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Swords of the Unjust (2 x 1/72 IBG Fw 190D-9)


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Following the thread, while I'm building IBG's Fw-190D-9 too.

Just a note, the aircraft in the picture linked above is Wr.Nr.210129, Red 9, as recently depicted in Exito's decals sheet. There is no photograph showing Yellow 9  W.Nr. 210128 although it existed; there is instead a profile of it by Claes Sundin who apparently mistook the same photograph(s) as showing 210128 and not 210129.

Ciao

Stefano

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2 hours ago, Ngantek said:

Newcomer here, I really enjoyed your mustang build, and having a look though your previous work. The build logs are great of course, but also the historical context, and the refreshingly honest reflections on the trials of family life. With two ragemonkeys of my own, I can sympathise deeply with the difficulties of carving out any spare minutes to do your own thing, and the sense of resentment, however unreasonable and self inflicted, that can sometimes arise from that loss of agency. So thanks, basically!

 

I have one of the d-15 torpedo kits, so I'm very interested to see how it should go together without the addition of incompetence.  But more importantly, it's all too easy to think of these models in the abstract, to marvel at the clean lines and impressive engineering of the dora without considering horrific realities of how, and indeed why they were created; so I very much appreciate the context.

 

Cheers,

Andy

I concur with the entire first paragraph :) 

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2 hours ago, Ngantek said:

I have one of the d-15 torpedo kits, so I'm very interested to see how it should go together without the addition of incompetence. 

 

This...may not be the build thread for you. On the other hand, if you want to see a grown man absolutely lose his mind over a tiny piece of bendable metal, and maybe stab himself with a scalpel a la Young Frankenstein, well then, pull up a chair!

 

2 hours ago, Ngantek said:

 but also the historical context, and the refreshingly honest reflections on the trials of family life. With two ragemonkeys of my own, I can sympathise deeply with the difficulties of carving out any spare minutes to do your own thing, and the sense of resentment, however unreasonable and self inflicted, that can sometimes arise from that loss of agency.

 

Last night I made Winston lie on the floor and told him he would have to live there until he was seven after he hit his younger brother one too many times. He seemed pretty resigned to it, but Grant was enthused in the sort of bustling officious way only four-year-olds and lifelong bureaucrats can be. He brought down a washcloth so we could bathe Winston in situ and thoughtfully brought his brother blankets, a pillow, and some stuffed animals, and alerted me any time Win shifted. Eventually Mrs P got home and told Win I was joking. Was I? WAS I?

 

54 minutes ago, steh2o said:

Following the thread, while I'm building IBG's Fw-190D-9 too.

Just a note, the aircraft in the picture linked above is Wr.Nr.210129, Red 9, as recently depicted in Exito's decals sheet. There is no photograph showing Yellow 9  W.Nr. 210128 although it existed; there is instead a profile of it by Claes Sundin who apparently mistook the same photograph(s) as showing 210128 and not 210129.

 

 

Yeah, I stumbled across that in the thread that was linked. Very frustrating. It's sort of hilarious how many 190 experts believed it was Yellow 9, however, if by hilarious you mean "shows what a fragile thread our perceptions of the past, and indeed, all of objective reality, can dangle by".

 

I guess I'll probably get the Exito sheet, though of course there are none to be had (that I can find) in the USA, which means I'd have to hope Polish Post can get it to me in time. And it's twenty bucks. 

 

 

 

As a  special bonus feature, here's the rarely-seen Mrs P informing the children they were getting a sister back in March. The boys' responses provide illuminating insight into their widely disparate personalities:

 

 

My house is pretty clean unless the children are home. They have a playroom, of course, which they refuse to play in, preferring to leave a trail of debris, like the one the Ballard expedition used to locate the shattered hull of the Bismarck on the ocean floor, in their wakes. They particularly love to leave large, cumbersome toys at chokepoints, like doorways or major thoroughfares.  

 

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10 minutes ago, Procopius said:

They particularly love to leave large, cumbersome toys at chokepoints, like doorways or major thoroughfares.

How did my children manage to get into your house?  Also, you've done some impressive work so far.  Methinks I shall follow this thread for a while...

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Just now, ErikT said:

How did my children manage to get into your house? 

