Photon

Looks like a fun project. I think it would be cool to add a few details to the suit, maybe some extra detail on the backpack or a new weapon. Then a small simple base to display it. Some of the glue damage could perhaps be expressed as battle damage or wear and tear once you get to the paint stage. Another thought is a derelict suit, rusted and with moss growing on it, maybe with a skeleton inside(?) Here’s what I mean by a small base (this is not my work, btw)

Looks ace, Pete. Lots of really nice details on this one. I especially like the canopy.

Looks fantastic. I really like the paint job. Are you going to add any markings? I’m looking forward to the RFI shots.

Absolutely ace work, Pete. You really seem to know your way around aircraft and it really shows in your work. The details really sell it. Great job!

Yes, I’ve had my eye on some Preiser backpackers, but they’re pricey and often out of stock. As I recall, I wasn’t 100% in love with them (their garb is too distinctly Bavarian), but maybe I’ll just grab them, because I do prefer the idea of hikers.

I do have some HO scale astronaut figures left over from another project that could be modified to look less ‘astronautical ’ and maybe a bit more ‘hazmatic’. They’re a bit soft, as far as details go, but some micro putty work and I think they could be brought closer to the ones in the original drawing. Here’s what the HO figures look like in the scene. What do you think scale wise? 1/100 figures would certainly lend some titanic grandeur, but I do like the idea of finishing this in my lifetime. There’s a large war gaming / toy solder shop and a huge model train shop just a few miles from here, but I’d rather not venture out into the corona hellscape unnecessarily . (And I when I think about what I’ve paid on postage this year to have various supplies sent here )

Thanks, Pete. I actually haven’t looked at 1/100. Outside of Gundam stuff, I wasn’t aware of many things being produced at that scale. Is it a tabletop game scale? I really like the texture, too. Unfortunately, it will mostly be covered in grass. I have some ideas for a couple submersible drone models. I think this texture will be well-suited to undersea landscape.

Waiting for the plaster to fully dry, then weathering and vegetation. Still haven’t found any suitable figures in HO scale. Maybe if I widen my search to include 1:72, I’ll probably have better luck. 1:72 is a bit bigger than I’d like, though.

Thanks. I used plaster mixed with some paper pulp to bulk it out. The paper pulp is an entire roll of toilet paper that I shredded with an immersion blender (in water to keep the dust down). Then I spread it on an old window screen and let the water evaporate. I just add it to the plaster mix by eye as needed. The right consistency is similar to loose porridge or cottage cheese. It’s an attempt to DIY a product called Sculpt-a-mold, that is popular with war gamers and model railroaders. The plaster that I used is a brand called Durham’s Water Putty. It’s yellow because they add limestone and other minerals to the mix. I’m not sure what properties that imparts. For the smooth sides, I mixed it a bit thicker and didn’t add any paper. If you look close at the last picture, you can see the sides are just a skim coat over the edges of the foam insulation that the base is made from.

I needed the panels to be thin shells that would fit perfectly over the ship hull. The shapes that I’m forming over are identically sized to the original. That means the inside of the vacuum formed panel will conform perfectly to the model. To 3D model a thin shell that would conform to the surface of the ship is beyond my computer skills and would be difficult to print without warping. Also, I really like vacuum forming and don’t get many opportunities to do it. Thanks

As usual, I’m bouncing between multiple projects. I finally put some time into this and thought I’d share some progress. I thought the ship hull looked a bit stark, so I decided to have a go making some panels. In order to get them to conform to the compound curves of the hull, I vacuum formed them. I printed three instances of this portion of the ship. I arranged them with a triangular plywood spacer, so the plastic wouldn’t have to be drawn as deep, preserving a bit of material thickness in the final parts. vacuum-forming machine: Here’s the result. The form is still trapped within the part, as I wasn’t too concerned with undercuts. Also it will provide some needed support whilst scribing. I scribed some lines into the panels using a chisel made from a ground down needle file. Scribing an ellipse onto a curved surface was challenging, but I got better at it as I went. The worst of them will positioned so it will be hard to see in the final piece. Here’s the ‘chisel: After scribing, the panels were trimmed to size. Here is the hull fully paneled, with some grey primer. I’ve started to paint and weather the engines, as well. They’ve got a ways to go. I also started to bulk out the base. I will paint the ship before attaching it, then continue to add ground material. That’s all for now. Thanks for looking. Hopefully it won’t be quite as long before the next update.

Heres a nice shot of the underside:

Great work, Pete. It really looks fantastic.

