Parrahs
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Posts posted by Parrahs
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To get a bit of variation into the armour shelf I thought I'd have a look at some guns. At first I had some issues choosing, but with much of what's around in 1/72 being somewhat small and simple I ended up just grabbing three at once and calling that a single build. So in the end I ended up with two decidedly iconic guns of WW2, the 88mm Flak 36 and the Bofors 40mm AA gun, along with a probably rather less well known but still somewhat widely used gun, the Bofors 37mm AT gun found in Ace's catalogue (as the Finnish PstK36). Now the first two probably don't need any introduction, but as for the last one it was a small AT gun designed for Sweden's army in the early 30s, and used both as a wheeled piece on its own and in armoured vehicles. It was also sold abroad, the main customers being Finland and Poland, with smaller orders going to the Dutch, the Commonwealth (Ordnance QF 37 mm Mk I), Republican Spain and Denmark. Captured guns then saw service with Germany, the USSR and Romania. Supposedly a very well designed gun it is to have been quite good against the tanks of its day, but as most such guns it quickly started to struggle as we get past the first part of WW2. It had a pretty good HE round though, so it continued to be highly useful against just about everythign on the ground except for tanks.
This won't be a big one in 1/72...
Anyway, getting started on things with a quick barrel comparison as I drilled them out. I'm worryingly amused by the fact that the tiny little one was meant to knock tanks, while the two much larger where at leats originally meant to be pointed at wood and aluminium.
No, I won't even think about replicating the muzzle break holes on the 37mm.
The Ace kits goes from "some" to "generous" amounts of flash, and has a bit of mould slippage in places as well. Zvezdas kits are more uniforms, generally having that "ridged" kind of mould line, especially along sides that's be parallel to the mould separation movement. Maybe it makes it easier to pull the pursues out? These two kits are designed to be cheap and simple enough to fit wargaming as well, so... They're still ok from the model building perspective I'd say (though not brilliantly detailed), and well, they were available. The biggest issue is the feed guides for the 40mm ammo, where the two side ones have been cast as a solid block.
Some carving out later, followed by a quick plasticard repair, and things are hopefully better. In that it should look better form a distance once painted up at least.
As we seem to be talking just under thirty pieces a model here a quick bit of tinkering gave me this.
The bit that's turned up under the 40mm gun is the gun blister/pod from a JA37 Viggen, same scale, that I had lying around. 30x173 for an interceptor...
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Some dot filters, some final details glued on and rigging leaves the build to be posted elsewhere...
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The build:
End result...
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20 hours ago, Homebee said:
Hobby Land report
So a 1/7000 HMS Hood from Flyhawk, that might be something. With the PoW and Bismarck already out I have a feeling there's a few books on the Prinz Eugen lying about in their research department. Now if
someeveryone could just keep reminding them that there's no 1/700 HMS Belfast kit in production by anyone... -
Ventilators trimmed, the small tower has been straightened out a bit, boats painted and washes applied.
Time for some oil filters and weathering-ish stuff then.
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I hope it goes well for them. Choosing to not really bother with 1/72 is a bit of a bummer for me personally, but I can understand if they want to aim at less saturated markets (though looking across the channel, well, British 1/72 armour ain't exactly saturated, hint hint... oh well). I'll just hope for some interesting ships in 1/700 instead.
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On 01/03/2019 at 16:22, USS_ESSESS said:
So my question is is it really worth the drilling of more than 100 0.3mm holes? Does it look significantly better than the plastic steps???
Not much of an improvement to my eyes, while the wire gives a more detailed feel the minor misalignments there draw the attention more than the more discreet blobbiness of the molded rungs.
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Adorable, it looks like it wants to be a Mustang.
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Some paint added, masking subtracted, and then some ventilators added in as well.
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Your really nailed the torpedo trails there, and the rest isn't exactly bad either.
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So the PE work went on. Including things like trying to match these platforms with this railing.
I the end I chopped off a small part for each long side, put a pillar in each other outer corners, and then tried to glue a small bit of brass across at the top at the outer end. Hopefully no one will look at that bit all too closely...
Then it was time for the masts and, well, here's the bits (with em having doodled a bit as part of the identification process).
The flank parts on the left block are just there to protect the rest, good thinking I'd say. And here's how I'm supposed to identify them.
So Π2 and E2 are on one block, and then E1, E3, and Π 1, 3 and 4 are on one block. Some reading of the instruction texts told me E4, E5 and Π5 were supposed to be stretched sprue. Π1 was the only part with significant side detail, so that one was kinda easy to identify. For the rest I just ordered them by length and hoped for the best, though looking at Π1 this pattern wouldn't have worked there... As for E2 and Π2 I thought I'd use the distance between the legs at the open end to identify them. But if you look closely at the actual parts you'll see two flat pieces stuck to one of them. The next page in the instructions eventually tells us that the rear masts legs have searchlight platforms on them, so that bit is for the rear mast. Had I followed my plan to have the bit with the greater leg spread in the manual be the part with greater spread in reality, well, I'd have gotten it the other way around. And possible cleaned off the platforms thinking they were some odd kind of casting artefact. So yeah, that took some time to sort out. As for actually building the masts the manual has you build them and then attach, but with basically nothing on them guiding you as to what angles the support legs come in at I started with adding the bottom mast and the support legs to the hull, and then built upwards. Thinsg ended up a bit crooked here and there, but at least I could get everythign to attach to the deck in the right post code this way.
And with that it's time for paint.
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1/72? Now that's the right kind of crazy. Even in 1/144 it'll have a greater wingspan than a 1/72 B-52.
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That turned out rather lovely.
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14 hours ago, HMSLion said:
Special bonus points for anyone releasing a good Apollo in 1/72 scale. The Dragon CSM is OK, but the LM is seriously misproportioned.