 

It's such a weird impulse that almost all children seem to have, along with strewing Lego like caltrops. My sister's children don't do things like this, but they also only have wooden toys, hand-made by craftsmen, one of which (a boat) Winston immediately converted to a submachinegun through the power of imagination the last time we saw them. We have not been invited back. 

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13 minutes ago, Procopius said:

 

..., one of which (a boat) Winston immediately converted to a submachinegun through the power of imagination the last time we saw them. 

 

H H Munro, better known by his pen-name Saki, was an early 20th century satirist ("all the wit, verbal brilliance and incisive sophistication of a master of social satire", "macabre, acid and very funny", his work "drives a knife into the upper crust of English Edwardian life", (so the blurb on the cover says).  Nowadays his work is a bit hit and miss but you might want to look out his short (4.5 page) story "The Toys Of Peace" for reassurance/consolation that children don't really change.

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1 minute ago, Seahawk said:

 

H H Munro, better known by his pen-name Saki, was an early 20th century satirist ("all the wit, verbal brilliance and incisive sophistication of a master of social satire", "macabre, acid and very funny", his work "drives a knife into the upper crust of English Edwardian life", (so the blurb on the cover says).  Nowadays his work is a bit hit and miss but you might want to look out his short (4.5 page) story "The Toys Of Peace" for reassurance/consolation that children don't really change.

 

"The Toys of Peace" is in fact one of my all-time favourite short stories. I wasn't allowed "war toys" myself as a child. Worked well.

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4 minutes ago, Procopius said:

 

"The Toys of Peace" is in fact one of my all-time favourite short stories. I wasn't allowed "war toys" myself as a child. Worked well.

Apologies.  I should have known that you are far too well-read to have missed out on the guilty pleasures of Saki.

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Just now, Seahawk said:

Apologies.  I should have known that you are far too well-read to have missed out on the guilty pleasures of Saki.

Don't overestimate me! You'd be amazed -- and alarmed -- by what I don't know.

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Lego caltrops? One of the waypoints of parenthood. Also a good reminder to have thick-soled slippers or similar when moving about the house.

And just think, you can initiate your daughter into the mysteries of modelmaking. I tried it with mine. She wasn't so keen on putting stuff together, but turned out to be excellent at masking and doing metal finishes, even with a brush. I confess to hiding the airbrush lest she goes to the Dark Side of doing her fingernails with it.

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I'm sure there's a lot of inspiring parenting stuff in there ("I'm not going to bug you anymore...", LOL), but I've learnt an important lesson that it's perfectly acceptable to normalise the presence of hobby paints in the main part of the house. I'm beginning to worry that my kids think I'm the random homeless guy who lives in the outbuilding.

 

Will

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Just now, Killingholme said:

I'm sure there's a lot of inspiring parenting stuff in there ("I'm not going to bug you anymore...", LOL), but I've learnt an important lesson that it's perfectly acceptable to normalise the presence of hobby paints in the main part of the house. I'm beginning to worry that my kids think I'm the random homeless guy who lives in the outbuilding.

 

Will

 

Oh yeah, I 3D-printed some figures for them and let them paint them, which they enjoyed almost as much as they did breaking them into a million pieces minutes later and demanding more, immediately. 

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2 minutes ago, Procopius said:

 

Oh yeah, I 3D-printed some figures for them and let them paint them, which they enjoyed almost as much as they did breaking them into a million pieces minutes later and demanding more, immediately. 

 

Good job you have a 3D printer then...

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10 hours ago, Procopius said:

Didn't let the time keep you from a beer after all, eh?

If only!, lack of sleep more likely.

 

"Work is the curse of the drinking class" - O. Wilde

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All human speech and writing relies upon stock phrases to some extent, from "rosy-fingered dawn" of The Iliad to the modern "not fit for purpose". Scale modelling is no different. I got most of my work done early today, so instead of getting a head start on next week, I did this:

 

https://mfbc.us/m/kfya7ry

 

Print one out and play along the next time you read a kit review!

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PC, I'm afraid you forgot 'The (engine, cockpit, etc.) is a kit by itself'. I never tire of that one. By the way, excellent introduction. Would you ghost-write my books?

 

Best Regards,

 

Jason

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8 hours ago, steh2o said:

Following the thread, while I'm building IBG's Fw-190D-9 too.

