Procopius
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Posts posted by Procopius
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Thanks for the advice, Paul. I was able to find a used Paasche D3000 air compressor and tank; one of the little black hoses had an annoying leak, but for the first time in my entire life I was glad that my father made me help him fix all the pipes one miserable year, and I patched it successfully with some teflon tape. It's sufficiently quiet for my purposes, and it was quite cheap.
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So, uh, stupid question here. Are there any printable 1/72 scale drawings of Spitfire camouflage schemes for the various marks? I had the bright idea that I could just print them onto frisket film or something and cut out the patterns to use as masks.
Erm, how stupid of me indeed. Right here: http://www.yolo.net/~jeaton/mymodels/spitf...02SpitTemp.html
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I bet you had forgotten to even think I'd forgotten about this, hadn't you? Well, wrong! I was just scared of cutting the vacform canopies. Visions of severed fingers floated through my head. I like my fingies!
Well, I finally found the US equivalent to blu-tac ("mounting putty", which sounds more promising than it is), and in between mucking about with my new/used airbrush and compressor (a complicated gadget, going from brush painting to it gives me deep sympathy for the Gloster Gladiator pilots switching to Spitfires), cut out the canopies. Huzzah!
I would never have been able to do this without advice from you guys. Thanks, Britmodeller! Maybe someday I'll be able to build a Valom Firebrand.
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Good start on an old kit
I built one of these a couple of months ago and its fair to say that the most recent rebox was one too many for the molds, they're very worn now. You mention that the fuselage reminds you of a banana, well mine had banana shaped fuselage halves thanks to warpage, one end was at almost 90' to the other :
Good lord! Well, yours seems to have turned out quite nicely, let's see if I can summon up all of my meager skill to get mine looking half as good if you squint in a dim room.
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Is that some impressive sinkage on the elevator, or is it just swirl marks in the silver plastic?
I believe it's just swirl marks brought out by the flash of my camera phone.
'Green Stuff' (A.K.A Sylmasta Kneadatite) perhaps? Similar to Milliput (which also resembles a green resinous emission, although is a dirtier grey/green shade to my eye).Not green stuff, of that I'm certain, as I used it during my former life as a wargamer myself. This looked closer to thick maple syrup to my eye.
Decals? Sunlight?He's in Chicago!
Hellooo?
Heh, yes, well. We're having an alarmingly mild winter at the moment (50 F outside as I type this) so I'm sure in a few days I can expect the traditional January blizzard. However, the decals appear to have gotten wet, and actually for most of the sheet have bulged 1-2mm off the backing paper. So it's not fading so much that's the concern. Traditionally, how big were the letters used on Hudsons? I have some 36" sky squadron code letters lying around.
In other news, I just picked up a used Badger 175 airbrush and a Paasche D3000 compressor for it, and I'm quite chuffed! Now to figure out how it works.
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Brilliant Stringbag, Tony! What did you use for the Cerrux on the front metal panels?
Regards,
Jason
I believe he says it was Aeromaster US Navy Light Gull Grey.
A gorgeous model. I'd always wondered about the wings folding up myself. Hair-raising!
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So tomorrow I'm either going to look at (and hopefully buy) a used airbrush and compressor, or I'm going to get mugged. You can never tell with Craigslist. Wish me luck.
In the meantime, I realized that I in no way wanted to have to mask all those stupid little windows in the fuselage for rattlecan priming, so I masked the interiors of the two fuselage halves and gave them a quick spray. Easy peasy. Now I'll just go put in all the windows, and...
[several years later]
OH MY GOD! SO MANY! I suppose I really should have done something to them with future floor wax to make them less like looking through a fishbowl, but my gut feeling is that you don't really want to subject viewers to an unfettered look at the Lovecraftian starkness that is the Airfix Hudson's interior. I will say that all the windowlets dropped in very nicely, and fit perfectly. So Blenheim flashbacks have been kept to a minimum.
With the windows all added in, it's time to assemble the fuselage, which looks a little bit like the bananaphone. Carefully I secure it with my precision instruments, and wait for the glue to dry.
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Capt. Joseph L Lang, Hyde Park, MA.
Yea and verily, the seat of the war!
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Oh my goodness! Wow!
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There may be some info on here......Funeral...
Decals for these aircraft are available from Xtradecal and Model Alliance. I think it would be safe to assume that the Sqn Leaders aircraft on each unit would have featured - which may help your search;
Worth checking out the individual pics on the Vertical Reality - Lightnings site?
That thread was my original source; I'll pop over to Vertical Reality and see what other information I can uncover, thank you!
