A Summer Where the Bad Light Stopped

[Dandie Dinmont]

18 minutes ago, Procopius said:

Hiya Craig! I was about to disagree with you, but then I reread the instructions, and you're quite right. I'm an idiot!

That wasn’t what I meant to say at all! I would hate for anyone to find out how many attempts it took me to work out that the two bits had to be glued back to back so that you can see the printed bits of both. 

 

Craig. 

[Procopius]

2 minutes ago, Dandie Dinmont said:

I would hate for anyone to find out how many attempts it took me to work out that the two bits had to be glued back to back so that you can see the printed bits of both. 

 

I'm ashamed to admit that I only figured it out when I read your words here. 😬

[Mr T]

Just come across this build and I feel a bit of a kindred spirit, as the Shackleton is getting to the stage where I cannot do a lot at any one time. I am startng work on a Spitfire I PRG and a Seafire F46, both AZ kits (although the 46 is an Admiral kit). Built a few of their kits. Not always easy builds, but satisfying once done and they have nice surface detail. 

[Dandie Dinmont]

3 hours ago, Procopius said:

Quite true, but they were in fact brass on the actual aircraft, so brass it was. 

 

I’m not sure what it says about me or the wisdom of my returning to this hobby but I recently invested £1.60 on a tin of Tamiya bronze acrylic especially so I could paint the gun button of the Hurricane (1/72 lest anyone misjudge the sanity of this) I’m currently working on. I’m now wondering if bronze is a close enough match for brass...

 

Craig. 

[Procopius]

What an up-and-down day. Mrs P drove the car to Michigan and it wouldn't start once she got there, which tends to happen if you don't put oil in them (a habit even less endearing than her tendency of leaving so much lint in the lint trap that the house is at all times one dryer load away from a raging conflagration), but amazingly the dealer replaced the engine for free and I, for one, am not asking too many questions. Then we found out that Winston, aged four, has been expelled from a second preschool, apparently for hitting. It's a cruel irony that the asthma medicine that keeps him from coughing until he vomits his guts out every night also gives him the impulse control of a hungry piranha, something I myself went through as a child in the 1980s, but that was an infinitely more tolerant time in that one respect only. 

 

I tried to talk about Mrs P on the phone about it this evening, but she does this thing where she just enters into an endless spiral of obsessing and constructing possible future scenarios around variables that remain as yet unknown to us, and it's just exhausting and I don't have the emotional energy to devote to it right now, so I'm going to drink this glass of scotch and stare blankly at a wall for a bit.

[dogsbody]

7 hours ago, Procopius said:

Quite true, but they were in fact brass on the actual aircraft, so brass it was. 

 

 

Well !

 

I guess it's break out the 000 brush and whatever I've got for brass paint and fix it. 

 

I'll be back!

 

 

Chris

[Procopius]

Thursday is Thanksgiving here, a holiday where we gather together to eat too much and fight with our families until the earliest possible moment it becomes socially acceptable to leave. I've been trying to get stuff sorted out at work, since it's a long weekend and bitter experience shows I rarely get anything done when at home with my children, and that's when we're not frantically trying to find a new school to get Winston into. 

 

In a perfect world, I could kick back and watch the MST3K Turkey Day marathon with my family, but that's not the world we live in. Watch it for me, if you can. It's a ray of light in a darkening world.

 

Anyway, tonight I finally got to work on closing up the Spitfires.

 

First I glued the seatbelts to the bottom of the brace:

 

 

 

And then it was time to close up.

 

The fit of the Airfix kit has worsened over time, but the instrument panel is a key offender. I should probably have scraped the fuselage out a little there.

 

 

Now! Time to let these dry, and then next steps.

 

 

 

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

1 hour ago, Procopius said:

a holiday where we gather together to eat too much and fight with our families until the earliest possible moment it becomes socially acceptable to leave.

Have you been to my families holiday parties PC ? I grew up watching my two grand uncles both WW2 vets and brothers. One navy the other US Army in NWE, go fisticuffs every holiday party. I grew up hating holidays because of that. SWMBO is trying to make me grow to the idea that not every family is the same and so far hers hasn't gone that way. 

[Stew Dapple]

Right now, I'm giving thanks that we don't have Thanksgiving! And it sounds like such a nice idea (at first!)

 

Chin up chaps, hopefully that's it over for another year  

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

 

 

[CedB]

Nice internals PC - love the chipping on the rudder bars  

 

Have a good Thanksgiving 🤞

[Procopius]

5 hours ago, CedB said:

Nice internals PC - love the chipping on the rudder bars  

 

Yes...chipping...

[dogsbody]

We have our Thanksgiving in October. It's not the big deal that our southern neighbours have turned it into. At my house, we don't even have turkey, because the wife hates it, so she bakes a large ham and we eat that.

 

 

 

Chris

[Corsairfoxfouruncle]

7 minutes ago, dogsbody said:

At my house, we don't even have turkey, because the wife hates it, so she bakes a large ham and we eat that.

