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On 8/31/2020 at 5:47 PM, Dandie Dinmont said:

Had Uncle Ced lead me up the garden path?

Of course not! A hasty reading of the instructions on the Stynylrez bottle (you might argue that I really should have read them before loading up the old airbrush) revealed that I had been spraying at roughly half the recommended pressure. I also have the bad habit of cutting off the paint and air flow at the same time so it's no wonder that the nozzle had clogged up. Repeated sluicings in every kind of airbrush cleaner I possess plus the purchase and employment of this fearsome instrument of torture

 

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unbunged things and a second attempt at the correct pressure went much better. I'll reserve final judgement until I've primed the outside of the aircraft but what I've seen of the Stynylrez, when applied correctly, has pleased me so far.

 

At this point, I seem to have stopped taking photos for a while so this will have something of a "here's one we prepared earlier" vibe to it. Sorry about that.

 

The bomb racks and bomb compartment floor were sprayed their final colours and assembled. As mentioned in my previous post, the decision to paint over the windows in the bomb compartment meant that the (now nicely primed) bombs supplied with the kit were consigned to the spares box. With no excuses left, the fuselage halves were united and the bomb compartment inserted from below. This went pretty well though there are a couple of seams that will need some work, especially on the bottom of the ventral canoe.

 

My prophesy in my previous post that my flibbertigibbit approach to following instructions would come back to hunt me was now fulfilled as I realised that I had forgotten to insert the sides of the bomb compartment before glueing the floor in place. The modelling gods love an idiot though and I was able to squeeze them in. I don't suppose anyone would have noticed they were missing anyway.

 

The engines were attached to their bulkheads and then it was time to fit the lower wings. It was at this point that things really started going wrong. I don't know if it was a number of previous minor mis-alignments catching up with me or just general ham fistedness but I could not get the wings and fuselage to come together in any sort of satisfactory way

 

50337255058_487c9a3bdf_c.jpg

 

Adding the engine bearers did little to improve matters. Then came the top part of the wings which fitted fine outboard of the engines but were a real struggle inboard, no matter how much of the underlying structure I pared away. Eventually, I had it as good as I could get it but I fear there is a lot of filling, sanding and re-scribing of lost detail in my future. Here's where things stand

 

50338101212_c0d4ca572d_c.jpg

 

Now here's something from the Impressionist school of scratch building. As @Retired Bob has helpfully pointed out, there should be something on the cockpit floor covering up the hole on the starboard side to allow the front gunner to get at his weapon. Despite poring over many pictures, I've been unable to get a real idea of what this thing looked like so I've scratched what I think it should have looked like

 

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and in situ:

 

50337953491_83a5ea5bcd_c.jpg

 

Does it look anything like the real thing? I have no idea but at least there'll be something to see in the cockpit.

 

Thanks for reading,

 

Craig.

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On 14/09/2020 at 09:23, Dandie Dinmont said:

Does it look anything like the real thing? I have no idea but at least there'll be something to see in the cockpit.

Looks good to me, the pad was folded back when they needed to use the bomb sight.  I'm just about to join my fuselage halves, after doing the same to my Monogram fuselage I have added some plastic card strengtheners to each fuselage half to prevent the seam splitting, or am I just heavy handed?  Having my wings as separate sections I was able to reinforce the leading edge between the engine and fuselage with some sprue glued in, how has wing trailing edge gone together?  I had to do some sanding and clamping to get mine together without a gap.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Jings! Only 20 days to go! The fear of failure rises damply in the Dandie mancave.

 

I reckon there's a PhD. to be had on a subject like "Loss of Mojo in Modellers around the Autumnal Equinox". Since I last darkened these pages (14th September, ulp!) it's required great strength of will to drag myself to the workbench, not helped by the fact that when I arrived there, I just seemed to muck things up further. Skimming through the pages of Britmodeller, it would seem that I am not the only one affected by this seasonal malaise. 

