Tcoat

Maybe they just recovered the aircraft and haven't folded it all up yet! Yep. I tried silver paint and then a light sanding so the canopy frame showed through but it was too garish. Went with the decals and although they put up a valiant fight some liberal use of Micro Sol put them in their place (both figuratively and literally). Good thing they give you extra though!

I am considering doing the same. What I think I am going to do is put one of the spare folded wing ones on the separate stand and a ready to go one on the cat.

So I have been on a bit of seaplane/flying boat kick lately and as I was finishing the Ardo up I had a moment of inspiration. I could do up the Tamiya I-400 and then do a 1/48 Seiran all folded up with the front of the hanger and start of the catapult scratch built as a base. Off I went online shopping and the prices sort of scrapped that idea. Today I was near the only place in town that still models and popped in for some paint. There on the shelf was the I-400 kit! Since I happened to have a 25% off coupon I had been holding for a while it is now mine at a cost that makes me feel better about what the Seiran kit is going to cost me. The history on these subs and aircraft is amazing and anybody that doesn't know it should give a quick read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine So down to business Normal Tamiya box. Even in 1/350 this is a large sub! Pretty much your standard new(ish) instructions and paint guide There is a rather nice stand with hardware to secure it and very well done name plates. There is also a stand to show one of the Seirans separate. Hull demarcation line will be easy since two pieces. The deck has nice detail. The space between the planks is a bit large for the scale but paint and weathering should fix that up. Not a lot of parts but there never is with subs. What there is are really nicely molded. Enough parts for two Seirans with all ready to fly and four folded up for the hanger. Only need three of them so have a couple of spares for something. They are very well molded. The panel lines are a bit heavy but again paint will help. Nice little photoetch mostly for the aircraft and radars. Also two big "ballast" bars. Like their 1/48 armour line I guess they think small kits need weight? Beautiful decals. Not sure why they went with black glass and white frames for the canopies though. I will try painting one as well and see which is better. The flags are on a very very thin sort of parchment paper and are a complete work of art. OK off to the paint booth!

All accurate but in the case of the Memphis Belle it was indeed a replacement tail from an older scrapped aircraft. A quote from one write up "The lanky pilot climbed out of his seat to see exactly what had happened. “It looked like we had no tail at all,” Morgan recalled. “I got back in the cockpit and flew back to the base in two hours. It was tough flying, and tougher than that to set her down." I don't have the book anymore but so can't say which mission but there was a good write up about the incident and the fact they had to change the tail out. You can even see in one of the few in service pictures that the camo blotches are cut off in an almost perfect straight line at the replaced panels. Repairs using parts of other more badly damaged airframes was pretty normal. Here is a 1/72 B-17 that got a whole new wing!

Oh I didn't take it as a criticism but was truly curious as to why there wouldn't be one. I have never seen the movie myself and rarely watch war movies at all. I usually just end up yelling at the screen when things get totally absurd. Don't even get me started on that Brad Pitt Fury movie which should have been about 5 minutes long after the take broke down! Tank broke. German column coming. Panzerfuast explosion. Roll credits.

Yep. Understood. Many of these kits are the old school AMT molds just repopped with a few new parts. Some of those molds are 40+ years old and even the best of them are only a basic representation of the actual car. I admire your persistence in stripping and restarting! I would have said "forget it it will be flat black" a long time ago.

I wouldn't worry about getting a nice gloss coat if you are indeed modeling Dom's car. Apparently I am the only fan of the movies here (in a they are goofy action movies not documentaries sort of way) so I know that the car was actually a matt or at best semi gloss finish. It is actually even a little beat up for most of the movies it is in so you can hide a multitude of paint sins. If I was painting it I would just use the Tamiya semi gloss as the main coat and may even give it a light spray of dull coat to knock the gloss down even more. Another option I may consider would be to use flat nato black as the main coat and then spry it with a semi gloss lacquer to bring the gloss up a tad.

You did a great job since figures can be rough at the best of times. At least your eyes and face look human as opposed to the other pics where it looks like the poor guy just realized it wasn't a fart!

I build everything, cars, ships, scifi, old aircraft, new aircraft, armor of all eras and figures. I was posted at the base in Gander briefly and believe me it is not representative of the rest of Canada! I got better!

I did 5 years as a cadet, a year Army reserve and then 5 years regular Army. I was out for about 15 years and then took my commission in the Naval Reserve for another 6 years. I spent almost half my life in the military in one form or another.

Not a hope that I can remember all the aircraft from different countries that I poured fuel into so I could model them. I have thought about doing the vehicles I drove but there simply are not kits of most of the Canadian ones.

I have handled and seen probably 100 camo nets over the years and although I wasn't really paying much attention I don't recall any two that were the same. I think that as long as you use roughly the right colours and materials for the era you will be bang on no matter what the pattern.

