Burn Down Their Hanging Trees (1/72 Airfix Lancaster B.III)

[Procopius]

3 hours ago, perdu said:

I have to agree with Crisp here Edmondo, with the state of my whinging, meandering legs if you want the additional kicking you will have to travel Premium Classe.

As soon as you see the extraneous "e", you know you're not getting out of there for less than premium rates.

 

1 hour ago, CedB said:

WHAT! No photos? 

It's gnarly, dude.

 

5 hours ago, Edge said:

Daughter flew to Botswana yesterday on a 4 week trip organised through school and after months of planning, packing and fundraising, all with a confident 'don't need your help' attitude we got proper 'going to miss you so much' hugs & tears before she left.

 

I look forward to the day my children fly off to Botswana (is that where they go? I've been wondering).

 

 

[perdu]

Mine went to Nottingham

 

(Cue exasperated rokkolings from Crisp)

 

But Botswana?

 

Works for me...

[stevehnz]

My Sis in Law & her new partner recently in Botswana, loads of animals & miles & miles of bugger all. They loved it.

Steve,

[Buzby061]

That Lanc is looking fantastic. Hats off to you spraying the undercarriage legs, I usually just paint 'em.

 

Hope the leg is getting leg shaped again. Our NHS has it's knockers (you can probably get them on the NHS as well) but at least you can go to Accident & Emergency & get some leg revitaliser, gratis.

 

Pete

[Edge]

I now have a image in my head of a herd of disgruntled teenagers roaming the grasslands searching fruitlessly for Internet access (daughter's group even had to leave SIM cards behind).

 

Good call on the extraneous 'e' too. Nothing guarantees overpriced than something labelled olde worlde!

 

 

[Tomoshenko]

Lanc looking good PC, and by order of me, Bill, Ced, Crisp and all the other Britmodellers, no dying before Telford!

[Pete in Lincs]

Or at Telford. All those forms to fill in, all the arguments over your stash, It might be your round. We have better things to do. (Probably).

I just might make it to Telford myself, but don't hold your breath. (See above for reasons)

[opus999]

Sorry to hear about that leg! That's scary. 

 

Hope you had a good time at EAA -- By coincidence, my Wife and kids are having a 3 week stay with her parents in New London, which is about a half hour or so from Oshkosh.  Yes, the same New London that saw tornado weather this weekend and my kids got to experience huddling in a tornado shelter while trees that had withstood the weather for 50+ years were crashing down in the yard.  The video she sent during the event was breathtaking.  Thankfully, we in the Pacific Northwest rarely see any sort of weather of note, although it regularly gets to 104 here in august, but with humidity at only 15-20% ("Evergreen state" my rear!  They never came to my part of the state!)  But I digress...

 

The turrets are looking very fine (no extra 'e'); can't wait to see more.  Take care!

[AdrianMF]

Looking forward to Ye olde Scale Model Worlde already!

 

Regards,

Adrian

[The Spadgent]

Ze Lanc is looking top notch kid. Bravo. 🥳

Johnny

[perdu]

8 hours ago, AdrianMF said:

Looking forward to Ye olde Scale Model Worlde already!

 

Regards,

Adrian

Must be good, all those value added es

 

[Procopius]

On 7/23/2019 at 8:41 PM, opus999 said:

Hope you had a good time at EAA -- By coincidence, my Wife and kids are having a 3 week stay with her parents in New London, which is about a half hour or so from Oshkosh.  Yes, the same New London that saw tornado weather this weekend and my kids got to experience huddling in a tornado shelter while trees that had withstood the weather for 50+ years were crashing down in the yard.  The video she sent during the event was breathtaking.  Thankfully, we in the Pacific Northwest rarely see any sort of weather of note, although it regularly gets to 104 here in august, but with humidity at only 15-20% ("Evergreen state" my rear!  They never came to my part of the state!)  But I digress...

 

The turrets are looking very fine (no extra 'e'); can't wait to see more.  Take care!

We go on Friday, so we haven't had a good time...yet. Glad your wife and kids weren't swept off to Oz!

