Good times at the bench

I've loved workbench photos since the moment I happened across the very popular and long-running thread on Hyperscale.  Here were these oddly fascinating glimpses of other mad scientists' secret laboratories, with their arcane and ingenious organizational elements, an endless variety of tools and supplies, and very often a huge, looming stash of kits surrounding or even dwarfing the work area.  Guys with six, seven, ten partly finished kits lying around, homemade spray booths, antique stereo gear, cats, empty beer cans...just great eye candy.  So finally today I remembered to grab the camera when I headed down to the paint shop.

Most of the basement is unfinished and crammed with stuff, but this corner sees some action from time to time.  You can tell I had a cleanup recently.

Spray booth made from an old rangehood, vented outdoors, and homebuilt workbench made from two old solid-core doors that were in the basement when we moved in.

Iwata HP-CS clean and in pieces.  Love this airbrush.  Easy to use, works great, never gives me problems.

Dragon 1/72 Ha-go with yellow disruptive stripe masked and second colour sprayed.  This kit was really fun and quick to build; a short week of evening sessions and it was down in the paint shop.  Using Tamiya acrylics as I just happened to have all the colours, and they spray beautifully.  After this photo I spent an hour masking with more Blu-tack, followed by five or six minutes spraying IJA Green...and twelve minutes cleaning the airbrush.

Tamiya 1/72 Shinden with fuselage hinomaru area undersprayed white.  This is such an old kit, I don't know why I decided to build it when I have three of the Hasegawa Shinden in the stash.  Fit was generally poor and it took weeks of fill/sand/repeat to finish building.  Using mainly White Ensign enamels, which I was lucky enough to get before they stopped shipping internationally.  Had bad experience trying to use Mr. Surfacer as a primer, but moving along better since.  Decided to model this one in flight, so I scratchbuilt a blurred prop that hasn't made it down to the paint shop yet.





  

Over the past year, in between selling/buying/moving house, losing job, finding new job, etc, I've somehow managed to cram in some modelling.  Most of it has led to the usual unfinished if promising results and several more half-built kits back in the stash pile.  There was one project I did complete though, proving that a) I am actually capable of completing something, and b) a deadline makes all the difference.

Couple years back I won a lot of six old Silver Streak HO scale maintenance of way cars on eB**, intending to build them as a Christmas present for my dad.  His model railroad hobby was probably the biggest inspiration for me to start building models as a kid, and I spent plenty of time reading back issues from his awesome library of Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman, and S Gauge Herald, stretching back to the late 1940's.  My favourites were the various Maine 2-foot gauge layout articles in RMC by Dave Frary and Bob Hayden, as well as the general tone of the magazine which was subtly humourous and fun to read.  Reading about model railroading during that era (late 60s/early 70s) gave me a sort of basic notion that while building kits is fun, in many ways scratchbuilding is modelling.  I never was able to run too far with it back then, but coming back to the hobby decades later it's an area I'm really drawn to.  So I really owe my whole interest in this hobby to my dad, and it seemed like building these cars for him would be kind of coming full circle.

I'd previously built him a later, Walthers era (mid 70s) Silver Streak Santa Fe reefer car, which for my first attempt at a craftsman type kit actually turned out OK, and at least gave me an idea what to expect.  For this project I set out to build four (later revised to three) cars at one time, an almost insane undertaking given my virtually unbroken track record of not finishing stuff.  Plus, these MOW cars were much older, Tru-Scale era kits, likely from the 1950s, and somewhat more of a challenge.  All the cast zamac parts had lots of flash, which created a lot of work, and in general this earlier generation of these kits leaves you more on your own.  But hey, scratchbuilding is modelling, right?  I leapt in fearlessly, spending many an hour cleaning up parts and bringing all four to a decent ready-to build stage.  Meanwhile I'd decided to build them as an old Canadian Pacific work train, since his layout is loosely intended as an imaginary branch of the CP around the steam/diesel transition era.  Luckily I found a couple excellent reference books at the library with plenty of gorgeous colour photos, and sourced some CP boxcar decals that could be adapted well enough.

  

The build started in late February and rolled on at a decent pace for a few months before the whole moving thing got in the way.  Resuming in early autumn, I started to realize just how much work was involved, and had to get kind of disciplined about it.  For about a month before Xmas it became virtually a part-time job, which was kind of crazy, but also fun.  Overall there was a lot of trial and error and the usual wheel reinvention, but I really learned a lot and gained tons of confidence.  Some highlights:

- scribed planks on the inside of each car side, since I wanted to start with bare wood and the pre-painted and lettered outside didn't sand down well at all.  Couple weeks of sessions to finish this

- made version of classic "ink and alcohol" wood weathering mix, in this case using shoe dye and methyl hydrate, and aged the wooden sides

