PeterB

Made a start on the Dingo - it's tiny! This is the interior. And this is with the basic body panels added. The fit is not great and I may have to use a bit of filler, but once the mudguards and suspension are added most of the joints will be hidden. The faceted shape is presumably an attempt to compensate for the very thin armour. It seems to be an excercise in building the smallest possible "armoured" vehicle that could hold 2 men and "sneak" up on the enemy to find out what they were doing. Cheers Pete

Hi Pat, I built one of these many years ago and I seem to remember reading somewhere that they were not actually pure black - the article suggested adding a little dark grey I think, so maybe NATO Black would be more appropriate - just a thought! Pete

Hi Martin The Midland book I have on Soviet armament has a pic with both tanks and rockets and says that you could carry both provided you dropped the tanks before firing the rockets! Mind you that might be limited to only certain types of rockets - I believe I sent you a pic of an S-21 next to a tank. Pete

Nearly there! Hopefully I will be able to airbrush a couple of coats of varnish on over the weekend and get the windows glazed. Then it is just a case of doing some rigging and sticking on the gun barrels and pitot tube. You may notice that the markings are not quite the same as shown on the box art, which is a good thing as that machine with the Alpha Romeo engines was from 10o Squadriglia BT, 28o Gruppo BT, 8o Stormo BT which AFAIK stayed in Italy and never took part in the conflict in Abyssinia. The decs and painting instructions are for this machine with Piaggio P.X engines whi

Cheeky sod! I have 2 sheets of Hannants black line decs but in the past I have found that the really fine lines tend to fragment during placement - a touch of varnish of MS Decal Film may be called for. Cheers Pete.

Hi Martin, You probably know this already but the parts you sent me included a couple of pylon mounted rocket launcher pods - probably the short nosed UB-16-57UD which fired members of the S-5 aka ARS 57 family of 57mm rockets. The Poles licence built this pod as the Mars 2 apparently. I believe the S 5 was originally envisaged as a anti bomber weapon but proved poor so a large number of different versions have been built - mostly air to ground but there is also at least one chaff dispensing version. I don't know if any of your current/proposed build versions would have used this w

As with the blue used on British Rail Diesels it was prone to fading but this is how I remember them. The pic is of a later type and maybe they used a different paint - possibly slightly lighter. The black lining could be fun - decs hopefully. Pete

One of the noticeable things about this machine and the later SM 79 were the "wires" running from the fuselage to wings and tail. As I mentioned earlier Supermodel provide a hole through the top of the tail and "dents" in the top of the horizontal surfaces, and Italeri show a pair of "wires" which they tell you to add from "stirred plastic" which I guess is stretched sprue. All the pics I have only show a single wire. There is also one from the fuselage to the upper wing as on the SM 79 above. When I built the latter a year ago I assumed they were bracing wires and so used fairly thick

Looking good so far - I usually paint the wheels, frames etc before fitting together as it is easier to get in, but I guess you will manage. Getting a bit rusty so may not be entirely correct but FYI the bits you have covered with foil are the connecting rods, coupling rods, valve gear, slide bar and crosshead - that's the bit that connects to the piston in the cylinder and goes backwards and forwards on the slide bars, that motion being transferred to the connecting rod which turns one set of wheels, the others being linked by the coupling rod - the whole set up is sometimes known as the mot

Hi Pat, Thanks for giving me the chance to build it - not half as bad as I expected, though it looks like the Italeri one has rather more detail. Pete

Thanks Pat, They were mostly the RM which replaced the RT but still interesting - quite decent acceleration at times. Pete

The cowlings are just a push fit at the moment so I can work out where the ruddy exhaust pipes go. I am quite pleased with it so far - better than I expected. Pete

Seats - that could be a problem as Tower say the same blue as the exterior but I am not sure about that. Certainly the normal Regents had a fabric covering which was in a dark colour as my memory serves - a sort of dark blue or grey with a red fleck comes to mind. However the RT's might have had a "leather effect" in a shade of darkish blue but I can't swear to it. They were designed for relatively short haul around London and the interiors were a bit "utility" I think, designed to be wiped down easily perhaps. Actually I have now discovered that the RT was actually a variant of the AEC Regent

40 years ago I built an OO gauge model railway layout which I had great fun with until pressure of a growing family meant I had to pack eveything up and put it in storage where it remains to this day. Originally it was "set" in the area around my birthplace of Bradford in West Yorkshire with LMS and LNER steam locos, but expanded over the years to include BR steam and diesel locos and a few "foreigners" from the GWR and Southern Railways. One of the things I wanted for the "scenery" was a Bradford bus so my wife bought me this! As you can see it cost her £5.25, but I gather Tower h

So, everything is now on except for the cowlings, props, exhaust pipes, pitot and gun barrels.# Now I can carefully complete the touching up before putting on the decs - all 10 of them. The engines do look a little small don't they? Typical of the problem the Italians had until well into the war which is probably why they started using German Daimler Benz ones. Cheers Pete