 

Still, progress has been made. After massive effort, the application of copious amounts of masking tape and no little amount of swearing, I managed to get the various panels in place around the engines. The fit between the panels is perhaps not quite all I might have hoped for but I'm telling myself that, as these items were removed frequently, this is probably prototypical. If you know differently, please email photographic proof to [email protected]

 

Next, the Heinkel was liberally slathered in PPP (what did I do before I discovered this wonder material?):

 

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and sanded and smoothed:

 

50389675178_671765c8ef_c.jpg

 

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Then, it was time to tackle what must surely be the crunch point of any He-111 build, the fitting of the glass house at the front. The Montex masks were applied

 

50390366126_b7752cf1db_c.jpg

 

a process which I find to be both engrossing and soothing, though I know that others dread this particular step. Then the moment I had been dreading, actually attaching them to the nose.

 

At this point, I must make a plaintive plea to my fellow modellers, what are the cool kids using to attach transparencies these days?  I started off using my bottle of Contacta Clear but it was useless. For a brief moment of madness I considered using TET but a quick test on a spare bit of clear sprue convinced me that this way lay sure disaster. Finally I ended up using the PVA I normally use to stick down the track underlay on my model railway which did the job but messily. There must be something better out there surely?

 

50454035557_1e4181c9d8_c.jpg

 

So this is where we are with primer just about to go on. Time is short but I might still scrape in under the wire if the gods of airbrushing look upon me favourably

 

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Ending on a sad note, I thought I'd once more share this picture of Jasper with you.

 

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Jasper passed away last week but the copious amounts of black hairs he left on my workbench will be with me for many months to come.

 

Craig.

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Sorry to hear about your cat Craig, looked a good mog. 

 

For transparencies, wherever possible I still use poly adhesive if there's no real danger of fogging; for every other circumstance I use Gator's Grip (basically PVA with added steroids) or Micro Kristal Kleer (again, PVA plus). All of these have failed me at some time or another :lol: 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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15 hours ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

Im sorry to hear of your loss, i lost two dogs within a three month stretch earlier this year and it is still very hard to deal with it. 

Thanks Dennis, it is ridiculous how these creatures worm their way into our hearts. We've lost 3 out of 5 cats in the last year so I'm really hoping this will be the last of it for a while.

 

Craig.

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10 hours ago, Stew Dapple said:

Sorry to hear about your cat Craig, looked a good mog. 

He was, and did remarkable well with one fewer leg than normal!

10 hours ago, Stew Dapple said:

 

For transparencies, wherever possible I still use poly adhesive if there's no real danger of fogging; for every other circumstance I use Gator's Grip (basically PVA with added steroids) or Micro Kristal Kleer (again, PVA plus). All of these have failed me at some time or another :lol: 

 

So what you're telling me is that I might as well just let everything fog up, thus also relieving me of the need to do any work on detailing the cockpit? That sounds like a plan 🙂

 

Craig.

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So after my last entry in this sorry tale last night, I went back up to the mancave and sprayed my first primer coat. As mentioned earlier, I'm trying out Stynylrez (one day I will remember how to spell that first time). I think I may have been a little too hesitant because I ended up with this ghost-like apparition: 

 

50459649738_6437650b37_c.jpg

 

It actually looks better in the picture but in real life, it's obvious that the Heinkel received only the lightest dusting of primer. However, I invite you to admire my foresight in buying a spray booth which is a perfect fit for the beast

 

50459649188_f9f8207d83_c.jpg

 

Since we're on a deadline here, I nipped back upstairs at lunchtime today and had another bash at the recommended range  of 10 - 15cm (I had been firing from much further back in my previous attempt in an effort to avoid my usual practise of putting so much paint on the model that it starts dripping off the edges). That seemed to go ok at first but wait! What's this?

 

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Can any of you airbrush experts out there offer suggestions as to what might be going on here?

 

Craig.

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There are a few possibilities ...                                     Solutions!

 

1. The model has grease on it !                                     1: clean your model thoroughly!

2. You can have oil/water or both in your air !              2: use a moisture trap and if fitted replace or clean it!

3. There is also a possibility of your stynylrez

not being shaken too well !                                             3: shake it 😉 but do it well....


Anyway the Stynylrez can be removed with IPA ..and you don’t have to do the whole plane again ..just clean the affected area.