Just a note, the aircraft in the picture linked above is Wr.Nr.210129, Red 9, as recently depicted in Exito's decals sheet. There is no photograph showing Yellow 9  W.Nr. 210128 although it existed; there is instead a profile of it by Claes Sundin who apparently mistook the same photograph(s) as showing 210128 and not 210129.

Ciao

Stefano

it is indeed. I doubt Claes 'mistook' his rendition of 210128 - Schreiner's 'yellow 9' was a 100% loss on 29 Dec 44 as was clear from his text.  But the two WNr are consecutive so they probably looked pretty similar ..

Following the thread, finished my first a few weeks ago. I must say I didn't find the other forum thread much help -  it over-complicated what was reasonably well illustrated in the kit instructions. 

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6 hours ago, FalkeEins said:

it is indeed. I doubt Claes 'mistook' his rendition of 210128 - Schreiner's 'yellow 9' was a 100% loss on 29 Dec 44 as was clear from his text.  But the two WNr are consecutive so they probably looked pretty similar ..

 

 

 

My understanding was that the blue Reichsverteidigung may not have been applied at that point. It seems to be absent from some of the JG54 aircraft brought down during Bodenplatte, in any case. But you make a good point; a man with no conscience could simply build Yellow 9. And I am entirely without scruples...

 

In the course of my researching Yellow 9, I did come across several pictures of Red 9 that were discussed without reservation as being Schreiner's Yellow 9. Would that I had dug deeper!

 

13 hours ago, Steve Coombs said:

And just think, you can initiate your daughter into the mysteries of modelmaking. I tried it with mine. She wasn't so keen on putting stuff together, but turned out to be excellent at masking and doing metal finishes, even with a brush. I confess to hiding the airbrush lest she goes to the Dark Side of doing her fingernails with it.

 

I of course hope I will produce an amazing, talented, beautiful tomboy of a daughter, who likes all the things I like. This is not out of an arrogant belief in my own inherent virtue -- I'm a piece of crap -- but out of a great desire to watch her make teenaged nerds even more miserable than I was at their age. One thing I've taken away from working on Twitter for the last eight years: The Youth must be destroyed. 

 

Anyway, I really got into the kits today, and hoo boy.

 

I feel very reticent about criticizing IBG kits, as they're a competitor, to some extent, of Arma, a company I'm obviously extremely fond of. I also dislike, intensely, the Focke-Wulf 190; as someone who sublimated the love he should feel for his father into a love of RAF aircrew as a small boy and never looked back, I regard it with all the affection that a normal person might feel towards a machine expressly designed to kill their dad. Additionly, my wife informs me my love language is complaining (as assiduous readers of my threads no doubt have noticed). So maybe keep all that in mind as we go forward. 

 

I put together the little engine/firewall/wing spar/cockpit subassembly, "practically a kit in itself" for both. 

 

52055593139_0ae0c55774_h.jpgPXL_20220507_010440780 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

52056065735_a1c172ea95_h.jpgPXL_20220507_035636506 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

They look a little like something you might see zipping around Tatooine in one of those new Disney streaming shows designed in a lab to extract maximum value from a beloved property the way one imagines Blofeld might ruthlessly juice an orange. 

 

You'll note one has paler seatbelts, I had to use my Eduard ones after I looked at the kit ones wrong while test-fitting the cockpit assembly, causing it to launch itself heavenwards with a comically audible "SPROING!" and tear a hole in time and space, into which it immediately vanished, to return to pass judgement upon us all at the Last Trump. 

 

All of this (aside from the cockpit tub) is very fiddly to get together. I personally found the gun mounts for the MG131s to be exasperating, and abandoned the kit method of assembly, instead fitting the guns directly to the deck and then cajoling the weird little mounting claws into place. As a  side note: this is a great design choice if and only if you plan on building the kit with the gun cover cowling opened up, and I suppose there's enough detail in the box that you could easily do that, were it not for the fact that the gun cowl is a single part with the upper fuselage gun troughs in the kit, meaning you're going to be in for a bit of misery. But if you do dioramas, you already like to suffer, I suppose. In any case, for anyone building the kit as an intact airplane more or less closed up, this is a useless extravagance. All it does is ensure you'll end up brush-painting the tiny tips of the gun muzzles where they barely protrude from the cowl. I gather that replicating the experience of building the aircraft but slightly smaller is more popular in 1/24 and 1/32 scales, a foreign country to me. Moving along!

