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Sukhoi Su-17 (early), Modelsvit
Blackmike replied to Pete in a shed's topic in Ready for Inspection - Aircraft
A lovely rendition, Peter - congratulations! Mike -
Vought F4U-1A Corsair (1/72 Tamiya)
Blackmike replied to Cromm Cruac's topic in Ready for Inspection - Aircraft
That is a beautiful model! Well done, indeed. Mike -
Warriors of Light – Ukraine Su-24M “41” 2016
Blackmike replied to trickyrich's topic in Ready for Inspection - Aircraft
That's a stunning job, Rich - well done, indeed!!! Mike -
"Spotty Jag" - Italeri 1/72 Jaguar GR.3
Blackmike replied to The Shearwater's topic in Ready for Inspection - Aircraft
That is just stunning! Well done, indeed!!! Mike- 42 replies
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Good afternoon and a Happy Easter everyone Before Covid 'lockdown one' I was visiting a modelling friend who gave me some of his rejects as paint mules (models to try out different paints and varnishes on). However, I am a bit of a sucker for a challenge and wondered if these two part-completed and rejected models could be brought back to life. With only a part set of decals found for the Fiat, and with no instructions for either kit - and a large number of parts missing I set to work. First stop was research - an area of modelling I enjoy very much. Fiat CR.25 In my research I came across the Special Hobby instructions for the CR.25. The SH 72089 kit allows you to build the same aircraft (MM 3651) in one of the three paint schemes it bore serving as the wartime transport for the Italian military attache to Berlin. I wanted to try a mottle scheme so elected for Scheme B. The aircraft was painted in this camouflage scheme in June 1941 but the registration ‘I-ACIF’ was not added until it visited the Eastern Front in October 1942. In March 1943 it received its last change of paint scheme. I had several bits to modify, scratch-build and rob from the spares box but I think I achieved my aim with varying degrees of success. The painting was huge fun - especially the mottle. I added a filter (or glaze as a figure painter would say) to produce a more sandy-yellow hue to the camouflage. As the registration decals were missing, probably my biggest challenge was painting the registration letters. Martin Maryland 167F I found the paint scheme for this aircraft in a Polish (?) publication entitled ‘Martin 167 Maryland’ (Monografie Lotnicze 96) which can be easily downloaded from the internet. Although the text is in Polish the photographs and drawings are captioned in both Polish and English; it is an excellent reference for Maryland builders. So many parts were missing from the kit that I bought the Eastern Express kit and used it and its decals, and some Falcon vacform canopies to finish the model. Marylands in French service - whether Vichy or Free French - came in a great variety of colour and marking schemes; choice and decals are perhaps the biggest dilemmas. I chose a machine of the Free French and decided to have a go at spraying the Free French markings (I had tried spraying markings on a 1/72 Hind build but without success). This time they appeared to work better using a reverse masking technique; however, while not perfect they are good enough for wartime TLAR (“That looks about right”). Weathering I know is a hugely debatable subject with modellers. The French aircraft depicted in my references - serving mainly in North Africa and the Mediterranean - looked really battered. Hence I had a bit of a field day! Anyway, here they are - the Fiat CR.25 and the Martin Maryland 167F You may be wondering what happened to the Eastern Express Maryland I bought for spares? Well, I planned to make it into a 24 Squadron, SAAF aircraft operating in the desert. Unfortunately, I made a complete mess of it and it has become…a paint mule!! Thanks for stopping by Mike
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Really enjoyed that, Bertie - and a great model to illustrate it. Congratulations! Mike
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1:72 Fujimi McDonnell Douglas FG.1 Phantom A&AEE
Blackmike replied to Navy Bird's topic in Ready for Inspection - Aircraft
That’s a beautiful model with photographs and write up to do it justice! Hearty congratulations, Bill. -
I love wandering around the smaller stalls at model shows - you know the ones where there are many kits (usually vacforms and limited run offerings) often dropped loosely into boxes or lying around in heaps on tables. Very often they are aircraft types that few have heard of - the products of a once-thriving cottage model production industry. “Roll up, roll up, one kit for a tenner, two kits for fifteen, etc.” Well, one year at Telford I bought a vacform then I saw a nondescript bag with some olive green parts and a cover sheet stuck on proclaiming it to be an ‘Epoxy-resin kit’ of a Blackburn B-37 Firebrand. "Give us a fiver, mate and it's yours..." Not having built a resin kit I proceeded carefully, but ended up shelving the project two or three times. In the meantime I built Rareplane’s vacform of the aircraft - carrying a torpedo, and finishing it in the extra dark sea grey and dark slate grey camouflage with sky undersurfaces. Then I bought the beautiful CMR Firebrand kit, and, intending to build it with the torpedo, I had the idea to use its bombs and rockets to build this kit as an air-to-surface attack version. I managed to buy a set of decals from CMR, which came with all of the placement instructions. It was a good fun build although I had to scratch build the cockpit (not that you can see anything at all!), and use one of the two CMR kit vacform canopies as the bargain bin model’s canopy was almost a tangerine colour! I got around the problem of cutting the underwing serial letters and numbers by placing the landing gear doors in position and decalling over them. 24 hours later I used a razor blade to carefully cut the decals and with a bit of Micro Set and Sol the rest was, as they say, history. So, here is my Blackburn Firebrand TF Mk 5, ‘EK773/CW’ of 738 Naval Air Squadron of the Naval Air Fighter School, Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose, Cornwall, UK, as seen at Royal Air Force North Front, Gibraltar in July 1950. It is armed with two 500 lb Semi Armour Piercing bombs and eight 60 lb practice rocket projectiles. Of note is the use of a camouflaged engine cover, and the replacement cowling panel with the incoming predominantly Sky finish for Fleet Air Arm aircraft. Which points me nicely towards the scheme I will use on the CMR kit when I build it with a torpedo! Thanks for stopping by. Mike
