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Halt and Catch Fire (1/72 Brengun Typhoon Ib)


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So I've got the wings on and done a fair bit of filling and sanding:

 

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It's not really too bad, mostly just the joins, as well as the intake, which has needed a lot of love to keep it from looking like the Typhoon has jaw cancer on one side. 

 

The big issue is the fishplates. Brengun supplies these as a separate PE part, sold, of course, independently, because only a handful of earlier Typhoons lacked them. The plates are rendered as one long PE strip that's about as difficult to get to correctly stick to the model as you'd image. I tried Gator Glue, I tried CA, I tried swearing at it, neither worked. Then I had a really bad idea, and I tried cutting the individual fishplates off.

 

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As you can see, they're a mite small. They also like to ping off into the ether, never to be seen again, while being manipulated with tweezers. I've tried using both CA glue and Tamiya Extra Thin so far with no joy. How do I feel? FRUSTRATED.

 

 

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I decided there was really only one feasible way to replicate the reinforcing strips, the same one used in the review build in the Valiant Wings Hawker Typhoon book.

 

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Imagine my excitement. 

 

I cut thin strips of styrene sheet to more or less uniform width using my scalpel and my very poor spatial sense, Then, using tweezers, my scalpel, and latterly, just putting them on the Tamiya Extra Thin bottle's brush, I applied them to the model.

 

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Yes, I know it looks like crap.

 

To say the process was fraught is an understatement. I used the plans in the Valiant Wings book to place the fishplates. It took about an hour, all told.

 

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Hmmm, I daresay all of these make it look pretty dire. Here they are at a more normal viewing distance:

 

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I'll sand them down a bit once the glue dries and hopefully it will look at least a bit better.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A brave try, PC! I hope it works. It's too bad there isn't some sort of way to make a stencil or mask, then just lay the paint on pretty thickly so it stands a bit proud from the surroundings. That's what I might think about doing until I realised it was far too ambitious given my physical/emotional/psychological limitations.

 

Regards,

 

Jason

Edited by Learstang
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1 hour ago, Procopius said:

Imagine my excitement. 

 

I did try :D 

 

I think it will make a big difference when the plates have been sanded, they do look a bit stark as is, but as is isn't how they are going to be :) 

 

Cheers,

 

Stew

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Macro photography for in-progress shots is the Devil's Work. When the glue has set you will be able to roll a scalpel blade around the front and back edges to trim them off, and a light sanding down will make them even perfecter.

 

I'm looking forward to the "It looks better than I thought it would" shot under some primer.

 

Looking good!

 

[edit] When I first looked at your the photo with the scalpel, I thought that the plates were the uncut rectangles on the fret at the top. Then I saw the little speck above your scalpel blade and thought “oh crikey” (or some such).

 

Regards,

Adrian

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On 8/12/2021 at 7:08 AM, Procopius said:

So for the first time in fifteen months, I've caught a cold. It's a toss-up as to whether I got it from the kids or Mrs P, who flew home from Michigan, or from the members and other staff at my employer's annual meeting, many of whom flat-out refused to mask up earlier this week, even after being repeatedly reminded that it was mandatory when indoors in Chicago. Thanks, guys.

 

In any case, some new reference material has arrived:

 

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Late to the party, sorry.

 

Anyone else judge people by their bookshelves/library?  10/10 Ed.

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6 hours ago, Quiet Mike said:

 

 

Late to the party, sorry.

 

Anyone else judge people by their bookshelves/library?  10/10 Ed.

 

I always peruse the bookshelves any time I'm at someone's house. And judge the hell out of them.

 

I suppose I ought to update you all on my progress, as I've been slogging along with this.

 

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Gunsight is mounted, canopy is closed up, fishplates are sanded down (and why the confused react, @stevehnz?), some paint is laid down to check the status of seams and so forth. 

 

I added the little PE covers over the 20mm cannon fairings -- these needed a bit of annealing, but actually went on fairly well: 

 

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I'm a little unhappy with the canopy -- it's not as bad as the one in their car-door kits (which is my favourite version of the Typhoon), but it doesn't line up well, and one gets the sense that the people at Brengun are the sort of perverts who like to leave the sliding hoods open on their models. As a decent, respectable person, I do not. I've ordered one of their vacform canopy sets, which has a closed option, for future experimentation, since I have a ton of these kits.

 

 More later I hope.