 

So then it was time to assemble the fuselage. I saw in the other thread linked that if you're a skilled modeller and do this properly (with the implicit criticism, of course, if you fail to pull it off), you won't even need to use filler, etc. etc. Well, I don't know about that, but I only needed to use one word during the assembly process. Repeatedly. The kit is so, so close to being there. Really, it is. Qualitatively, the molding seems to be on a par with the Arma Mustang. The sprue gates are somewhat finer. But Arma clearly has a better understanding of the tolerances of their molds than IBG, because this is a process that demands a level of precision that's difficult to achieve without an obliging squid in attendance. This is a petty bitch to have, but the parts don't really click into place, and it's very difficult to see whether everything is all lined up at the same time so that you can cement everything together. The exhaust stacks are necessary to sort of anchor the nose halves to the engine, which is a double shame, as you have to kind of scoot them into place (the exhaust stack area on the nose has three cells or bays, and because it makes painting and weathering the stacks that much harder. The whole experience felt uncomfortably like building one of Roden's 1/72 WWI biplanes, where their excitement at being able to produce that level of detail in 1/72 warred with whether or not it was actually desirable to do so, and won comprehensively.  

 

52055466108_5a12e2740f_h.jpgPXL_20220507_021345063 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

One thing I took away from the other thread: you're gonna need to bend those gun barrels up, or you'll lose your mind trying to get the upper cowl on. 

 

Getting the lower wing on was also a pain. I must have misaligned some part somewhere along the line, but the front half needed to be forced into position and threatened to pop out of place without strong restraint. The rear underbelly, it must be said, did fit perfectly and likely will need no filler. abaft the wing-fuselage join.

 

I honestly didn't have a hugely hard time with the PE (now that I've said this, the next kit's landing gear bays will be complete disasters), but I kind of enjoy PE. However, while the IBG PE is excellent for seatbelts, being very thin and flexible, it isn't ideal for structural elements such as the ones it represents in the landing gear bay, The Eduard 190A in this scale, one of which I built in 2016 (and also didn't much enjoy, mainly due to how one had to do the exhausts) uses plastic parts for this and it worked perfectly fine. But even with its excessive bendiness, I was able to get the PE in place:

 

52054466672_e9e43e86c6_h.jpgPXL_20220507_025900880 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

You'll note I put a piece of masking tape over the wheel well opening, to spare myself the sight of a tiny bit of PE vanishing into the void halfway through the process.

 

There was a little bit that you're supposed to fold inwards an infinite number of times until space itself folds and you travel to Ix. Many machines on Ix. New machines. Erm! Anyway, it goes between(?) those two photoetch pieces, and I said to myself f...orget that.

 

So now we come to the part of the kit that I think makes a lot of people prefer being fed into a woodchipper rather than attempt it: The photoetch wheel bay roofs. Why was this done? I'm 210% sure it seemed cool to IBG at the time, and I bet the people who really really love 190 to an extent that gets worrisome, and who're very good at building them, welcome this. (It's possible that they weren't confident of their ability to replicate small parts or fine detail, but this seems incredibly unlikely given all the small parts and fine detail present in the kit as it stands.) All I'm prepared to say is that I tried.

 

52055560503_5c6f5ebafe_h.jpgPXL_20220507_032035239 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

In my defense, the instructions aren't exactly crystal clear on how they go in, if you refer to Step 14 here: https://www.scalemates.com/products/img/3/4/7/1385347-51-instructions.pdf

 

There are also unfortunately no score lines on these pieces to make folding easier. They're present on several other pieces of photoetch on the sheet, and they would have been very helpful for knowing what to fold and where.

 

As you can see, the lower nose took quite a beating, and will likely need some filler and then the application of the kit PE scribing template to add some panel lines(?) to it.

 

52054534232_a342d7b4d5_h.jpgPXL_20220507_035845382 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

The engine should have a ton of wires and hoses coming out of it that'd be visible looking up through the wheel wells. It's late though, and I'm not 100% confident I could think of a good way to do it even with the lead wire I have on hand, just because of the fragility of the engine, its mounting, all the PE near it, and the kit's own tight tolerances. Without that, though, the area looks a little empty, like you might see a tumbleweed roll through, or find a lunchbox stashed in there.