 

Anyway, it's been a weird few days. I've worked at the same place for the last thirteen years (unusual these days, I understand, but I'm institutionalised, I could never survive on the outside), and until May, when I moved to my new department and my new boss, I'd had the same boss for the last eight years, but the bar association fired her yesterday and is now having my old department report to my new boss. They also offered my old boss's job to the person I used to share my cubicle with, who's one of my favourite people in the whole association, so it's not all bad, and we'll be working together again (though now she'll be vastly more powerful and busy), but yesterday was weird because of it, especially because I knew before my old boss did that she was going to be fired, and as a result had to be sequestered in a meeting room, presumably to keep me from dashing to the elevator banks and riding to my old floor to give the warning a la Paul Revere. Losing my job is a major fear for me (which is why I've worked at the same place for thirteen years, obviously), and when other people lose their jobs here, I get freaked out, because it could always have been me. It's been a bad ten years for bar associations, so I get freaked out a lot. Before my old boss added me to a special project testing an email platform that eventually became Salesforce but at the time was known as ExactTarget, I was stuck in our call centre, a pretty hellish place for anyone, and for me in particular, a dreary rote place where my supervisors were perpetually unamused by me. So I owe my old boss a lot, and I'm sad for her. Stuff like that tends to leave me feeling a bit withdrawn and introspective, but I suspect that's pretty normal, for once.

 

But the model kit! 

 

I sprayed AK Xxxxtreme Metal on the landing gear (the plan is to mask off the metal bits for most of the rest of the build) and fitted the main legs into place:

 

 

I also assembled the rest of the turret-y bits:

 

 

The gun barrels are a little akimbo, but the nice thing about brass is that you can bend it as needed. I think the replacement barrels are a huge improvement. 

 

And, lastly, I fitted the upper rear cowlings for the engines:

 

 

 

These are very gappy, and I may try to fill them in using some of my limited supply of sheet styrene. 

 

In other news, I'll be visiting a psychiatrist for the first time in probably twenty years to see if they can help me sort myself out, but I'll be honest, I selected the one I'll be seeing less for their qualifications than because they matriculated at Russian Peoples' Friendship University in 1976, which would have at the time been called Patrice Lumumba University, which boasts both the current leader of FARC and Carlos the Jackal as alumni. If I can get them to open up on that front, I'll consider my $60 copay well-spent.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

Hope everything else is going good including your Mosquito injury ? The Lanc. is looking great so far. 👍🏻

[CedB]

Sorry to hear about your current woes PC and I hope the therapy (if that's the right word for it) helps. It's always good to talk…

Sounds like the new boss will be an improvement, fingers crossed. You can't do too much for a good boss and you can never do enough for a bad one.

 

Nice work on the Lanc - won't belong before there's some paint in the AB eh?  

[perdu]

The Lanc is looking great already, but...

 

Use the plasticard, we'll get you some more in November if you run out

 

Far better to replace air with plastic than any filler, use filler to tidy up after

 

I find myself spending too much time contemplating rather than doing stuff, it is not such a rare condition so I wish you well with consultations

 

👍

[rob85]

Nice work on the Lancaster, I’m making notes as it’s bern a long time since I built one but have one in the stash. 

 

I the job job front I understand how you feel, it is normal. There has been a lot of change where I work and a number of people left the business, some I 100% agreed with but then my direct boss was kicked out. She was great, and made me better at what I do (not everyone agrees with this, but she had high standards, which were hard to reach) and she was replaced with someone who really should have been binned off. Sometimes just how it goes, more change is coming, and seeing people leave in environment that is in flux is not a secure feeling. I work in retail and have had my job on the line more times than I care to think about, but it happens and life goes on. Hope you don’t dwell on it too much and the bite clears up.... also congratulations to your friend I bet they deserve it.

 

Rob

[Procopius]

5 hours ago, rob85 said:

also congratulations to your friend I bet they deserve it.

Oh, absolutely. 

 

I got a little more done tonight. 

 

First, I masked and went over the mid-upper turret with Colourcoats Night:

 

 

Then I used Alclad black primer on the rest of the MLG parts:

 

 

And used what was left in the cup to spray some spots on the underside of the fuselage to see how they were looking:

 

 

 

Meh. Could be better. But we're getting closer.

 

 

 

[Stew Dapple]

Looking seriously nice mate, those brass barrels look most impressive too  

 

Do you think it would be possible to build the kit and fit the main landing gear right at the end, or does it have to be a case of careful masking?

 

Cheers.

 

Stew

[CedB]

I second what Stew said PC - nice work  

[stevehnz]

Rather than quote the whole post again (#387, this one) a pet bug bear of mine, I just want to say, the Lanc is looking very good, some of which may be down to the kit but much of which I believe is done to your good self. Nicely done.

Institutionalised, pah, you ain't seen nothing yet. I've served 33 tears in one place because A/ I was too scared to quit & B/ if I had, the only jobs on offer were more poorly paid for a heap more stress. bugger that, I surrendered to the institution, after a while30 +/- years, I almost started to like it.  