Ah yes, Apollo 11. I had already given up entirely there and gone off looking for 1/700 Saturn V on Shapeways instead. And as far as Dragon goes, a quick look at ebay and there doesn't even seem to be any available at the moment, from what I can recall prices for them when they do show up tend to be, well, astronomical. So a re-release from Dragon or a new kit form someone else would be very welcome. As strange as the lack of a 1/700 HMS Belfast is, that we haven't been buried in Apollo 11 stuff this year is even stranger to me.
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8 hours ago, Uncle Dick said:
Thats done it - only one seated pilot or are there two sets of the pilot sprue? Don't tell me the Russians are copying the future American plans of flying twin seat F-15 "arsenal jets" solo!
I like the box art on this one
Someone had better strap an R2D2 model into the back seat.
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I think I'm starting to accept that they probably scrapped the development of the kit, but I'm still kinda hoping that someone at some show will ask Trumpeter about how the 1/700 HMS Belfast is coming along. Maybe someone could remind Flyhawk that she's an easily available museum ship in a pretty well visited city while they're at it, you'd think that'd count for something...
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On 26/03/2019 at 20:52, Courageous said:
Thought that this was a waterline job
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So, boat race diorama... maybe some other time.
Still, things are fiddly enough as I'm currently mostly sticking on various small bits to the main hull. Or onto each other. And then bending other tiny bits around all that, and...
Of course, when it then became time to stick that onto the main affair the stretched sprue supporting pillars turned out to be very much in the way of a pair of large ventilators, and thus had to be very gently ripped off again. I also got the searchlight platform a touch too low to clear the ventilator perfectly (the best thing I could think of to determine at which height exactly it should sit was to estimate it from the ladders) but as the amount of sulphuric language involved in prying that loose and then re-attaching just about everythign would probably lead to a few cops in full riot gear knocking on my door and so I let that slide.
A touch of painting, masking, and attachment of other little bits have also happened. I found the first bubble that needed filling on top of a ventilator while I was at it.
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Work so far has mostly consisted of looking at the manual, looking at the parts, looking back to the manual, and then scratching my head as I try to figure out how to bets go about everything. I got the turrets together though (the odds of those PE guns staying there throughout the build seems rather slim) and chopped the funnels off their block to see where things may be heading though.
Then I went for a bit of fiddling with the boats, one of the leats interesting parts IMO so best sorted early. Rudders and, when appropriate, propellers are being left off until the very last moment, because dear gods those bits will be fragile.
Yep, every oar is its own bit of PE.
Some more thinking and something of a plan has formed. most of the kit and the PE looks like ti can be assembled before painting, so I'll go with that. Masking off the deck on the other hand will probably take a lot of handling of things, which'd doom a lot of the PE if attached. And as such I'll airbrush and mask that now.
So now to try and balance the fiddliness of masking around the small details with the making-a-mess-risk of leaving things to be hand painted.
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The certainly Fitter does well in grey.
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So a Finnish Mig-21 and over at their Su-17 side of things it seems we're getting a Polish-suitable one as well. It seems that when Modelsvit (finally) went for the variants I've been looking for they went all in.
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The Georgios Averof was a Pisa-class armoured cruiser that the Italian government decided it didn't quite have the need/money for. Luckily for the maker and ship Greece decided that they did however. The ship in return performed extremely well in the Balkan wars, where she almost single handedly chased off the Turkish navy in two battles, securing Greek naval domination in the Aegean sea. She was eventually decommissioned in 1952, restored as a museum ship in 1984, and then restored to sea-going condition in 2017. Today she sits as a museum ship outside of Athens, the last armoured cruiser in the world.
Having been on board the armoured cruiser Georgios Averof when I was in Athens a while back I thought I'd build a kit of her, and luckily there's a Greek maker with a pretty nifty looking (if not terribly cheap) resin kit on the market.
Photoetch included. Castings seem very nice so far, good detailing and all the holes on top appear to be for putting stuff in rather than bubbles.
Some bubbles, a few extra resin blobs and some bubbles underneath. And most importantly this, well, blob of material that just has to go.
Time for some sanding then...
Well, yes, I may be one of those waterline people. Luckily I could use a bench sander at work, and make a support/holder out of some scrap wood and oldish kneadatite. (Apparently it's still mostly viable after, uhm, two decades?)
And to return to the casting and detailing here, some of this stuff is ridiculously thin.
Getting these overhanging bits out of the mould has to be quite the experience.
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IIRC when I ordered from them some time back things weren't quick, but overall it worked.
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4 hours ago, SoftScience said:
that S-tank looks sublime!
Let's toss in a better view of that one as well then while we're at it.
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2 hours ago, Das Abteilung said:
I love this little vehicle. Love child of a Brummbar and a TNH.
We need more older Swedish armour in any scale. I want this one in 1/35. Stuff the paper panzers - what about some actual real overlooked ones........
Surprisingly enough that does seem to kinda exist, https://www.scalemates.com/kits/armycast-mandm-ac-35001-stormartillerivagn-sav-m-43--603923
With no sign of it on Armycast's homepage though it may be a bit tricky to get your hands on one.
That said there's certainly plenty of kits that could be released here. A half decent CV90 in 1/72 (that one's even got a decent number of international sales if you swap the cannon for a peashooter), a Strv m/42 in 1/72 (I guess if everyone bought a bunch of IBG's Strv m39 and m/40...) or 1/35, etc. And while most Swedish stuff did see as much combat as those paper panzers, yeah, at leats these got built.
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Time for some sanding then...
TAMIYA MATILDA "RUBBLE CAMO"
in Work in Progress - Armour
Posted
Your skill strop is clearly up to the task.