 

 

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9 hours ago, Procopius said:

fishplates are sanded down (and why the confused react, @stevehnz?)

Merely an inadequate way of indicating I didn't feel confident in what you were doing, somewhat like I'm not confident that using similar sized bit of plastic is gong to work to make rocket mounts on my Hellcat.

Sorry if it created perturbation within thee. :)

Steve.

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6 hours ago, Procopius said:

the sort of perverts who like to leave the sliding hoods open on their models. As a decent, respectable person, I do not.

Hahahahahahahahahahah

 

It looks great PC, I really like the effect of the PE ring covers over the cannons - very classy.

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On 8/25/2021 at 11:52 AM, Procopius said:

and why the confused react

Ha ha, I just added one too and then read this.  It doesn't look so much confused as a lesser degree of sad.  I'm not changing it.... ;) 

 

Wow those PE covers and the cannons look really great!  I've also got to dog-pile on and comment that I think that sanding and shaping of your ad-hoc fishplates will look fine.  I sure hope so, because your mis-adventure with the PE fishplates would find me exhausting my plentiful supply of colorful metaphors (both real and made up).

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So on Thursday, I told Mrs P I didn't want to have any more children. I've never felt more like a monster. She cried and cried and cried, didn't eat dinner, and went straight to bed, after telling me this news was her worst nightmare. She's been extremely withdrawn today, and I've been rather worried that I've found the magic words to make the only woman on earth who could love me magically stop loving me. 

 

So that's been fun. 

 

As part of my continuing and increasingly desperate campaign to neither turn on the TV nor have to hear the audiobook of the Star Wars YA novel "So You Want to Join the Resistance" even one more time this week, I've been offering to read to the boys from some of my "grown-up war books", since Winston seems to like it, and Grant seems to like it when Winston isn't bored enough to beat him like grouse at a stately home. 
The other day I read to them from Tank Action, a memoir of the fighting in Normandy by Captain David Render of the Sherwood Foresters Yeomanry, kindly loaned to me by a friend. Winston has been very into tanks lately, and he was entranced. He made a tank for himself out of pillows, and sat within it with a little Lego (well, Cobi) Sherman tank I'd gotten him a while ago, and listened to me read for two straight hours. After dinner, he asked if there was an audiobook so he could listen while in bed. Mrs P retrieved my phone from his unconscious grasp around 10PM, still blaring out tank facts at absolute maximum volume. Today he informed me excitedly that a Sherwood Foresters Sherman had destroyed a Panther ("which is even more  dangerous than a Tiger"). He's a monster so often, but he's my monster. May all the Panthers life throws at him present their weak flank armour at ranges under five hundred yards.

 

I bought a Flames of War starter set for the tank models, and tomorrow I'm going to try and build some Shermans with him as a little surprise. With any luck, at least one person in my house will remember me fondly after I die.

 

I have done a little bit on the model as well, in case you were wondering.

 

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I'm a little demoralized by how much damage the cannon seem to have done to the wings, and how poorly my lights have gone in. Happily neither are visible in this photo, but believe me, it's there. 

 

I've primed the model, and opted to add the Sky band on the tail now, likewise for the wing invasion markings. I'm thinking I might do the fuselage markings after I paint the normal camo scheme, mainly because MN317/ZY-B left the area immediately around the squadron codes unpainted:

 

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FWIW, I think the sanded down fishplates don't look too bad:

 

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Survivable Edward, it is survivable, your domestic situation is familiar to me.

 

You will pay for it of course, but c'est la vie.

 

Your Typhoon is coming along well too and I applaud your converting Winston to tanks might be the making of him.

 

I remember taking my son (singular, nota bene) to Duxford and his excitement when he discovered there were "Tanks dad, there's tanks too!"

 

Sometimes we do well when we think we might be crashing in flames instead.

 

 

 

Oh yes, cool fishplates dude.

 

Didn't they blend in nicely.

👍

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As Bill suggests, domestic challenges tend to be survivable Edward, that's why we have our hobby, yes? Hope things smooth over in time.

 

Tanks! I am rather partial to tanks myself, targets as a colleague of mine refers to them. He's a bit of a CAS guy! I am fortunate in that I live less than 30 minutes drive from the Bovington Tank museum as well as the live firing ranges and test tracks. Weekday firings can be clearly heard quite often. The museum itself is quite wonderful if you are into these beasts. I think Winston would love it! Next weekend we have the South West model show being hosted at the museum, and I plan to go along to that. I helped one of my grandsons build a Cobi Sherman, and now he has seen my small collection of completed AFV's, he wants me to build a Sherman from a kit, "in Cobi scale" as he put it. Looking at his Sherman I would say that is around 1/48. Much modelling lies in my future.