 

hope it helps, Jan

 

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Thanks Jan and Dennis. I think Jan has probably hit the nail on its head with his first suggestion. On other parts of the model, there are panel lines where the same thing has happened, suggesting to me that there’s some kind of crud at the bottom of them.  IPA is not something I actually have in my modelling arsenal but I should have a big bottle of the stuff in my hands today courtesy of a well-known on-line retailer. Stand by for further developments!

 

Craig. 

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17 Days to Go!!

 

With lavish supplies of IPA to hand, I set to stripping off the dodgy areas of primer (which was most of it) and wiped down every area I could reach.

 

50476895453_c305715504_c.jpg

 

I reloaded the airbrush and.... the same thing happened :banghead:However, I noticed that going over the same spot with a second thicker coat seemed to tidy things up a bit. So that's what I did resulting in:

 

50477594626_1ca1648d87_c.jpg

 

There are 4 main issues with this:

  1. There's so much paint on it now, I think it's actual 1/47th scale
  2. The little of the fine ICM surface detail that remained after my marathon filling and sanding session has been obscured
  3. While inspecting the results this morning in a dangerously decaffeinated state, I dropped the accursed thing on the floor splitting the rear fuselage open and sending the tail wheel scuttering off who knows where.
  4. 50477593791_5965e6c976_c.jpg
  5. While trying to clean up 4., I snapped off half the towel rail aerial  on the bottom on the fuselage. One of the few shining highlights of this build so far was that I had managed to avoid doing so.

This is in serious danger of stopping being fun.

 

Craig.

Edited by Dandie Dinmont
speeling
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16 Days to Go!!

4 hours ago, Stew Dapple said:

Does seem to be fighting you rather, doesn't it? However, darkest hour is just before the dawn, and all that :) 

 

And the light at the end of the tunnel is not necessarily an approaching train. Thanks for the kind words Stew but let's not overlook the sheet amount of cack-handedness being deployed in this build 🙂

 

Gather round kids and learn from your old uncle Craig's mistakes. Never dismantle your airbrush in the middle of a Stynylrez spraying session to see what's restricting the amount of paint coming out of the nozzle. The stuff gets EVERYWHERE and it takes hours to chip it off from every corner, crack and crevice. In truth I should have left well alone anyway since the restricted flow prevented me from indulging in my usual airbrushing sin of covering everything with a half inch layer of paint. 

 

Anyway, this is where we are:

 

50486866288_fd9163cb72_c.jpg

 

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Good enough, I think and the primer revealed no defects which can't be sorted out with a little PPP and a gentle rub down.

 

Tonight, I dive into a whole new area for me, rife with opportunities for mucking things up. Home made markings!

 

Craig.

 

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13 days to go!!

Because none of the main decal manufacturers have had the foresight to produce a decal set for the aircraft I'm building, I have to provide the markings myself. Luckily, the markings on this aircraft are all straight lines which makes things a bit easier. I can use either the kit decals or the Montex masks for the "1H" on the fuselage sides but I also need an "FT" (with the "F"s in yellow) on the fuselage sides and a full "1H FT" under the wings. This involves cutting several parallel strips of masking tape of exactly the same width. Luckily I have a tool for that:

 

50504294218_6583608368_c.jpg

 

And thank goodness I do because it simplified matters considerably.

 

The masks were cut out and applied and the appropriate colours sprayed on top. I think I may finally be acquiring some finesse with the airbrush because I managed to avoid having great streams of excess paint running down the fuselage and wings:

 

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In the last photo, the Montex mask is on the left and my home made efforts on the right. Needless to say, the Montex masks were much easier to apply and gave a much better result than my feeble attempts.

 

Anyway, a couple of days to let the paint dry and pluck up courage and voila!

 

50505007711_57638a3746_c.jpg

 

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Not too shabby for a first attempt, I think, and certainly should be useable with a little touching up.  Now I need to re-mask the letters with yet more finely cut masking tape, fix some rough areas revealed  by the primer coat and then I can get some paint on this thing!