 

I also got the upper wings on, which you have to sort of slot into the fuselage at a 45-degree angle and then lower them confidently and vigourously into place. In my case, this was followed by a lot of laundry clips and tape to hold them together long enough for the glue to dry, as well as some coaxing where they mated with the upper fuselage to avoid too odious a seam. 

 

52055617083_335a091b0a_h.jpgPXL_20220507_035835912 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

I will say, when it goes together well, it goes together very well. But it's very finicky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Looking good there! It's funny, with you not being a fan of the '190 and not being afraid of the challenge and me, very much liking the Dora Nine, deciding that I'd rather eat my own earwax (or, indeed, someone else's) than attempt this kit. Generally speaking, I don't mind a challenge, but not when it involves photoetched parts. I despise PE with the kind of passion I reserve for Marmite. *shudder* Also, being unashamedly lazy, I shy away from unnecessary work. Life's to short to spend time on bits that will never again see the light of day, and I kinda resent having to pay for the privilege of having those parts included. Yes, I'm looking at you, designer of the Airfix Wellington!

 

Anyway, I'm enjoying watching this build. Sometimes it's more fun do do things vicariously.

Cheers,

Mark.

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Looking good! Brings back fond memories of building mine a few months ago :)  You may want to check the fit of the fuel tank carrier. The instructions tell you to glue the tank to the carrier first and then the whole unit to the bottom, so I did that and left mine off until the end, but then the top of the fuel tank carrier didn't fit flush with the belly of the aircraft, leaving a gap.

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15 hours ago, elger said:

Looking good! Brings back fond memories of building mine a few months ago :)  

 

In fact, I took a few peeks  at your WIP before getting started! I suspect mine will not look quite as nice as yours when all is said and done.

 

15 hours ago, elger said:

You may want to check the fit of the fuel tank carrier. The instructions tell you to glue the tank to the carrier first and then the whole unit to the bottom, so I did that and left mine off until the end, but then the top of the fuel tank carrier didn't fit flush with the belly of the aircraft, leaving a gap.

 

I took a look, and...holy hell! What kind of person designs a long, thin pylon with this as the only locating pin?

 

52057885731_13b8161eb3_h.jpgPXL_20220508_032229289 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

Madness. 

 

15 hours ago, lasermonkey said:

Looking good there! It's funny, with you not being a fan of the '190 and not being afraid of the challenge and me, very much liking the Dora Nine, deciding that I'd rather eat my own earwax (or, indeed, someone else's) than attempt this kit.

 

One of the cool things about being stupid is that it's generally far too late for me to quit when I realize I'm in over my head. Which is why I'm married and soon to be the father of three children.

 

Speaking of, today was, as all Saturdays are when you're a parent of small people, a long day. Mrs P had some conferences this morning at her school, so I had to take the children to swim class. I, despite having lived within walking distance, almost within sight, of the fifth-largest lake in the world, have never learned how, so I'm very sceptical of Mrs P's firm belief that they will die, immediately, if they can't swim. (a) We can always make more if we lose one, god knows, and (b) we could stand to free up a bedroom right now anyway. Anyway, the way it works is that one child goes in the water and refuses to listen to their swim instructor for thirty minutes while the other sits on a bench with me and complains, a thirty minute interregnum, and then the two children swap positions. Grant swam first.

 

52056775266_0a12040587_h.jpgPXL_20220507_132037157 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

While Grant swam, to distract Winston, who when bored is capable of feats of destruction so incredible that I've considered loaning him and an audiobook of Deuteronomy to the Ukrainian government for the duration of hostilities, to be airdropped wherever the need is greatest, I regaled him with a condensed history of flight from the Wright Brothers to the Battle of Britain, which is arguably what all of human history was building up to; we're just living in the extended hangover now. Periodically he would interrupt me to let me know the Cat People had analogous weapons or systems to the ones being discussed, only far superior. 

 

A digression on Cat People: Cat People are, obviously, a creation of Winston's fevered imagination, filling for him the role of an imaginary friend: a society of perfect warriors with ultimate weapons, in a ceaseless war against their hated foe, the Dog People. I learned only yesterday that Cat People do not, as I had surmised, look at all like cats, but instead have "cat-like" personalities, which as a former cat owner I assume means they're sociopaths. It can, to be honest with you, be a little tiring to hear about what the latest wondergadget the Cat People have is.

