corporate

Really? That's nice Billy, thanks. I know where there's a 2CV Fourgonette in ex-French Post Office yellow sitting disused in a barn in Lot et Garonne, lovely condition just waiting to be restored. Alternatively this Ebbro one might do me for now... rgds Tony

This is lovely, only just found the thread and greatly enjoyed following your build. Excellent work! Inspiring too: must finish my Tamiya VW Beetle 1966... I hadn't heard of Ebbro: I wonder if they have any similar vintage types coming out? I've sometimes been tempted by the Tamiya or Heller 2CV, but I never owned one of those. However, I did have two Citroen Dyane 6s, one after the other, great car I think about far more fondly than any other previous car I had. I cannot find even a metal 1/24 kit, let alone a plastic construction kit: on the shelf above me there's a Corgi Dyane in a smaller scale, grossly over-scale tyres that I must change some day! But I'd really like a plastic kit in 1/24 of a Dyane 6, so I can reproduce one of the two I had - maybe the first, that I drove twice to Portugal, happy days... rgds Tony

Yes indeed - fluo's work best on that. I could have used Tamiya fine primer but in fact I just sprayed on some Vallejo white. The basecoat is fine, it's just a problem in getting the fluo stuff through the airbrush... I might give it up as too much hassle, and get an acrylic aerosol, which will probably give better results anyway and will be far easier to use for the comparatively large area I need to cover. rgds Tony

Nigel, is that enamel paint, i.e. cellulose thinned, perhaps with some xylene too? I should have emphasised I use Vallejo because I decided a while back that I prefer using acrylics, though I know Humbrol enamel airbrushes very nicely when thinned with cellulose; and that I need currently to airbrush onto expanded polystyrene - which reacts very adversely to cellulose, xylene, other powerful solvents... So is the Halfords stuff acrylic? I believe the Airfix aerosols are.. rgds Tony

Some time ago I settled on Vallejo and find I'm fairly competent at airbrushing both Air and Model colour through my Iwatas; I prefer Air, but if I thin the Model Color with plain water and a drop or two of artists flow enhancer, it goes on OK. For the first time, I just tried some Vallejo fluorescent stuff, and couldn't make it work. Even adding more water and half a dozen drops of flow enhancer failed to prevent it from clogging up very quickly. And what gets onto the model is very thin, watery, feeble stuff. Is there a special technique? I wanted to use an Airfix aerosol fluo colour but blasted Antics in Bristol were out of stock yesterday... Thanks, Tony

No, just Jane Fonda and the Orgasmotron...

Sure, it's just that there's very little comparison to be made between the original '60s TV series and subsequent movies. The original has wonderful kitsch appeal, almost tongue in cheek - though I bet they were perfectly serious about it... There's a possibly apocryphal story about a manufacturer approaching the production team of ST to ask about a licence to market the amazing automated sliding doors onto the flight deck of Enterprise: he was disheartened to be told they just had a couple of guys out of shot, pulling and pushing the doors... Re "Plan Nine From Outer Space" I have an idea this also had an alternative title but I can't recall... Certainly a great totem of cheesy SF movies. Actually I think I might have seen (decades ago) a Three Stooges film that was sort of SF, featuring fearsome (!) Amazon/vampire female aliens. The Three Stooges were just about as cheesy as movie comedy ever got, not excluding Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin, or Norman Wisdom...

Can't remember the spaceships in Blake's 7, was too distracted by the gorgeous women in it... Wonder if it's available on DVD...? As for really bad spaceships, no-one has mentioned the admittedly antique Flash Gordon serial movies from the 1930s, really very amusing.