 

Incidentally, (and I meant to mention this in my last post), harking back to my primer woes,  @janneman36 had offered the following possibilities:

 

1. The model has grease on it !                                     

2. You can have oil/water or both in your air !              

3. There is also a possibility of your stynylrez

not being shaken too well !                                             

 

At first I had suspected number 1 but liberally sousing the Heinkel in IPA had only partially improved things. I had been shaking the Stynylrez (complete with a couple of Mr. AK's finest shaking balls in the bottle) until my hand felt like it was going to come off my wrist but perhaps it wasn't enough? I plunged my electric paint stirrer into the bottle and swooshed it around for 5 minutes or so and hey presto! a perfect (or as perfect as my feeble airbrushing skills can produce anyway) primer coat. So it looks like the problem may have been a deadly combination of 1. and 3. You live and learn.

 

Craig.

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10 days to go!!!

So much for my confident assertions. I thought I'd get the first coat of RLM65 on last night and ended up with this:

 

50512922072_f16bf33994_c.jpg

 

(This is after two coats. The first coat was even worse).

 

A closer look:

 

50512756521_c8f507869c_c.jpg

 

Oh deary me. Time to apply some Vulcan style logic. As the first picture shows, my faithful old paint mule was similarly afflicted so it can't be a property of the model (which I had wiped down with IPA beforehand anyway). Regular readers will recall that I had the same issue with the primer so it can't be the paint. I used a different nozzle, aircap and needle for the primer so it's probably not them. That leaves 2 possibilities as far as I can see, it's either some part of the airbrush which I didn't swap or it's something to do with my airbrushing technique. The surface of the model is smooth so these aren't actually indentations in the paint or anything. I do have a pot of the Tamiya RLM65-a-like I could try (the current paint is Xtraxcrylic thinned with Vallejo airbrush cleaner which has worked well for me before) though I eliminated the paint with remorseless logic above. I checked the moisture trap and the drain plug of my compressor and they're both as dry as a bone. Quite frankly, if I had any hair left, I would be tearing it out with both hands.

 

Baffled of East Lothian.

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Hello Graig that  is not okay...

what kind of setup do you have for providing the air?

I still think that contamination is your problem...sometimes it happens when you use different sorts of paint like oil based and then use waterbased/ acrylic ones!

And sometimes polluted air...with oil that is..
I use mostly cellulose thinner to clean out my airbrush and that is only recommended when you have Teflon seals in your airbrush.

 

cheers , Jan

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36 minutes ago, janneman36 said:

Hello Graig that  is not okay...

what kind of setup do you have for providing the air?

 

I've got a Sparmax TC610H+ compressor+tank.

 

36 minutes ago, janneman36 said:

I still think that contamination is your problem...sometimes it happens when you use different sorts of paint like oil based and then use waterbased/ acrylic ones!

 

I only ever use acrylics in my airbrush. This started when I tried out the Stynylrez but that may be a coincidence.

 

36 minutes ago, janneman36 said:

And sometimes polluted air...with oil that is..
I use mostly cellulose thinner to clean out my airbrush and that is only recommended when you have Teflon seals in your airbrush.

 

cheers , Jan

Thanks for the suggestions Jan. I think my next step is to strip my airbrush completely down and see if I've missed anything.

 

Craig.

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Hi Graig , I looked up those specs for the Sparmax and that one is oilfree so we can rule that out!
Do you empty the the moisture filter on the compressor on a regular basis by pressing the valve on the underside of the filter?

This is important when you want to keep moisture out of the air as it tends come in your air when not properly emptied..it can give you these problems..

 

Good luck , Jan

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4 minutes ago, janneman36 said:

Hi Graig , I looked up those specs for the Sparmax and that one is oilfree so we can rule that out! 

 

Good to know!

 

4 minutes ago, janneman36 said:

 


Do you empty the the moisture filter on the compressor on a regular basis by pressing the valve on the underside of the filter?

This is important when you want to keep moisture out of the air as it tends come in your air when not properly emptied..it can give you these problems..

 

Good luck , Jan

 

Yes, I do that at the end of every session. Maybe I should do it at the beginning as well!