- used rubber cement technique for peeling paint effect. Came out OK

- cut the pre-scribed roofwalk stock too short (duh) so had to scratchbuild those out of coffee stirrer sticks

- somehow wound up scratchbuilding a fair bit of underbody detail - air line, brake rods, levers, mounts, etc

- scratchbuilt brake rods, stirrups, brakerod chain (OK, I bought that), brake platforms - basically everything except the brakewheel

- kit turnbuckles were unusable so scratchbuilt those from styrene rod (harder than it sounds).  Results are overscale but look the part at least

- evolved my own variation of the fishing-line truss rod method.  Bit of an engineering feat

- scratchbuilt various external details like smokejacks, doorway grab handles, and rain shutters

For the base colour I chose True Line mineral brown/freight car red, after unsuccessful experiments with mixing something suitable from various Humbrol enamels, but since I wanted to be able to mix numerous variations on it, I got some Model Master Acryl colours - Guards Red, French Blue, Semigloss White, Tan, Burnt Sienna Raw Sienna, Dark Earth, and Neutral Gray.  This worked out surprisingly well for the most part, though I did find the MM Acryls caused a lot of tip dry when airbrushing and are tough to clean up really thoroughly since they harden so fast. 

The prototype CN/CP mineral brown is an interesting colour.  Photos show all kinds of fading effects from dusty reddish brown to rich reddish purple, as well as the "freshly shopped" option.  Using reference photos, I sprayed a different base colour for each car, then mixed three variations and brushed down individual planks with a #0 brush.  After the second variation of this the cars started to take on sort of a vivid look, which was encouraging.

The zamac ends had to be painted separately as in an attempt to imitate the "peeled paint showing wood" effect of the sides, I started with a sort of "raw lumber" colour mixed not too successfully from MM enamels.  Think I tried to seal that in with a coat of Future before going to the base colour.  The car ends wound up looking OK but not quite the perfect match to the sides I was going for.  One thing I will do next time: prime metal parts!  Also, I painted the doorway windows with either Tamiya XF-11 or XF-13, to represent (spurious) green oilcloth window shades, and carefully pooled several coats of Future in between the window frames to look like glass.  Didn't really work as well as I'd hoped.

After awhile everything was glued together and it was on to decals.  My first time using waterslide decals since about the age of ten was pretty interesting.  Spicing things up was the tendency of these minute decals to break apart, which forced an awful lot of fast improvisation with brushloads of water and moving things very gently with a cocktail stick.  After drying I sliced the decals down between the planks with a fresh #11 blade and hit them with Micro-Set, and in the end got just about all of them looking painted on.  For the car designations I used Woodland Scenics dry transfer letters, not quite the right font but passable, and did the same slicing trick with them where needed.  Finally I peeled up the rubber cement with a cocktail stick and moved on to weathering, with Vallejo black wash and some light applications of shoe dye/methyl hydrate.  One cool side effect was that the methyl hydrate melted the white decal ink a little and gave a weather-stained look to some of the lettering, which was accidental and luckily not a disaster.

The Kadee archbar trucks got a dry brush of steel and a couple layers of rust and earth/mud colours, while I believe the undersides were sprayed neutral gray and drybrushed with a two or three earthtoned layers.  I was still touching this up and finishing weathering on Xmas morning.

It felt like a big accomplishment to have actually completed three models at once, but the real satisfaction was watching my dad open the box.  We saved it til last, and it was worth every minute of the 100 hours or whatever it was to see how happy he was with them.  I didn't really relax til we took them downstairs and put them on the layout, since I wasn't completely sure they would track properly, but they did.  We ran them around behind a CP diesel switcher for a while, and I took some pictures.  It was a great feeling to finally see them sitting there on his handlaid track, where they belonged.

Dragon PLA J-15 "Flying Shark" 1/144

Back in December I kinda got tired of work in progress posts, so I've been trying to actually finish something.  I'm pretty close on a few things, but meanwhile here's the latest kit to catch my attention.  Modern jets are not particularly my area but something about this one caught my eye - probably the box art!

Nice crisp molding.  Panel lines somewhat overscale but par for the 1/144 course really.

Here's the kicker though - notice the identifier numbers on the sprue.  Reading up a little on this plane, it develops that a) it's not actually in service until 2014 or so, and b) it's repeatedly described as seriously resembling the Russian SU-33, or the Sukhoi Flanker family in general.  So the seeming wonder of how Dragon could produce a kit of a plane that's still undergoing presumably top-secret design trials is no great mystery - this is a reboxed SU-27 with Chinese decals and sexy new box art.  Might bother some, doesn't worry me.  I just want to build it (maybe even OOB for once!!)

Always seem to read good things about Cartograf decals, so that's promising.

Canopy looks nice and thin, and comes in its own little bag (decals too) - a nice little touch.