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'Factory fresh' or 'War weary'? 1/35 MiniArt SU-85
Blackmike replied to Blackmike's topic in Ready for Inspection - Armour
Good afternoon, guys. Many thanks for your kind and encouraging comments. Just thought I'd reply to a couple of points/questions. Pete: your point accepted though I would say the following: 1. Yes, I do have a general tendency to over-weather my models (both aircraft and AFVs); I guess I have to develop better judgment to know when "enough is enough"! 2. In my research I noted that Russian 4BO tends to darken as it ages - unlike western AFVs where the opposite tends to happen. Though both sides of the SU-85 started out as 'clean' 4BO the application of the washes/chipping etc made it darker than I was expecting. 3. The hit on the glacis plate was supposed to simulate an incendiary-type shell which blackened the paintwork. That, coupled with the darkened 4BO made the colour contrast (between the two sides) quite stark indeed! 4. I have not seen any colour pictures of battle-worn SU-85s; my only reference has been black and white - and we know how difficult it can be to draw colour comparisons from them. Sanfrandragon: I used a Parkside (Dremel-type) rotary tool with a milling/shaping bit. Best wishes and happy modelling to you all! Mike- 10 replies
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This is my latest build - an SU-85 (Early Production Mod.1944) of the 221st Tank Regiment, 8th Estonian Rifle Corps on the Leningrad front in the summer of 1944. Both my first Soviet AFV and full interior kit, I received it at Christmas 2017 and started it soon afterwards. However, complications with fitting the crew members inside and losing the decals (later found after MiniArt supplied a replacement set!), caused the build to stall for a considerable time. However, with an ‘end the shelf of doom’ push I have finished it! It was a very enjoyable build and I learnt a number of things - especially to look very carefully at the building instructions since several parts in a build section look similar - but are not! I found that with some components of the interior a misalignment in the fitting/gluing would nearly always cause problems further down the line. That said my biggest headache was making the four crew (commander, gunner, loader and driver by Master Box) fit the interior. Much radical surgery was required and I half suspected that the figures are slightly over-scale. It is just possible to see the back of the driver's head on the forward view photograph (below). I did consider ‘opening up’ the AFV to show the detailed engine and fighting compartments, but decided that - besides complicating things - it might blur the contrast between the ‘Factory fresh’ and ‘War weary’ aspects of the model. The display base is quite simple with the civilian worker (LZ Models) being there to give some idea of the size of this AFV. The SU-85 shared the same low profile as the German Sturmgeschütz III and, later, the Jägdpanther and, like them, would often prove to be a difficult target for the enemy. For those interested, the banner on the external fuel tanks reads: ‘Pod znamenem Lenina - vpered za Rodinu, za nashu pobedu!’ which translates to ‘Under the banner [of] Lenin - forward for the Motherland, for our victory!’ (My apologies to any Russian speakers if I have got this wrong)! The slogans on the side of the AFV are in Russian (Cyrillic) and Estonian and both say ’For Soviet Estonia.’ The SU-85 (Samohodnaya ustanovka meaning ‘self-propelled’) was a Soviet weapon system based on the chassis of the T-34 medium tank. The ’85’ designation is for the bore of the vehicle’s main armament which, in this case, was the 85 mm high velocity D-5S gun - itself adapted from the 52-K anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) weapon The Soviet Union’s first large-scale production tank destroyer (as opposed to an infantry support/assault weapon) the SU-85 was designed on the body of the SU-122 using 80% of the parts of the T-34; it was introduced in August 1943. However, when the up-gunned T-34 medium tank with an 85 mm gun entered service in early 1944 there was little point in continuing production of the SU-85. This was halted in late 1944 after a production run of 2,650 vehicles - giving way to the SU-100 tank destroyer armed with a more powerful 100 mm gun. Though it served until the end of WW2 the SU-85 was withdrawn from Soviet service soon after the war’s end; a number were exported to Soviet client states with those in North Korea and Vietnam seeing active service in those conflicts. SU-85s were still in service with several armed forces until as recently as the 1990s. Any constructive criticism would be much appreciated! Thanks for stopping by and looking. Mike
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My first motorbike build, a birthday present from my eldest son a long time ago. I couldn’t emulate the pristine builds which grace these pages so went for a ‘used and abused’ look, a bike in much need of some TLC! The Honda VT250F, introduced in 1982, was one of the first Japanese bikes to sport a full fairing (after a change in Japanese law). Powered by a two cylinder 90º V-twin, four-stroke water-cooled engine derived from the Honda NR500 GP racer. Brakes were a single, inboard, ventilated disc on the front wheel and a drum unit on the rear. Thanks for stopping by. Stay well, stay safe. Mike