Stay strong.

Steve

PS, the  reaction was for your "relationship" with your shrink. 

[SafetyDad]

18 minutes ago, stevehnz said:

 

Institutionalised, pah, you ain't seen nothing yet. I've served 33 tears in one place because A/ I was too scared to quit & B/ if I had, the only jobs on offer were more poorly paid for a heap more stress. bugger that, I surrendered to the institution, after a while30 +/- years, I almost started to like it.  

Stay strong.

Steve

PS, the  reaction was for your "relationship" with your shrink. 

+1.

 

I'm now retired (hurray!!!) but I too had the choice to either accommodate major changes I fundamentally disagreed with 20 years ago at work or slowly self-destruct through stress. I surprised myself with my pragmatism, but others couldn't (or wouldn't) adjust their perspectives and they really suffered. In my old field of work there were realistically few other options.

 

Sometimes you just have to safeguard yourself, in which I hope you are successful.

 

Enjoying the thread, and your hard work with the Lancaster is close to being complete. Looking really good. Stick with it!

 

SD

 

 

[AdrianMF]

Lancaster is looking very nice. If you don't want to use card to fill that gap, you could always use some stretched sprue.

 

I hesitate to say this to a communications professional, but you really need to work on the message in each post . I wanted to respond with like, sad, laughing to your penultimate post, so I had to settle for confused! Most people probably spend more time with their workmates than family, so when changes are afoot it is stressful and it's natural to react to that. 

 

Anyhow, it seems like your new work setup is looking good, fingers crossed, and the Lanc is looking great!

 

Regards,

Adrian

[opus999]

6 hours ago, AdrianMF said:

I wanted to respond with like, sad, laughing to your penultimate post, so I had to settle for confused!

+1  

[Jonny]

You know,  what’s just occurred to me is this (at almost 2am here in the UK) ....

 

it’s the sheer genuine humanity that comes across, from PC who’s.building hisLancaster and everyone who’s chipped in, from all over the world. I’ve stopped trying to work out from where so many contributors come from.  Quite pointless really - everyone has a common interest, no matter where you are.

 

Thanks, all of you, for helping me to rebuild my faith in *people*,in mankind, whatever.  PC has shared his, and his family’s, issues with us, and there’s been a solid WHOOMF of support for him.  I’d love to come to SMW this year and meet so many of you but it just cannot happen.  One day, maybe.

 

Thankyou to everyone who’s contributed to this thread.  

 

Jonny

[Procopius]

1 hour ago, Jonny said:

it’s the sheer genuine humanity that comes across, from PC who’s.building hisLancaster and everyone who’s chipped in, from all over the world. I’ve stopped trying to work out from where so many contributors come from.  Quite pointless really - everyone has a common interest, no matter where you are.

I would hate to think that I'm in any way emblematic of the human race, for it's own sake, but I thank you and I agree that one of the great pleasures of Britmodeller is the community. 

 

In any case, today was the big day, airshow day! We, voluntarily and ostensibly sound of mind and body, decided to take Winston (three-and-a-half) and Grant (twenty-two months worth of pure accumulated id) 140 miles north to EAA Airventure, the largest airshow in the world. 

 

Winston woke us up bright and early at 6 AM in his accustomed fashion: he hauled his little body over the roll-off protector we have to keep Grant from doing same at night, then balanced his body on it like a seesaw and plummeted mattressward like a falling star, his impact easily measurable on the Richter scale even with very crude instrumentation. Mrs P, who was very tired, is not, it can confidently be said, in love with this power starter, and he was banished downstairs, with me going along with. Now, I didn't want to be awake either (I almost never do), but I had been cooking up something to entertain him ever since I'd seen his dejected face when he learned he'd need to be literate to play Battleship (proof, at last, that he can't just rely on me to do all the reading for the rest of his life): I have a lot of 1/6000 miniatures (and by a lot, I mean "every major surface unit of the Royal Navy in WWII, all fleet destroyers, most Hunt-class destroyers, and virtually any potential enemy ship from the Japanese, German, or Italian navies, plus many ships for minor allied powers like America, Free France, and Holland) and quite a few naval wargames of varying levels of complexity, so I grabbed some miniatures and Avalanche Press's Bomb Alley, and set up a battle between the two Nelsons (for Winston) and two of the older Italian dreadnoughts (I think Andrea Doria and Giulio Cesare):

 

 

He enjoyed rolling dice for shooting for about a turn and a half, but the maneuvering bored him, and he went back into my cases of miniatures and pulled out the unbuilt Malta-class carrier HMS New Zealand, which he was very taken with and insisted on driving her around the map -- he had me bring out HMS Ark Royal "to be a friend", so he has a sense of what a chummy ship might be, I tell myself. Anyway, baby steps. 