Since I have been using this forum for reference work and inspiration for several years I figured it was about time that I joined up and contributed a bit. Like many people I started model building as a young child back in the Gold Age of kit making of the mid 1960s. I probably built 200 models between the age of 6 and 12. Most of those succumbed to enemy fire in the way of firecrackers and BB guns. At age 12 I joined the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets and since the girls loved a man in uniform the hobby of modeling was soon greatly reduced. Next came cars followed closely by regular (then reserve) military service, deployment and eventually a family so model building was completely forgotten. About 12 years ago I got a call from my parents to come and get all my crap out of their attic. It came as a surprise since I didn't know I had any crap in their attic. One of the things I found was the large personal effects container from when I had returned from being stationed in Germany back in the 70s. I opened it up and was amazed to see all the contents of my bedroom that my parents had packed up when they moved while I was on a Un deployment in 1979. There were many items that I had forgotten but at the very bottom of the box was a huge pile of broken models, unfinished kits and random pieces. Among those pieces however were 3 mostly intact models. Since they were late ones (around 1970) they had never been subjected to adolescent simulated combat and survived for over 20 years in the bottom of a box! Finding these trigger my addiction and now I have a massive stash that will not be completed unless I reach the age of 160 and a profusion of built kits on almost every flat surface of the house that annoys my wife to no end. Glad to be here and able to share with people that are actually interested since the reaction at home has reached the point of an exasperated sigh, eyeroll and whispered "another one?" The ones from the crate; Probably a bit older (1968?) Aurora 1/48 I apparently had three bottles of paint. Newer and I think the last I built before coming back to the hobby Tamiya 1/35 And... Another Tamiya 1/35 I obviously developed my affinity for dirty vehicles early even if all I had available was oil paint by number paint. It is important to not that the antennas are the ones I put on there in 1969 or 70 and have not been repaired or even touched since I took the model out of the bottom of the box!

I found a these when I was looking for some Voodoo stuff a while back. Never did order so can't vouch for them. Not a huge selection in low vis but may be a start. https://www.canmilair.com/ I have also come across some on Ebay but that of course is hit and miss.

Why wouldn't it? I was really torn on how to finish it since there are really three different ways you can go. There is the actual historical aircraft that had the ugly (and totally ineffective) medium green "camo" blotches over the faded light olive drab. It had a replacement vertical stabilizer and rudder after a prop strike that looks to be darker olive drab with lighter fabric. There is the movie version that was pristine dark olive drab over the whole surface. Well at least at the start of the movie it did. By the end of the movie it had sustained all the damage in it's last mission that it did in the whole of it's real operational period. Or there is the restored version that sort of falls someplace in between the two others so includes elements of each. I am/was building this to give away to a friend (I give away about half of what I build these days) that is a huge fan of the movie so I modeled it primarily based on that even though it is probably the furthest from the real operational aircraft.

I found it on clearance at a local shop. It had sat on their shelf for a while and they pretty much gave it to me. I bought it to work on at the cottage where I have only limited supplies and tools. Built all the subassemblies then it sat unpainted in the box for a couple of years since I also had no place to display it. Got new shelves just before Christmas so figured it was time to pull it out, throw some paint on it, and get it on display. Thank goodness the wings fold though or even the new shelf wouldn't have cut it!

1/48 Snow Speeder and 1/72 Tie and X-Wing Sorry don't have nice display pictures as they seem to have disappeared and since these were built as a gift and I don't have easy access anymore. As usual the weathering looks excessive in the pictures but is more subtle in real life.

I am working on an airfield base for it. I have a lone figure that I am going to have standing beside a staff car just looking at the aircraft. I think it will be rather poignant.

I wanted to convey the damage as seen in the movie but not get carried away to the point the model would break in half if you tried to pick it up. Studied 100s of pictures of the real thing and although some of them made it home with massive sections of aircraft missing I wasn't so sure a model would survive it!

Yep. The colour chips for the RLM 02 seem to run the gambit from a dark tan through a light olive and end up in a light grey so I just sort of went with a colour that was kind of in that range. Since I could not get out to my local shop to get paint I just mixed up my own "close enough for my old eyes" colour. There is actually more of an olive hue to it than the pictures would make it look. Besides I wanted something that wasn't grey, green or silver on the shelf! I varied in the interior colour as well since it was supposed to be a light olive grey but I wanted better contrast so went with a bit darker. Since they were just a trial aircraft I will just say the exterior faded and made the interior look darker. Going to pick up the 196A kit and will stick to the actual RLM colours for it.

Yep. It is actually a nice deep red not dark pink as it appears.

Thanks. May be just my computer then. The pics are all washed out and faded looking to me.

Beutiful kit and dirt cheap! Need to work on my photography skills though.