wombat

Interesting DIY masking....what kind of vinyl sheet are you using and where do you get it? also I have visions of a very confused archaeologist in a few hundred years coming up with theories as to why offerings of money were placed inside replica planes...

Just about enough time to build the necessary house extension...

I got ok results thus....first an orange brown base coat. Then, use gloss varnish variously tinted with various shades of brown, building up layers. Let each layer dry thoroughly then sand lengthwise only with a fine grain sandpaper, repeat, repeat. You build up a series of translucent brownish layers, the sanding giving an impression of the planking. When you’re happy, Matt varnish overall.

That’s odd. I had a missing part a while back that Airfix replaced directly without quibble.

Apparently some German agents were caught because their fake identity cards had the address in the continental style, street name before house number. but it’s not as if the British did much better. Two senior SIS got themselves lured and captured very early in the war. At least one major SOE network was clearly blown but commanders refused to believe it and kept sending agents in to their doom. Quite possibly it was blown by the SIS. And that’s just in occupied countries, not the enemy homeland. in fact there seems to be little to no detail of SIS operations in Germany itself, if there were any. meanwhile, the soviets were merrily embedding moles throughout the establishment who would come into their own in the fifties and sixties...

Ah the buffalo...looks like a hasegawa eggplane in real life...

I shall read your build with interest as I have this decalset (and the similar camel one) but have been terrified of them!

For small areas, I’ve got one of those “middle of Lidl” battery tooth polishers, with different grades of Wet&dry superglued to the interchangeable heads.

The dh9a May be a serious contender for there being more real ones built than models of them. In 1/72 I think it’s merlin, a vacform the manufacturer of which escapes me, and an eastern bloc manufacturer’s polikarpov r-1 (dh9a reverse engineered clone), if you can find one. I can’t imagine many have been assembled.

I think there’s someone on here powers a Dremel through some kind of voltage reducer, which effectively enables control of the rpm low enough to be functional on plastic.

Yeah I don’t want to make a model that looks like I made a mistake building it!

I’d settle for an FE2, DH9 and 9a!

It’s easily possible that an apprentice working on the triplane worked on the Vulcan before retiring. Or up at handley page his contemporary could have worked on the 0/100 and Victor. I wonder if there are any definite documented examples.

That looks more like a Merlin effort!

I never met a Finn that I didn’t like. Briefly visited Helsinki, coming up on two years ago now (in the “before” time). Lovely place. Also Mika Hakkinen is cool.

Interesting...will try that on the next one. Cheers.

So, rather than faff with masking a hurricane canopy, I’m trying the opposite approach - I’ve painted up clear decal sheet with the requisite colours and am trying to cut that into strips and lay it on. The first shift seemed to go ok but come the second shift48 hours later, I find the decals from the first shift still loose and shifting especially if they get wet. I’ve never had this problem after more than an hour or so with “normal” decals so what might it be? could be the clear decal sheet itself I suppose?

Having received an email warning of attempted log ins (including location thereof) I assume the admins receive their own specific warnings of the same? Random bot activity or something more sinister?

Or a “Roden” as it is known in the trade...

I now have an image of a poor unfortunate night cleaner at the museum who enters the tank with his duster, gets turned round, leaves by the wrong hatch and ends up in Flanders in 1917...

We’re through the looking glass here, people...

I presume the next logical development path is software that can get from the minimum photographic input to the maximum 3D design accuracy.

Could try getting an aftermarket clear decal sheet, painting sections in each colour and then cutting lozenges to apply individually, to represent painted lozenge, which would presumably be pretty nonuniform anyway

Terminology learned from that James May programme the other year: STABLE = Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy

I think I managed to conflate the two separate points I was trying to make in my last post. Im not trying to compare production costs of injection moulding with a photorealistic one piece product because I don’t think they serve the same market. Sure, we might lose a few for whom the goal is a perfect display item but I think that’s a small proportion of the modern hobby compared to years ago. The rest of us will probably spend a bit of our hobby budget on one or two or maybe more of these as a separate thing, but (and I could be wrong) I don’t think I’ll take a look at what I get and quit building models in despair at ever matching the end product (to quote Mrs Doyle, some of us like the misery). the far greater threat to the hobby is the shrinking user base. Despite a short term boost from lockdown the trend is all one way as very few kids pick the hobby up at entry level anymore. If it’s to survive the industry needs to be able to economically produce high quality kits at smaller, possibly much smaller volumes, and I believe traditional technology production costs are already as low as they’ll get. 3d printing technology offers an escape route to that dilemma. So long story short I think the hobby will gain more on the swings than it loses on the roundabouts.