 

Then it was breakfast and then we finally set off for Wisconsin, a process that took about ninety minutes to reach a "go" state, since we forgot something and had to go back and getting the boys ready for anything is as fraught and as time-consuming as fueling a Blue Steel missile. 

 

 

 

Anyway, after a long drive made longer by the need to stop for lunch and take the boys to the bathroom (and Winston has reached the awful stage where how other people pee is a source of infinite fascination, causing him to tend to work his way around the flank of anyone trying to use a urinal, a complex military operation made much easier when the enemy, usually in a state of great consternation, has been fixed in position not by fire but by the fault which exists in all of our stars), we arrived at Oshkosh just in time to see an F-22 make a takeoff at an 80-degree angle in the distance, causing Winston to immediately drop a full tube of M&Ms, and nearly ending the whole day before it began. There were lots of cool aircraft there this year, as defense spending and defense bluster (but not the actual use of American military power to help people who're having the dickens bombed out of them, oh no, we'd never risk it going after someone who could fight back) are up, way up, including an F/A-18F Super Hornet with talkative crew supplied by the US Navy (I felt bad for them, the USAF cunningly hemmed them in with a Strike Eagle on one side and an F-15C on the other, and the Super Hornet is already an oxymoron; even the best Hornet you can imagine is merely adequate), a C-5M Super Galaxy that we walked through, a NOAA P-3 Orion, an INANG A-10 ("is that its shooter?" asked Winston of the gatling gun), an ultra-rare NY ANG LC-130H, and a Wisconsin ANG KC-135R, which, regrettably, Winston discovered you could do a walkthrough of. Tankers are very vital aircraft, and I'm glad we have them, but they're boring as hell and I'm not buying the Italeri kit. To his credit, the WIANG Captain assigned to stand in front of the aircraft had a great conversation with Winston, which only got better for Our Man when he divulged that this, the mighty aircraft before him, was his favourite at the airshow. Mrs P and Winston and Grant all went inside, while I guarded the stroller. 

 

 

I guarded the stroller for about sixty years, because right before Mrs P and the kids went in, three extremely amped and even more nerdy teens were let in, and they parked their rumps in the cockpit and wouldn't shift until an Air Force Security Policeman (with working rifle and real hair) directly ordered them to leave the aircraft so that everyone could have a turn. Winston then achieved his major stated aim and got to sit in front and pretend to fly a jet. I've driven a car after he's been allowed to pretend to drive it, and nothing was quite the same, so I expect the Air Force will be short a KC-135R in due course. 

 

It was now my turn to do something, since I was the one paying for the pleasure of standing aimlessly under a flying gas station while holding onto a stroller as aircraft made exciting noises just outside my field of vision, and so we headed to Warbird Alley. But on the way, we came across a small pedal-powered F-22 toy that a small child could ride in -- or fight his brother to the death for, and gentle reader, you'll never guess what happened. 

 

 

Here is Winston, seconds before Grant, goaded beyond endurance by the joy of another, attempted to murder his brother in a reverse Cain-and-Abel situation. Fortunately Grant isn't very strong. Winston then tried to run his brother down with the F-22, a martial use that I somehow doubt Lockheed Martin really planned for with the real version, but who knows. 

 

Anyway, we finally reached the warbirds, and...

 

SPITFIRE!

 

 

Grant, as can be seen, was immediately taken with her, and received a battlefield promotion to firstborn. Winston was more interested in a nearby Corsair, because it had folded wings, and was left at the airshow. I hope a new family finds him.

 

 

 

 

Win did give a good look to the undercart, eventually, but had to be restrained from screwing with the control surfaces. The return of the awesomely loud F-22, an aircraft so loud that it feels like being punched when it lights up the afterburners even from a mile away, however, turned him away from his evil intent.

 

 

Mrs P was also impressed by the F-22; she hadn't believed me when I told her how loud it is, but hastily dug out the earplugs I strongly suggested she bring with the first time it passed overhead. 

 

Pretty soon after that it started to rain, so we skedaddled, but in the car, I asked Winston his favourite part of the airshow, which we had traveled, I remind you, over a hundred miles to see. 

 

"I liked the little wooden plane that was just my size I could ride in." 

 

Go figure.