 

The Typhoon is looking rather Typhoon like, and the rear fuselage fishplates look just right.

 

Terry

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Glad to hear (and see) the fish plates turned out well.  As for the domestic front... it sounds like the parenting is doing better than you think.  As for the other issue... I was in a somewhat similar situation once and it worked out -- I'm confident yours will too.

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I see the RAF and British Army have concluded their evacuation of endangered persons, including 2,200 children, from Afghanistan, and I hope you're all as proud of them as I would be, were I a Briton. As it is, I can only admire their incredible work from afar, a solitary bright spot in a humiliating moment for my country. Makes a fellow want to build an A400M, I think ZM411 was one of the ones there. 

 

In personal news, I spent most of the day assembling Flames of War tanks in an unventilated area and felt a bit woozy for quite a long while as a result. Winston was pretty excited.

 

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As was Grant.

 

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(Grant was even more excited to discover there was a tank named after him. Some day perhaps we'll make some.)

 

Win was disinterested in assembling the tanks, but he enjoyed clipping the infantry from their sprues.

 

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Win complained about my Sherman assembly, as he had definite ideas about which transmission cover should be used (having learned the three part transmission cover was mainly on earlier Shermans, and was less durable than the cast cover, he demanded I not use it, ever). I asked him if he wanted to build them himself, and he told me he had no idea how, so I offered to teach him, whereupon he declined. I then explained to him that if you're not doing the cooking, you have to eat what you're given. He didn't like that too much. 

 

It's too bad Winston is totally uninterested in learning to read or learning to play Flames of War, it looks like it would be fun. But it's probably saving me money, so I shouldn't complain.

 

Tonight I airbrushed on the black stripes for the wings.

 

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They're far too nice to be accurate, but still a little rough. But there's a certain satisfaction in some glossy, more or less neat invasion stripes, even if they're wrong. And we'll dull them down later anyway.

 

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I am liking the stripes PC, just the right amount of scale "off-ness", myself would be happy to leave them there like that.

 

(But flattened of course)

 

Kids huh?

 

Oh well, you pay for what you get.

 

(keep receipts, one day there might be a reckoning...)

 

;)

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21 minutes ago, perdu said:

(keep receipts, one day there might be a reckoning...)

 

Having funded all my seven through University as well as life in general up to around that point (and beyond in some cases), I'm looking forward to that day very much. I'm thinking maybe the "refunds" will purchase a nice villa with a pool in say Barbados maybe ..........?

 

Terry

 

aka ever positive and hopeful of Dorset.

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6 hours ago, Terry1954 said:

 

Having funded all my seven

 

Yes, I was going to say, you clearly never had that difficult conversation with your wife. 

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A little more work done. Colourcoats MSG added to the lower fuselage.

 

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I cunningly put the gear in place and sprayed the stripes on them, which worked about as well as you'd expect.

 

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What you see above is after some corrective respraying, and it will do. 

 

I also somehow lost one of the inner gear doors. God knows where it went, I tore apart my work area with no trace of it, and robbed one from one of my other kits, which surely will never come back to bite me in the rump later. Surely. In any case, I've added a link to my wants thread to my signature, because at my core I'm just a howling need engine screaming into the void.

 

The boys start school again tomorrow, and Winston will be going for full days. Let's see how he does this year, it can't be worse than last year.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Procopius said:

I also somehow lost one of the inner gear doors. God knows where it went, I tore apart my work area with no trace of it, and robbed one from one of my other kits, which surely will never come back to bite me in the rump later. Surely. In any case, I've added a link to my wants thread to my signature, because at my core I'm just a howling need engine screaming into the void.

Why not use the one from the other kit and trace it to scratch build a new one from plastic card ? 

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7 hours ago, Corsairfoxfouruncle said:

Why not use the one from the other kit and trace it to scratch build a new one from plastic card ? 

 

I considered it, but the doors aren't flat on the interior side, and they have a lot of rivet detail (in fact, they're probably the most consistently-detailed parts in the kit), so it would be pretty clear that that one was a ringer.  

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