Radio Gnome

If you need to decant paint from an aerosol can into a jar ot tin, just use the straw that comes with you badger airbrush cleaner. Clip into the nozzle hole and gently spray into a jar.

You don't want to be spraying at 30psi unless your giving your car a once over. For humbrol enamels a rough rule of thumb that gives me great results is close to a 50/50 mix for darker colours and a 60/40 mix for lighter colours. It all depends on the specific colour and batch though. You need to get a consistancy similar to full fat milk. For general coverage spray at about 15psi approx 3-4 inches away from the surface. For detail work, go down as low as you can .. less than 10psi if you compressor will do it less than an inch away. 3 very light coats about 30 mins apart look 1000 times better than 1 heavy coat. I always use test cards. After spending 20 quids or more and god knows how many hours on a kit, I am not going to guess at a mix and spray blind and hope it all comes out alright. A great way of making cheap test cards is to cut the front and back panels off cereal boxes and spray the glossy printed side with halfords grey primer. This is a good simulation of a primed plastic surface. I always have plenty of these cards knocking around and before spraying onto the kit I have sweated over for weeks, I always test each colour and mix on a test card to see how it comes out. Its a practice thing, you get used to it very quickly and before you know it you will be able to see when a mix is just right by the way it drips from your mixer. Talking of mixers, get an electric mixer. Invaluable! Have fun, good luck

Its in low concentration though and lacks the punch of the old formula though which had both Methoxyisopropanol and Ammonium Hydroxide. I still have a spray bottle of Windowlene which I use for cleaning brushes after acrylic and it works well, but I don't think it is nearly as good as it used to be for flushing airbrushes. After spraying acrylic I use neat isopropynol which is much better than the watered down Windowlene formula we get today.

http://www.rbeuroinfo.com/ Note Sodium Hydroxide replaces Ammoniuim hydroxide in the trigger dispenser liquid version.

Windolene, the UK version of Windex no longer contains ammonia. I wonder if they will see any drop in their sales figures as modellers no longer buy it?

You are right to be proud of that build. Its got competition winner written all over it. Seriously good work!

For 1/48 bezels and films try Waldron at http://www.brookhursthobbies.com/waldron_model_products.htm

The decals are not the best Revell have done, defo not up to their normal standard, and blooming fiddely some of em are too! The centre bomb rack just clips in (I tested before final assembly) and it is going to be posed with the bomb on a bomb trolly anyway. The prop will just be glued on. I never go for spinning props, I always used to get them too tight so they don't spin anyway or too loose so they look droopy. These days they get stuck on

On the finishing straight now. I'm not happy with the canopy, so I have ordered a Squadron Vac replacement. Hopefully in this pic you can see that I have managed to pick out the panel lines reasonably well with Mr Florys wash (and very impressed with the product I am too) Just a few bits and pieces to tidy up while I wait for the vac canopy to arrive

Great work on the office. You've brought the best out of the resin.

Follow this link http://www.swannysmodels.com/Painting.html For Matt Swans excellant guide on Luftwaffe interior colours.

This is the first thing I have built so far this year that I am happy with (so far anyway). Keeping it 100% OoB to try to shake off the blue funk of AMS that has haunted me since Christmas. Here we are after some Klear and some decals and some more Klear .. in the "shiney" phase. Took 3 coats of Microsol to get some of these decals to lie down nicely, which is unusual for Revell decals. Tropicalised Aircraft were usually delivered to the Afrikan theatre in standard European theatre camo schemes. The local tropical camo scheme was then applied locally often with a brush. To simulate this I have put down a standard European RLM 70/71/65 camo scheme and then put the RLM 79 over the top of it in a deliberately sloppy manner to try to simulate the hand painting. The preshading looks much better in real life. I'm not much good with photography, I just pinch the wifes camera and point and click in a hopeful optimistic manner. Lots of annoying finishing off to do now. I hate the last 10% of a build ... it always seems to drag out for ages. The canopy is going to be a pain as well. The frame lines are not well defined enough for my usual Tamiya tape and new xacto blade method, and I don't fancy using parafilm on this one either. I will probably try the painted decal strip method for the first time as I have some decal paper knocking around. Edit/ forgot to add that I have used W.E.M. enamels on this build and they are absolutely blooming marvellous. Can't recommend them highly enough!.

I have built a couple of the Academy jugs, have several more in the stash and have the Tamiya in the stash for comparison. It comes down to money really. The Tamiya is the better kit, but not by as big a margin as you would think. The Academy kit is a nice, well fitting, pretty accurate kit with a comprehensive couple of sprues worth of stores. Plenty left over for the spares box even if you build it dirty and fully loaded. Consider that both will build into excellant display pieces but if you shop around you can get the Academy kit for less than £8 but the Tamiya will set you back £20+ My choice would be to buy 2 Academy jugs and spend the rest of the difference in price on some aftermarket decals which are the Academys only real weak point (a little on the thick side).

As for quality then Aires really are very good indeed. However the big weakness they have is their vague instructions. I bought and built the double Ju-88 engine detail set a while back and the instructions for that really were useless. I had to do a huge amount of googling for pics of the original engines to work out where some of the parts actually went and reworking the assembly order into something that was actually possible. I have the same gripe with a lot of Eduards PE sets. once you have lovingly folded your bits and bobs together you have an arrow pointing roughly in the direction of an illustration of a bulkhead with no idea of where it should go on the bulkhead. Again lots of googling for pics !!! A couple of simple before and after illustrations or pics even would be so welcome.

I know what you mean about PE Wolfpack. I learnt the hard way with the Eduard interior and exterior sets for the 1/48 Ju88. These days my golden rule with PE is "You don't have to use it all!!" The Aires guns do look very nice though.