Hey Pete, here’s a couple pictures of a Fledermaus that I had grabbed off Twitter because I thought it was an interesting paint job. Maybe you’ll find them useful. I can’t wait to see what you cook up this time.

Great job, Will. Those concrete blocks look extremely realistic. Are they made from plaster?

Great idea. Thanks!

Thanks everyone! I will be making a small base. It would be nice to scatter some debris around. I was thinking maybe some broken concrete and rusted scrap metal among the weeds. At 1/35 scale there’s no shortage of oil drums and other accessories available, but I don’t want it to get too crowded.

Thanks for the encouragement, guys. I’m almost done. A couple more bits to glue on and a final weathering pass. I might build a small base for this as it’s a bit vulnerable as is. thanks for the tips about spraying orange paint. As least I know it’s not my ineptitude.

Thanks everyone, I appreciate it. I managed to get everything base coated and chipped. The chips are out of scale in some cases, but overall I’m pleased. I had a really hard time getting the orange laid down with any opacity. I had this problem before with another brands of orange and I’m starting to think orange acrylic might be one of those problem colors. In both cases, Vallejo Model Air, and now Mission Models orange spray very thin with poor coverage. My experience with Mission paint up until now has been very positive. In any case, I’m going to let everything sit for a few days to cure, then start decals and weathering.

Have you thought about printing with polystyrene filament? It prints beautifully and is really easy to sand. It can be glued using standard modeling cements, so you can easily detail prints with kit parts or Evergreen shapes. I just posted a thread about printing with polystyrene:

I just realized this new 3D printing section was here and I thought it might be helpful to share a bit about the ways that I use it in my work. I recently got back into model making (~2017) after not having done it since childhood. My focus is scratch building science fiction subject matter. I have a resin printer and a FDM style printer, both relatively inexpensive, that have become an important part of my work flow. Here's my souped-up Tevo Tarantula: FDM ( fused deposition modeling) style printers seem to be going out of favor with the recent arrival of cheap, high resolution resin printers. But don’t write them off yet. I get a ton of use out of mine. If you’re unfamiliar, FDM printers use a heated nozzle to extrude plastic filament to draw your part a layer at a time (sort of a high tech hot glue gun). I bought mine as a kit directly from China for $190 US. I chose this particular printer because it was cheap, well liked, upgradeable, and had an active user community. But above all, because it could extrude polystyrene filament. The importance of this point can not be overstated... it can print styrene. This means the resultant parts are strong and lightweight, sand easily and can be glued using common modeling cements (Tamiya extra thin, in my case). Polystyrene filament is sold under the name HIPS (high impact polystyrene). It’s sold as a support material because it can be dissolved using a special solvent*. What most folks don’t seem to realize is HIPS is a great material to print with on its own. In my experience, HIPS filament prints beautifully. And it's cheap and goes a long way; I'm still using the $20 spool I bought almost 4 years ago. FDM printers aren’t great for small details. The parts also will exhibit noticeable layer lines or striations. There are games you can play to reduce this, but I just except it as a limitation of the technology. A light sanding removes the highs and filler takes care of any voids. The main way I utilize this printer is to create large forms that would be difficult to make in other ways and then add detail using kit parts. Here are a few examples of how I’ve been using the FDM printer with styrene filament: For my Airship, I needed to created the segmented insectoid, bulbous shape seen in this photo of the finished model. I designed the part to be printed in three pieces, letting the locations of the segments define where the part was split. The assembled parts were registered by a 1/2 inch aluminum rod to keep them concentric. Here you can see one of the segments being printed. Note the honeycomb pattern on the interior of the part. This saves on material use without sacrificing much strength. You can also see the central hole for the aluminum rod. Sandpaper and auto body putty were use to achieve a smooth surface. The part was primed with automotive primer from a spraycan and wet-sanded. The pile of elliptical rings on the left was also printed in styrene. Once the surface was acceptably smooth, I feathered back the primer with 600 grit paper where the rings needed to go and bonded them with Tamiya cement. Then the part was detailed with kit parts. Here’s the final result in primer: The next example is from my model of the Nostromo Airlock from the movie, Alien. The walls had some tricky angled sections. I decided to print an underlying structure to make assembly easier. Here is the printed support. They’re about 6.5 mm thick. The holes in the upper and lower areas are for a styrene tube to align and strengthen the two supports. I could have cut these by hand, but these are very accurate and I was downstairs reading a book while they were printing. Multi-tasking. The supports were then clad with sheet styrene for the walls. Another more novel use for my FDM printer that I’m still exploring, is printing forms to vacuum-form over. Here’s another example from the Nostromo Airlock model. To make the recessed dents in the airlock doors, I printed the positive shapes in styrene. These were glued to some thin plasticard to lift them slightly off the bed of the vacuum former. The resultant “dents” were then cut out and glued to the rear of the doors. Here’s the result. I'm still figuring things out and coming up with ways to put this machine to work. Please let me know if you have any questions. -Peter --------------------------------------- *There are printers that have dual extruders and the idea is you print your part in ABS and support any overhanging geometry with HIPS (these are printed at the same time). Then you put your part in a vat of solvent and dissolve away the styrene leaving just your ABS print.