 

Time passed, and it was Winston's turn to defy his instructor.

 

Winston, the child of my heart, has real problems with authority. The moment an adult granted (by society, certainly not by Winston) power over him wants him to do something, it's as if a switch is thrown, pumping a heady mixture of nitrous oxide and defiance into his veins. He has the strength of ten men at these times. Grant is quiet, dutiful, and obedient, as long as he's more or less getting his way, like a good little crypto-authoritarian. 

 

I console myself with the knowledge that while Grant would cheerily and efficiently set fire to a Ukrainian peasant village on the steppes, Winston would be attempting to assassinate the Fuhrer with a Heath Robinson bomb disguised as a bottle of brandy, which reminds me to secure my brandy. As we watched Winston rail against all manmade authority, Grant observed, in his quiet, dead voice, "Winston does not follow The Rules." I could hear the bolded capitals.

 

52055731777_12253dc8cc_h.jpgPXL_20220507_141903004 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

After swimming, it was time to get groceries, escorted still by the bitter fruits of my loins. I have a very definite goal when grocery shopping, which is to obtain enough food to feed a family of four for a week in a time of rampant inflation, and, since I have to make all the meals after finishing my own work and while keeping my children from twisting each others' heads off like the lids to jam jars, the dinners all have to be fairly easy to prepare. In theory, Mrs P (who is an excellent cook) will make dinner if you buy ingredients, but right now it's just an expensive way to pre-reserve a night where we order in. So it goes.

 

We wandered semi-aimlessly through the store, with me attempting to get everything on my list and the boys trying to get as many random things as they could browbeat me into putting into the cart. At one point they wanted dog chew toys. We do not, obviously, have a dog. Winston had apparently been told by his mother that we "might" get water balloons (thanks, honey), but managed to be so bestial (ramming me with a cart as I crouched to look for pickles) that he didn't get balloons today, and possibly won't even be allowed to look at them for the next ten years. When I got to the car and opened the trunk to load the groceries, an incredible sight greeted me:

 

52056776401_a715de2271_h.jpgPXL_20220507_155320758 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

I have no idea what the hell it is, but apparently Winston saw it on a kerb and Mrs P loaded it into the car and promptly forgot about it. I don't normally think to check the trunk to see if a filthy child's toy the size of a baby hippo is in there, so I was somewhat surprised myself, especially since it occupied all of the space I was going to use for the food. Ho ho ho. I was sorely tempted to ditch it in the parking lot.

 

When I got home, Mrs P graciously took the kids to the park, and so I had some grotto time during daylight hours, once a fixture of my weekends, but now a very rare occurrence.

 

So one of the problems with the kit is that the rear decking of the cockpit isn't angled sharply enough to fit without a lot of coaxing. This bedeviled me on the first one, so I found a solution for #2.

 

52057487971_bc26ae8cb3_h.jpgPXL_20220507_191422253 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

52057975480_cf36cdef6b_h.jpgPXL_20220507_191430243 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

It seemed to work well enough.

 

This one in general is going together better thanks to what I've learned on the first one.

 

52057975480_cf36cdef6b_h.jpgPXL_20220507_191430243 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

This stupid little delta-shaped piece of framework gave me a lot of trouble when it came to getting the lower wing on right.

 

52057488056_34ecc766ff_h.jpgPXL_20220507_193459350 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

The cannon mountings have too narrow a space between them unless you very carefully sand and file and position them. This kit is a little too much like real life in that you can often find yourself screwed by decisions you made ages ago and which are now irrevocable.

 

After this, I took a short nap and was awakened by tiny yet loud voices as the children returned. I grilled hot dogs for everyone, since we had some nice weather finally today, and then afterwards, we made s'mores. Here are my children, bitching about what was always a treasured childhood activity for me, shortly before they handed their marshmallow sticks to me for me to toast and went inside.

 

52057724119_bc332089fe_h.jpgPXL_20220507_230524043 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

After they were put in bed, I folded some laundry and watched Valkyrie, the movie directed by the repellant Bryan Singer and starring the only slightly less loathsome Tom Cruise, whereupon my children reappeared as if by magic. I told them they could watch as long as they folded, and they set to doing the absolute worst job of folding laundry I have ever seen with a vengeance. "I think I have always known how to fold laundry, since I was born," Winston confidently informed me, as he crumpled a shirt into a misshapen triagle and placed it in the laundry basket. When it became apparent that the Desert Air Force shooting up Panzerarmee Afrika (best part of the movie) was a one-time deal, the boys tired of folding, and returned to bed. I finished the last basket and headed back down to the grotto. 