A friend of mine suggested the following a/c and serial numbers:
56 sqn F1/1a XM189, XM176 & XM163; 111 Sqn F1/1A: XM188, XM190, XM135, & XM192; and 19 Sqn F2: XN787, XN773, XN781 & XN783, but unfortunately, I have no real way of verifying if that's correct, short of looking at the aforementioned ORBs.
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Unfortunately, I've just found out the PRO is unable to hunt down specific dates in the squadron ORBs for me---a problem I've run into before.
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Thanks! I'm checking with the PRO to see if they're able to scan the relevant pages from the squadron ORBs.
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If a cack handed imbecile like me can stick it together it cant be all that bad
Looks fine to me, but by the end of this, I'll make you look better by comparison than you ever dreamed possible.
Your prose is entertaining me far more than Airfix are entertaining you."If you can't inform, you should at least entertain." -- Nobody I've ever worked with, ever.
So, I've been thinking, and I realized that the Hudson's delectably banana-shaped fuselage not only resembles an excellent source of potassium, but also something I vaguely recall from my misspent youth:
Oho! Won't Mister Hitler be in for a nasty surprise: he's trucking with forces far beyond his ken. Not even the Spear of Longinius nor a whole host of other Indiana Jones-type relics can save him now.
I started off tonight only to discover that in a minor way, I'd scuppered myself by not putting in the seats prior to installing the cockpit bulkheads, and some frantic slipping and sliding of a glue-coated chair over a recently painted piece of plastic occurred, bolstered by hearty oaths. The Airfix Experience! (I actually quite like Airfix kits, I should hasten to add, even ones that people apparently don't like much, like the new Spitfire IX. I'm a flawed man, like a Byronic hero.)
The chairs now in place, I got down to the serious business of assembling the nacelles and the large wings, festooned with rivets. I began to have flashbacks to an unfortunate experience with an Airfix Blenheim IV (since thrown, possibly with great force, into a wastebin) where the nacelles were in multiple pieces, the flaps were separate, and AND NOTHING FIT. However, despite rising glue fumes, I had little difficulty in getting the wings together. (Faint from the vapor, however, I had an unhappy mental image of Edward Heath's Britain, and a veritable second Somme for the nation's brightest young minds as they inhaled great gulps of model cement fumes while assembling Lancasters in bedrooms with the windows closed.) However, I can't help but notice a few gaps remain. I'll take this moment to ask: I once saw a photo of a sort of model gap filler that looked to be about the color and consistency of ectoplasm, or perhaps the ichor of Talos, but a rather deep and alarming green, as though it had come from some hidden fastness deep deep within the human body. Assuming this isn't a resinous emission all modelers can learn to produce with age and experience, does that sound like a real product to anyone? The toothpaste-like Squadron filler I have at present is very difficult to work with.
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Gosh. Well, any decals out in 1/72 that could plausibly be used to model an aircraft that overflew the funeral?
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I will be watching this with interest as I built one a couple of years back as a commision build and hated every last second of it. All I can say is, you must have really upset someone for them to give you that kit as a present!
Martin
Come to think of it, cousin Ben did beat me up an awful lot when we were younger...
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Shortly before my marriage, I received a number of bachelor gifts of doubtful utility (including a set of olive-green Rambo speedo briefs which I believe my wife has thrown out): things like tools, clothes that fit, novelty marital aids, etc etc. I also received two rather ancient model kits that a cousin of mine found at a local thrift store. One, of a Mosquito FB.VI, dated from the mid-1970s and is missing a large number of parts, including, I believe, a wing. The other was probably the aeroplane every British youth in 1940 dreamed of flying against the hated foe, the glamorous Lockheed Hudson I, not even the most misshapen of America's early-war exports. For some reason, I frequently conflate it with the Avro Anson in my mind.
The kit appears to be completely intact, down to a slip of paper with MADE IN ENGLAND on it and a small advert for a number of models of utterly-cutting edge jet aircraft, all of which were obsolete before I was born. Scratch that, there's also a Harrier and a SEPECAT Jaguar.
Anyway the kit was intact.
As I began assembling it, I was struck by all the detail that had been crammed into the flight deck, the intricate instruments all engraved finely, the many complex controls all rendered with suburb fidelity to detail...I'm lying, of course.
The cockpit area sans little seats for the tiny guys.
I'm not really sure what color the inside of a Hudson would be, so I'm going with RAF Interior Green.
I've also noted that the decals are kaput:
Not really sure what I'll do about that when the time comes.
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Paint the stripes by hand and worry not if the stripe edges aren't perfect... because neither was the real thing. Invasion stripes were brush painted onto the various aircraft they were employed on. So perfection was not the name of the game, just the application of said stripes.
Regards,
Hurry
I console myself with this thought, but for some awful reason, I have a terrible time even approximating a straight line freehand, even coloring in the lines. Perhaps as I grow bolder!