 

Thanks again,

Craig.

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7 Days To Go!!!!!!

 

50525892521_966bbce1ae_c.jpg

 

Now that's more like it. What was the trick? Well I did exactly what you're not meant to do when debugging things and changed two variables at once. It's either reducing the spraying pressure to ~12psi or switching to Tamiya acrylics. 

 

Enthused, I spent my extra hour this morning applying vast acreage of masking tape.

 

50527974207_fedc8056d2_c.jpg

 

I'm off to apply one of the two near-identical versions of green onto the upper surfaces. Fingers crossed!

 

Craig.

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A late catch up with your build Craig, I was there at the start, but got waylaid by my own OTT build (which won't get finished in time).

 

An very enjoyable read, possibly more so then the fun you've had with spraying etc. Airbrushes can be most frustrating. But glad it seems to have settled down. And very sorry about Jasper. Being 'a bit older', and having had many cats, I know what its like.

 

Best of luck for the rest of the build!

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20 hours ago, Johnson said:

An very enjoyable read, possibly more so then the fun you've had with spraying etc. Airbrushes can be most frustrating. But glad it seems to have settled down. And very sorry about Jasper. Being 'a bit older', and having had many cats, I know what its like.

 

Thanks Charlie. I had to pick a couple of black hairs off the newly sprayed Heinkel yesterday so in some ways, he's still with us.

 

3 hours ago, Stew Dapple said:

Looking good Craig, glad you got the airbrush/paint issue sorted

 

You speak too soon Mr. Dapple as I shall relate:

 

6 Days to Go!!!!

 

I cracked open a new jar of Tamiya's interpretation of RLM71 and made free with my electric mixer thingy before carefully decanting precisely the same proportions of paint and water as I had successfully used on the underside into a mixing jar. The airbrush was charged and directed at the model. My powers of expression fail me when trying to describe the results. Paint spattered, cracked, stuck to some patches and spurned others. I wish I had taken a picture but I had curled up into a foetal ball whimpering slightly. Had I not mixed the paint enough? Mixed it too much? Not used enough water? Used too much water? Not used the right kind of water? Maybe there was some kind of contamination in the mixing jar? I mixed up a new batch in a brand new mixing jar and it did exactly the same.

 

Note however that though the paint had done many undesirable things, it had not run. This is because I have actually learned something from my experiences and am now making use of the gadget at the rear of my airbrush which allows you to restrict how far back the paint lever can be moved, thus making it much harder for me to follow my usual practise and apply the paint until it runs off the model in waterfalls. I was thus able to repeatedly apply thin coats until after one final attempt this morning, we have this.

 

50532315022_a0d54bcb9c_c.jpg

 

50532314787_c8b29a937d_c.jpg

 

Not perfect by any means but it's going to have to do. If anyone offers criticism, I shall reply (without offering any proof naturally) that it is well known that this is an airframe which Arado allowed the apprentices in the paint shop to cut their teeth on.

 

I'm planning on knocking off from work early today (ah, the joys of home working!) to do some masking and then get the first coat of RLM 70 on. It'll be my first attempt at Luftwaffe camouflage so it should be an interesting experience.

 

Craig. 

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5 Days to Go!!!!

 

So as forecast, I spent yesterday evening applying large amounts of masking tape to the Heinkel. It may just be my growing befuddlement but I found it incredible hard to keep in mind that the tape needed to cover the bits of RLM71 I wished to retain. Also, hint to ICM, next time, try printing the plan view of the painting guide in colour, not two similar shades of grey.  

 

Anyway, eventually it was done

 

50536340572_45105f0986_c.jpg

 

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and after a thankfully trauma-free session with the airbrush, we have:

 

50536340132_1584170ea7_c.jpg

 

Apologies for the cat, Rollo was so impressed by my painting skills that he refused to leave the model's side.

 

If it wasn't for Rollo, I'm not sure I could tell the before and after pictures apart. The proof of the pudding I suppose will be when the masking comes off but there's a couple of areas that needs touched up first so that will be a treat for the next time.

 

Craig.

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