outline and armament. I marked mine as the USS Reuben James, a Clemson class ship that was the first US ship sunk in the European Theater in WWII and is the subject of the song "The Sinking of the Reuben James" by Woodie Guthrie.

I'm thinking of starting the old Revell 1/240 USS Buchanan four piper destroyer. The decks all have a simulated wood planking. However, every photo I can find of their decks on the real ships (not models ) looks like they are not wood. No other destroyers of the modern era that I know of have wooden decks, so it would figure that they wouldn't either, but does anyone have any insight on this matter?