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Sadly, Giorgio's suggestion didn't work, or only worked partially, and I still had black flowing into the crevices. I rather more than suspect the fault lies on my end.
Here's the mostly finished pre-glosscoat final aircraft. I also added the sky band at the tail (although it looks a little off) as the decal version is intensely lurid. Sadly, my spare sky letter decals are too big for this model, so the rather poor JE-J that came with the kit will be pressed into service.
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Is it still possible to participate in this? I think I should like to try one of these, perhaps a US Navy aircraft in Operation Musketeer stripes for the US intervention in Suez in 1956. I know little of USN aircraft of the time, so I'd need advice.
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Are there any 1/72 decals or known markings for any of the 16 Lightnings (apparently from 19, 56, 92, and 111 Squadrons) that overflew Churchill's funeral procession?
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Alternatively, you could try decal setting solutions.
There are many on the market and they are used in slightly different ways but essentially they soften decals and encourage then to 'suck' themselves down to the model surface, conforming to the lumps and bumps and even rivets and panel lines. Your Spit with its steep cannon bulges would still be a challenge but these products are well worth the investment as you only use a tiny amount and a pot lasts for years.
I use those also, but with the earlier Spitfire, I think my lack of a glosscoat sank me.
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Nice result there. Just one point, shouldn't be the d-day stripes also on the landig gear doors?
There will be, though they probably won't match up entirely. Progress is slow, but hopefully steady.
One solution to avoid paint bleeding is to paint with the existing colour after masking first. In your case it's most likely you painted the white first... after you have masked the areas that have to stay white, paint more white over the unmasked areas. In this way the white paint will bleed first, so blocking the gaps. As it will bleed over other white paint, it will not be a big problem. When you'll add the black coat this will not bleed as the previous white coat will have (hopefully) blocked any gap in the masking.Oho! Thank you very much!
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So when I decided I would build model airplanes to calm myself down prior to my wedding (because compared to the fun of dueling sets of parents, hunting for a rogue cannon barrel while glue dries on your hand in the carpet is a right lark), the first thing I did was build the Airfix Spitfire IXc as my boyhood hero "Johnnie" Johnson's Spitfire. I resolved to follow ALL the directions, AND to put the landing gear down, to escape the spectre of a grown man racing through the house making airplane noises...not, of course, you understand, that I would ever do such a thing. Anyway, I applied all the decals, and...dear god man! Those invasion stripes look horrible! Like a stripey tarp is covering the wings! This will never do. But it did, actually, because I had NO IDEA how else to do things.
Flash forward six months. I'm older, wi---well, maybe not wiser, but since I was just praised for, for the first time, doing a good job packing away my wife's birdcages for her drive back to graduate school, I've at least demonstrated the capacity to learn. But not very quickly.
Anyway, with the hated doves now four hundred miles away, it is again safe to paint. Having recently found some 6mm Tamiya tape at a local Hobby Lobby, I got the notion that 6mm was about the width of the Spitfire's invasion stripes, and I had another Spitfire IX built and painted, which meant...OH MY GOODNESS!
Of course, I always have to do things in the least intuitive manner known to man. Instead of painting the whole area white and then adding black stripes, I taped the whole area to be striped off, then removed the strips over the black parts and painted them, like so:
So clever. And I wonder why they never seem to promote me at work.
I wised up for the fuselage stripes, and the net effect is, I think, rather an improvement:
The insidious effects of my hated foe, Capillary Action, may be noted along the edges. This would never have happened if you'd stuck with raised rivets, gentlemen!
All in all, I'm very excited by this---I know it's old hat to most if not all of you reading this (although on the off chance that someone who hadn't heard of this somehow DOES stumble across this, I hope my mistakes prove illuminating), but I love figuring out new ways to do things better and learning things in general, which is why this is such a great hobby.
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Hullo all!
My wife has graciously permitted me to purchase an airbrush/compressor setup (I may have given her the impression that it will enable me to produce models of a quality level akin to the ones frequently displayed here by others, ha-ha-ha), but I'm not to exceed $140 spent on the whole shebang. This rather limits my options to the realm of "bad" or "depressing", as near as I can tell. This seems to mainly limit me to compressors that generate more dB than an EE Lightning F.6 on reheat directly above our apartment. My questions to you are, will something with a 1- or 2- gallon air tank be able to store enough air for a decent amount of silent operation, or will I be risking death at the hands of pitchfork-toting neighbors? Are industrial compressors difficult to hook up to airbrushes? I'm not terribly mechanically apt.
1/72 camouflage diagrams
in Aircraft WWII
Posted
Do you know if they're reusable, by any chance?
Damon - I did! A very interesting and informative thread, although it made me feel a little self-conscious about continuing to freehand camouflage.