Procopius

It's filler time! (A cultural reference particular to the USA which also predates my birth? Why yes.) So I mixed black food coloring, baby powder, and black food coloring to make a gap filler. I'm struggling with the mixture; sometimes it dries too quickly, other times, it's thin and runny like water. Is there some kind of ratio? At any rate, I've gooped up the wing roots and any other likely gappy areas and given them a friendly file-down. I've yet to procure sandpaper, so I'm still relying on a small metal file set from my days as a miniatures wargamer. After filler applied: After sanding: I also discovered a local hobby shop near me, much to my intense delight. My family's descent into penury begins now. I've already special-ordered a Trumpeter Sea Fury and the forthcoming Cyber-Hobby Sea Venom, and the shop owner has set aside a grungy old Mach 2 TBM-3W for my Suez project. Annnd, just for kicks, a look at everything in my work area awaiting my loving attention:

A lovely Wyvern! Makes me very excited to build mine.

I'm rather vague on British aviation history post-1945, so I've only recently come to wonder...how good a plane was the Hawker Hunter? It seems to have had (like many other British aircraft of the era) a great number of teething troubles, but it also seems to have largely surmounted them (unlike the Swift, Wyvern, and Attacker). But how good of a combat aircraft was it? How did it stack up to US and Russian aircraft of the era? It's certainly more attractive than the MiG-15 or the F-86, and the general sense I get is that had they been ready for Korea, they would have been stupendous (provided they had the range to find any MiGs), but how were they in comparison to the jets of the later 50s, or how good were they in actuality compared to Korean War-era jets?

Quite nice! I wish I could build and paint as well as you.

Oh my goodness, yes! Thank you for offering!

And, alas, in 1:48 scale. Although it is quite impressive; I'd love to find something like that in 1:72, although it'd tax my meager skills to the limit.

Dang man, I hope my efforts end up looking even half as nice as yours. That ol' Wyvern's so ugly she goes right back around to beautiful. Do you know of a good place to get the Propagteam Hunter decals? I could only find them online at their website, which doesn't take credit cards. That was roughly my response as well. Cool, I hope you post it up here to be seen when you finish it!

Wow, thanks for all the information so far! Are there many Suez decal options for these kits? I've seen a Suez F4U-7 boxing, but my limited research hasn't turned up an F-84 or Hunter F.5 decal option. (My interest lies more towards the fixed-wing combat types, rather than the helicopters and transports.)

I recently got the Trumpeter Wyvern kit in 1/72, and since I had resolved to paint it with those swell-looking yellow-and-black invasion markings for Suez, I thought it would be best to get some other period appropriate kits so that it didn't feel lonely. I also have the HobbyBoss Seahawk FGA.6 and am planning on picking up the Cyber-Hobby Sea Venom, but what other aircraft participated in the war, and, even more importantly, have available kit/decal options so they can be modelled in 1/72? Any particularly nice kits I should look out for?

This whole thing has been probably my favorite modelling project ever on Britmodeller. Watching Battle of Britain on a Saturday afternoon was a highly formative experience for me as a lad back in the early 1990s, and it's phenomenal to see you recreate the planes from it with such fidelity.

Wow, it's been a busy week...wait, what? It's only Wednesday? Oh dear. In between struggling to master my new airbrush, assembling two Ki-43s, proofreading fifty pages worth of grad papers for my wife, watching modern-day cinema classic Roadhouse for the first time, and intermittently sleeping and working, I've not spent much time on the Hudson. Tonight I decided to fix that, and glued on the wings. Having learned of the amazing powers of blu-tac through Britmodeller (thanks, Britmodeller!), I'm using it to hold the wings on while the glue dries. As it stands, the Hudson is a little gappy around the wing roots and engine nacelles. I also recently learned of a trick for filling gaps with a mix of CA and talc, so I may investigate this as a solution to the gap issue, marking the first time in my modelling career that I've ever been proactive about gaps.

My local autoparts store cheerily sold me a length of hose for the princely sum of $3, and the hose was easily replaced, as Kev and Jetblast suggested. Thanks everybody for all of your advice, it helped a bunch.

Sorcery! Does it have to be made at the time of use, or can it be prepared in advance?

While reading this, I spotted some weird but effective looking goop used as filler: What is this stuff? It looks almost like a liquid. Does it work as well as it looks to?

Troy, thanks! I'm in the process of signing up on Hyperscale now. As for the tape, yes, it's PTFE. I misunderstood something I read online, and thought it was the best choice. Sadly I appear to have been dead wrong. Yes, that looks very similar, minus the white box. How did you remove the old air pipe without wrecking anything? How did you ensure the new one didn't blow off? I really appreciate the offer of spare hosing, I may take you up on it once I figure out all of my options. Thank you! Sadly Paasche apparently no longer makes the hoses for this particular model. A friend also suggested going to a car repair place to see if they could fix it, which seems like it might be safest given my level of mechanical aptitude. Thanks everyone for all the advice so far! I'm feeling a little less nervous, and more like this is recoverable.

So I bought a used airbrush and compressor on craigslist for $140. The airbrush is a Badger Model 175 Bottom Feed Dual Action Internal Mix, and the compressor is a Paasche D3000 with a 1 gallon air tank. The compressor looks like this: Shortly after I brought it home and got it set up, the black cord leading from the carrying handle to the white box (and from there, I gather, into the tank) split. I patched it with plumber's teflon tape, and that seemed to hold it for a little while. When the split widened, I patched more. Air is now leaking through the patch, though, and the compressor has to run constantly. The compressor doesn't have a regulator. I bought one in a local Home Depot, but it's of the kind where it's a sphere that slowly rotates to obstruct the passage of air, and it can't seem to lower the air pressure below 35-40 PSI. Additionally, the cable connecting the airbrush to the compressor has an integral water trap that's sort of between two cables linked to it on either end. The white filter(?) in the trap appears to be a little yellowed and wrinkled. I've never seen any water or moisture collect in it. When I use the airbrush, I get terrible spatter of the paint. It's almost impossible to do anything but basecoating, and even then the spattering is so bad as to be noticeable. This was kind of a big purchase for me. It's not like I'll starve to death, but it was something my wife and I had to talk about a lot, and I asked the advice of three of my friends who owned airbrushes. If this is screwed up beyond repair, it's not like I'm in trouble, but I will feel bad for spending part of our very finite fun money on something useless. So, here are my questions: What is causing the spatter with the airbrush? As it stands, it's almost unusable for anything. Is it the pressure regulator? The moisture trap? The brand or model? Both? Me? Can the compressor be fixed? Who would be able to fix it? Does it make more sense to get rid of it? How badly have I screwed up?

Oh my gosh, that looks lovely.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I believe it's just swirl marks brought out by the flash of my camera phone. 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. 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.

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!

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.