Hello Stuck - glad to hear you've made progress. I have no experience at all with H&S airbrushes, but what you say in general sounds very familiar, much the same process that I underwent. I started in the same way, using cheap and/or obscure airbrushes that were either difficult to use, unreliable, or difficult to clean and maintain: eventually I went for Iwata and have three currently, really well made and work extremely well. At the same time, I went through a process of experimentation with different paints, abandoning acrylics because i found them utterly impossible, finding a good technique using enamels, then finally getting to grips with acrylics because I tried Vallejo and that brand worked for me. From all I hear, H&S are indeed perfectly sound - and those who complain about them probably have just not found the right technique or the best paints. Thanks for the tip about that Lidl W5 stuff - it's probably cheaper than Fairy Power Spray, which acts as a very effective remover of enamel paint and a cleaning agent too. Regards, Tony

Mike, you need to specify which A-4 you're doing: a FAA A-4B or A-4C, or an Armada A-4B, and even then there was some variation. The naval A-4Bs were pretty well standardised on US Mk82 bombs in a triple or quadruple load AFAIK, while the air force 'planes used some British bombs (I think) and certainly the Spanish EXPAL... I have a bit of information, but say what you're building - and there are some guys on the board who are in Argentina, and they tend to have the greatest expertise. Tony

I'm not a "rivet counter" and hardly consider myself even a modeller, compared with the hugely skilled people on this forum and others. I just think Daniel deserves a vote of thanks for taking the time & trouble to post all those super, fascinating photos here - and for demonstrating his awareness of copyright (I'm a professional photographer) by pointing out that the pics are either his, or copyright-expired. Really interesting topic. Tony

I don't think the photos are "defaced" at all. I understand completely someone's desire to make his photographs identifiable as his own and to discourage their being ripped off by others. Copyright theft is rampant, and the worst thing about it is that too many people either don't know about the value of copyright - or don't care. Tony

If that was my first model I'd be delighted! Looks great, lovely cockpit detailing, paintwork, decals... Tony

Russ, I'm impressed by your production rate! Seems to be about 20 times my own rate... You consistently build the sort of kits/planes that appeal to me, too - including this Vietnam-era Voodoo. Lovely paintwork, very realistic. I had an idea that there was at least one off the shelf kit of the recce version - ? Been sort of casually looking for one for a while. But now I've heard about this Koster conversion I might check that out as a possibility. Congratulations, excellent effort. Tony

Warm water with a drop of detergent does a good job of loosening everything so it can be brushed off. I've tried adding white vinegar (then rinsing thoroughly afterwards) but haven't found it makes a huge difference.

I got mine from Maplin Electronics in a sale, around (from memory) £20 and it's proved very successful - it's great for airbrushes, but perhaps my commonest application is for the several pairs of spectacles I seem to need... Tony

Yes, not dealt much with Hiroboy but his stocks are excellent - and when I had a query about some technical aspect of a model, I received a detailed email, with attachments, that was really useful. A genuinely worthwhile supplier, highly recommended. Tony

Nice, clever paintwork, encouraging - I just bought another HobbyBoss Me-262 boxing, the one-off nightfighter radar-equipped job, though I intend to do it as a conventional 1A. I shall watch your progress with interest, pick up some tips - impressed with the quality of the moldings. Tony

There are (or were at one time) rumours of a similar buried hoard of US Army stuff from WW2 in a tunnel not a million miles from Newton Abbot. It's not inconceivable, since there were very large numbers of US forces in South Devon during WW2, but it's not quite as obscure as Burma and one tends to think it would be hard to "lose" a great pile of military hardware in our crowded little island. Tony

Agree strongly. It took me quite a while to get used to airbrushing, probably through natural stupidity; at first I tried using old/weird/cheap airbrushes and that was a big mistake; but even after I got into Iwatas I wasted loads of paint and thought it was a disaster, simply because it took me ages to find the right paints & techniques to suit me. I have three Iwatas - HP-C Plus, HP-C, and HP-B - and like them a lot, but H&S have an excellent reputation and I doubt very much if it's the airbrush that's causing the OP's problems. Perseverance and experimentation are the key - boring but unavoidable.... Tony