 

I managed to do the gear bay PE without losing any pieces, but I can't help but think an aftermarket PE set for this would be easier to work with. Sadly, Eduard instead chose to make photoetch flaps to drop, which only six people in the world are capable of assembling properly. Failing that, I wish I could design stuff in CAD or Blendr, because I think a 3D-printed solution could work here as well. Something. This is do-able as it is, but not very consistently or terribly well. I would rather an 85% solution anyone can do over a 100% solution for a handful of people. There's also a certain amount of mental strain imposed on the innocent modeller as they mash down the upper wing on top of all that fragile PE.

 

52058302015_fe80c8b336_h.jpgPXL_20220508_022609763 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

I then decided to use the scribing PE bit on the first 190D. Ironically, this is the only piece of etch that steadfastly refuses to bend.

 

52058114094_f4b4521def_h.jpgPXL_20220508_031644501 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

I'm not good at scribing, nor do I enjoy it, but I stuck a needle in my pin vice and gave it the ol' college try. (I had a C- average in college.)

 

52057875966_f6b32506ed_h.jpgPXL_20220508_031627593 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

You can also see in that photo that the starboard exhaust stacks are a little wonky, one of those cases of screwing future me pretty vigorously, only to suddenly become the me being screwed. Around this time I discovered that I'd also put on the...well, I'm not sure what the technical term for it is, but the tapered nose section that the annular radiator mounts, I'd somehow managed to put it on upside down. Which is fine, except that the mounting point for the radiator is keyed. Whoops. Fortunately, I didn't do this with the second kit.

 

Anyway, after some chiseling, I got the radiator on and I think it's fine. 

 

52057948228_cefa5f41fe_h.jpgPXL_20220508_034246660 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

52057948228_cefa5f41fe_h.jpgPXL_20220508_034246660 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

52056875072_ef941e2f22_h.jpgPXL_20220508_034231958 by Edward IX, on Flickr

 

I also added the rudder, ailerons, and tailplanes and elevators to the first kit. Annoyingly, the tailplanes fit rather loosey-goosily in their mounting slots, so I had to use superglue and accelerant. Additionally, the elevators are molded with commendable fidelity but unnervingly small contact points: only two tiny bits of plastic connect them to the tailplanes, with a third going into a hole in the fuselage. The ailerons are very sensitive to flash, so if you build one of these, be sure to clean them up.

 

Flickr appears to have crashed, so that photo will be posted later. Hopefully the ones above are visible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Your description of small boys’ reactions to being taught how to swim (or not) rings very true. Our son regarded swimming lessons as a form of (expensive) torture to be avoided at all costs and he only learned properly through being thrown in the deep end by his college “friends” whilst on a lads holiday in his late teens… :shrug:

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22 minutes ago, Procopius said:

I have no idea what the hell it is, but apparently Winston saw it on a kerb and Mrs P loaded it into the car and promptly forgot about it. I don't normally think to check the trunk to see if a filthy child's toy the size of a baby hippo is in there, so I was somewhat surprised myself, especially since it occupied all of the space I was going to use for the food. Ho ho ho. I was sorely tempted to ditch it in the parking lot.

Me doth think this is a standing child’s sandbox. 

 

25 minutes ago, Procopius said:

Ironically, this is the only piece of etch that steadfastly refuses to bend.

Annealing Edward will soften the metal enough to bend. Candle or a lighter for a short time and that should do it. 

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How you have the time or inclination to build kits after a day like that I'll never know!  Fortunately for me, my days of child-rearing and the associated cat-herding, fog-plaiting, lack of sleep, weird decisions being made by spouses (which are obviously then not communicated until there are a huge amount of pieces to pick up) , weekends that disappear at the drop of a hat and other acts of  general psychological warfare that go with it are over.  I am still traumatised by the memory of countless Eisteddfodau, scout camps, guitar lessons etc.  I'm enjoying the window between children and grandchildren as much as I can for as long as I can!

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