Im with her, i don't eat any poultry ever. Too many bad experiences put me off poultry. Now a goose, duck, or other waterfowl = Yum. 😋

[stevehnz]

2 hours ago, dogsbody said:

so she bakes a large ham and we eat that.

The sacrifices one makes eh?

Steve.

[keefr22]

1 hour ago, stevehnz said:

The sacrifices one makes eh?

Steve.

 

Not as big as the one the pig made....!!

[Procopius]

Well, Mrs P and the kids are home, and I got the full terrifying story of our car's self-immolation, involving thick blue smoke and a fist-sized hole in the engine...turns out 2011 Subaru Foresters sometimes have a defect and the oil low light never comes on, which is part of the reason we're getting a new engine for free. Anyway, she's been understandably a bit traumatized by the experience of having the car completely fail like that on the way to be serviced, so when she came home to find a large package from academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan, and an enclosed invoice that didn't reflect the fact that they were and are currently selling $120 hardcover books for $10 each, I only very narrowly escaped divorce. It would have been awful, all that free time and the quiet...hardly bears thinking about. 

 

 

Thank heavens she doesn't know about the second carton of books I had sent to work.

 

At any rate, after a lengthy discussion wherein we've agreed to explore the idea of moving further north, to Wisconsin, doubling my commute but also more or less doubling the amount of house we can afford, I retired to the grotto.

 

I put the lower wings on the Spitfires:

 

 

I'm trying to get these attached as best I can to leave a minimum of seams, but I'm also a ham-handed oaf, so we'll see.

 

I added a little filler to trouble spots, and masked one of the canopies with a Peewit mask, which performed perfectly well, though the real test is of course yet to come.

 

 

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Bleg.

 

 

 

 

[AdrianMF]

Spitfires are looking splendid! Hope Thanksgiving goes well for the Procopian household this year.

 

Regards,

Adrian

[CedB]

Nice progress PC and have a good Thanksgiving!  

[DJJunis]

Hi Mr.P,

 

If I may suggest for next time. I usually thin the seats down to a more scale appearance. 

Good luck on the sale of the house..we'll be doing the same next spring. Still staying in the area ..just o none floor somewhere.

 

Take care.

Don

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

A Peewit mask?  WTF?  Is that some kind of weird avian gimp thing?  I mean, whatever floats yer boat and all that, but a peewit?

[Courageous]

6 hours ago, Procopius said:

Thank heavens she doesn't know about the second carton of books I had sent to work.

Almost all of my purchases are sent to my work, I can then drip feed them into the house with no problems...not that I need to worry about such things.

 

Stuart

[rob85]

Happy thanksgiving!

 

excellent progress Mr P, really liking the details you are adding to the cockpit! I thought all the bracing struts were T shaped, but they appear to be quite the minefield!

 

hope the house hunting/packing/selling goes ok and isn’t too stressful! 
 

I think in the future you do the right thing and have all purchases shipped to work....it’s the only way forward for you both I feel!

 

Rob 

[opus999]

On 11/22/2019 at 6:10 PM, Procopius said:

And MH434's looks almost cruciform

Oh, I see!  Great photos BTW!  Well, more information for me to pack away for upcoming Spitfire builds!  

 

On a related note, do you know of and/or can recommend a book that points out the differences between Spitfire Marks?  I'm fairly confident I know the external differences (through a lot of painstaking research), but I would like to find a book to describe them to see if I missed anything.  I got the Squadron "Spitfire in Action" book and it really didn't do a great job of describing differences in Marks.  Not like their Bf-109 book that started each chapter with a list and diagrams of how this model was different from the previous model.

 

On 11/22/2019 at 6:10 PM, Procopius said:

Happy to do you a deal on my Badger SOTAR or Krome if you get to me in the next fifty minutes...

Somehow I just now saw this.... certainly  more than 50 minutes!  I appreciate the offer, but I think it is a bad time for me to make any big model related purchases... what with Christmas coming up and a big car repair bill we just got...

 

Another question I wanted to ask: How are you moving your models? The last time I moved I devised a packing system using those pressed paperboard coffee cup holders.  The ones that hold four coffee cups that you get at an Espresso stand.  I found if I put a model between two of them, the coffee cup holders would hold the wings securely so that it wouldn't move around, and they were cushioned reasonable well. I had to trim some of the coffee cup holders so they wouldn't interfere with antennas and the like. I'm not proposing this as a solution for you, I was just curious if you had a better system, because frankly mine seemed kludgey.  I hope with all my might that I will never have to move again as it is an unbelievable headache (as you know).

[opus999]

6 hours ago, Courageous said:

Almost all of my purchases are sent to my work, I can then drip feed them into the house with no problems...not that I need to worry about such things.

 

Stuart

Brilliant.  I wish I could do that. 

[opus999]

On 11/26/2019 at 6:39 PM, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

not every family is the same

Quite true!  As a kid Thanksgiving was 2nd only to Christmas in my list of favorite holidays because I got to see relatives I adored and rarely saw. Thanksgivings went smoothly at our house because all of my relatives got along quite well.  I wish everyone had the same experience!  

 

It seems that my relatives started not getting along only in the last 10 years or so.  Weird.