Beautiful model, congratulations. It looks impeccable! I find this particularly inspiring since I've just acquired a parallel HobbyBoss kit for a one-off radar equipped 262 - though I intend to build it as a standard 1a fighetr. Why do you say the kit wheels are unusable? I've just looked at them on the sprue and they seemed OK to my eyes... Lovely camo paint job, and I like especially the cockpit detail, inside and out. Tony

Very impressed by your Spit, lovely work. At first I thought maybe the panel lines were too dark and obtrusive; but the close-up shots made me change my mind. Those CUs of the cockpit and prop really show the attention to detail - wish I could do similar! I'd heard this kit was a good one and I see that this is true with a high quality build, makes me quite keen to do one myself even though I tend to think there are too many Spit models! Well done. Tony

Know what you mean in a way - my last car build was a NASCAR Pontiac, but the next ones lined up are two VW Beetles and a 1967-type VW van. Tony

Well, yes, Keef, I'm aware that there were loads of hot Escorts such as the RS - I remember the 1970s all too well... From my point of view though, the problem with "hot" versions of ordinary mass-market saloons is that they're still just immediately obvious boy-racerish developments of a very ordinary mass-market saloon - alloy wheels, big bodywork stripes and boomy exhausts notwithstanding... I speak as the one-time owner of a Fiat Uno Turbo, my only "hot hatch", certainly very fast and nippy but also unreliable, traditional Fiat dodgy steel (an engineer friend said they just used low-grade steel with a high slag content), chronic depreciation etc. And don't even ask about my MGB, a total heap of manure! By contrast, the two Dyanes I had were extraordinary - one breakdown in ten years (alternator died), ridiculously cheap to run, most comfortable car in its price band, could carry loads of stuff, fold-back roof, wonderfully simple to adjust the headlights for driving on the right in Europe... I drove the first one to Portugal twice, girlfriend & I got a suntan while cruising in comfort across France & Spain... Dunno about "entertaining" (IME "entertaining" motoring is always horrendously expensive) but you can hardly compare a Dyane with an RS2000 - they're not interchangeable. I'd bet a reasonable sum that the Dyane was a damn sight more reliable than most Escorts, cheaper to run, more practical, and more comfortable. More interesting too. I got my first as a cheap-to-run car when I went off belatedly to be a student for four years, and liked it so much I kept driving them for another six years after that. I never, ever had the slightest hankering for an Escort of any variety! As for those supercars, tend to agree - but I'd have a new Jaguar XK tomorrow. Please say you're joking about those Chevettes and Mantas! Aaaaagh! Opel Manta joke from Germany in the 1980s - Q: Why are they going to make the next Manta only one meter wide? A: So that the driver can hang both arms out of the windows at the same time... (Point being that Manta drivers were supposedly utter posers, bit like Capris here.) Still, chacun à son goût, as we say in Devon... Tony

I presume people are keen to see kits of cars they knew or owned in real (1:1 scale) life, which is surely the only reason anyone might want a kit of the Ford Escort, one of the world's most boring cars... Even the Austin Maxi (my dad had one, and I drove it too), a rather under-rated motor, is pretty obscure in terms of wide appeal and respectable kit sales. Sixties Fords are a bit more interesting, like Phase 2/3 Zodiacs, Mk 1 Cortina, though still rather a niche subject I'd have thought. Speaking of which I personally would snap up kits in 1:24 of the VW Beetle 1200 Deluxe 1961 (only a 1:32 old Airfix kit of that to date), the VW 1967 1600 Variant, and the Citroen Dyane 6 - because I owned each of these... The only Dyane (a great car, owned two in succession, very reliable, practical, comfortable, cheap to run) I've been able to obtain is a somewhat crude Corgi diecast in some kind of small scale like 1:43 - more than one 1:24 plastic kit of the 2CV6, but not the Dyane, let alone the wonderfully eccentric Ami or those corrugated-side 2CV vans etc.... Sadly, hell will freeze over before anyone makes a plastic kit of such vehicles! Tony