Looks amazing. Really nice work. How do you attach the booms? Is there some kind of internal structure or do they just glue directly to the car body? I’m also looking forward to see what you come up with for the engine.

This is a project I’ve been quietly working on (and off) in the background over the past year. It’s a sort of chance meeting on an operating table between a sewing machine and an umbrella, or in this case, between a 1:35 scale Hitachi Zaxis excavator and a couple of Gundam kits. It’s based on a model that I saw on a Japanese social media site a couple of years ago by a modeler called “Surume0407”. You can see his work here: <https://twoucan.com/profile/surume0407> I really liked it and wanted to try to make my own version, but while the use of the Hasegawa excavator kit was obvious, I had no idea what kits were used for the robot bits. I bought the excavator kit, figuring it would be fun to build regardless if I attempted the kit bash or not. Some time later, while looking at pictures of other people’s models on the web (a hobby in itself), I recognized some of the major bits in a photo of a Gundam ‘Graze’ figure. And with that, I was off to the races. This will be a fast one, so I’ll let the pictures do the talking. Hang on, there's a years worth of work squished into one post. The chassis was 3D printed out of polystyrene. It took a few tries to get proportions that I liked. This shows the underside. The white tubes are attachment points for the rear legs. The feet are 1:35 tank wheels and some styrene tube. 5/32” is close enough to 4mm that it seems to work ok with the Gundam poly-caps. I had to add some Tamiya putty in some cases to tune the fit. Leg armour squared off with epoxy putty to somewhat reduce their ‘gundamosity’. The extension for the counterweight was modeled in Fusion 360 and printed in polystyrene. I was unable to identify several of the armour pieces, so I decided to make my own. Here's the prototype sheet styrene knee armour and the printed final. Scratchbuilt a new piece for the top of the shear to match the size of the one on the claw and to make room for the Gundam ball attachment. The manipulators were made from a combination of the 1/144 scale leg and arm parts. The main Gundam torso was glued to a printed stryrene bar that fit into a groove in the chassis I busied up the sides of the chassis with some kit parts. So here are most of the parts laid out. All that needs to be done at this point is prime and assemble. Primer A lot of the original Hitachi parts are not glued to make painting easier, so everything is a bit precarious at this stage. All of the Gundam points of articulation are still functional, making posing this thing rather difficult (Much respect to Mr. Ray Harryhausen). Phew! So this is where things stand as of today. There are a lot of detail bits still to attach and the possibility of a driver, we'll see. Next up final assembly, paint, decals, and weathering. Stay tuned and thanks for following along. Oh, I also have another sci-fi build in progress in the diorama section, if anyone's interested. Thanks! -Peter

Thanks. The main ship hull was printed with polystyrene filament and probably took around 6hrs or so. It’s about 13 cm in diameter. The engines were printed on a resin printer. I was able to print them in pairs and if I recall took about 4-5 hrs. per go. thanks, those are good suggestions about the figures. I have seen some solders with mine detectors. I’m not above modifying the figures. I think my main goal is to have a bit of humor, since the whole scene will be rather cartoonish. Peter

The inspiration for this vignette came from this sketch by concept artist, Guy Warley. I originally planned to have the figures to be backpackers or maybe having a picnic, unaware they were sitting upon the site of an ancient extraterrestrial ruin. Then I could call the piece, “Picnic at the Ruins of ARK Polaris”, or some such. I also thought it would be funny to have one of the figures have a metal detector, but I’ve been unable, as yet, to find an HO scale detectorist figure. The ship hull was printed in polystyrene. I made the ship a bit more organic than the one in the drawing, as I thought it would look cool if the engines were nestled in recesses. After some minor body work with sandpaper and Tamiya putty: The engines themselves were designed in the free version of Fusion 360 cad software and printed. I also added some kit part details between the engines, but I think this will be largely invisible in the finished piece. Here are things mocked up. I bulked out the ship with some styrene insulation. I think the overall base will need to be slightly bigger, but overall I’m pleased with how it’s turning out. That’s all for now. Thanks for looking.