Love how the pilot figure looks like he's slouched deep in some kind of futuristic La-Z BoyTM, glued to a big-screen HDTV.  Certainly the most relaxed pilot I've come across yet...actually he looks a bit robotic as well. 

The exhausts could probably use some thinning around the edges.  Generally though the exterior detail looks very nice and I'm really looking forward to starting this one.  I guess it's kind of a "future what-if" in a way, and I do love a what-if.

Model Box Art Part Two

More action packed closeups of the 1/72 Hasegawa Emily.

This G3M2/G3M3 Nell boxtop is probably my favourite.  Doesn’t appear to be signed, but has a rather extraordinary “you are right there” feel to it.

Again there’s that illusion of floating, and the depictions of the crew are unusually vivid.  If it’s not Koike’s work (I suspect not), it’s certainly worthy of inclusion in the same bracket.

Just a couple reasons why you can never have too many model kits! 

Model Box Art Part One

One of the best answers to the not-infrequently asked question “Why so many model kits?” would have to be “The box art!”  Most of us modellers can probably recall the fascination these colourful boxtop paintings held for us as kids, and it’s likely the agonizing decision of which ONE kit the allowance would accomodate was helped in no small measure by which one had the best box art.

Airfix knew how to grab ya! 

Whoa!

Sometimes it’s just the overall look of the box too – I vaguely remember being able to buy models at the drugstore (!) several blocks from our house, and it seems to me it was there that I first encountered the Tamiya 1/35 WWII figure kits I loved to build and paint during my latter childhood phases of modelling, before other things came along.  Their four-figure Afrika Korps boxing is the one I really remember; the art was nothing too special, but something about it grabbed me.  It might have been my first encounter with a Japanese model box, and doubtless all the Japanese characters fascinated me.  I liked the Tamiya logo too, and the whole thing just seemed to have an irresistible air of mystery to it (Shizuoka City, Japan?  Where is that?)

I can even call back the feeling of that afternoon, sitting at my desk with the old gooseneck lamp, gluing, painting and (helmet) decaling the figures.  I was entranced by the diorama photo on the instruction sheet, and loved how the figures went together. 

It was just coming on dusk as I reached the decal stage; my mom was cooking in the kitchen, and I remember the particular pattern on the small bowl I borrowed from her for warm water to activate the decals.  To this day the sight of the Tamiya logo on a kit box strikes a chord with me, and they certainly have their share of fine aviation art too.

These days I’m more likely to have Hasegawa kits kicking around, since their 1/72 line seems to be a little more extensive, and it’s hard to miss some of the awesome box art on these things.  Their star artist for many decades has been Koike Shigeo, and recently I had some fun taking close-ups of a few of my favourites.

This kit looks pretty venerable; the grossly overscale raised rivet lines kinda give it away as a tooling first marketed back in the 1960s, but Hasegawa keeps on reboxing it to this day.  This unusual yellow boxtop is an example of Koike’s adventurous use of colour, which is apparently one of his trademarks.

Today’s current boxing of the same massive sprues sticks a bit closer to a realistic light, while creating a similar illusion of the aircraft floating in a sea of air (as opposed to merely “flying”).

Personally I think the H8K Emily is one of the most fascinating Japanese planes, which explains why I have two of these monsters and will one day find myself trapped in a world of endless, excruciating sanding and rescribing.  For the moment it’s a lot easier to play around with the camera:

Apparently I've maxed out the available file storage for one post, so I'll continue with part two.

Hasegawa JASDF F86F Sabre 1/72 WIP

Nyutabaru Airbase, Kyushu, Japan, March 1961 – Radar reports unknown contacts approaching from the northwest. Flight Lt. Kamiko Tomoyuke is raring to get airborne…but what’s this?

A Russian plot - his plane is in pieces!  In fact it appears as if someone has yet to even build the cockpit or wheel wells.  Bakayaro!

This JASDF boxing of the Hasegawa F86F Sabre in 1/72 looks to be a pretty old kit.  Judging by the raised panel lines and rivet detail, minimal cockpit, and complete lack of wheel wells (merely indicated with more raised lines) the tooling might even go back as far as the 1960s.  What the hell, even though WWII Japanese planes are really my thing, I couldn’t resist getting a JASDF Sabre because it just looks so cool.  So one night a few months back I decided to build the thing…and upon coming to grips with the kit’s limitations, decided to go ahead and scratchbuild in some of the missing detail, undaunted by lack of experience.  I figure enough will be seen through the canopy to make it worthwhile as the Sabre canopy is mostly one big convex piece of glass with no framing to obscure all that effort. 

Back in the day, Hasegawa figured that an instrument panel decal (but nowhere really suitable to affix it) and a skinny floor/front & rear bulkhead part (mainly there to glue the pilot figure to) took care of any necessary cockpit detail.  Today we know we can do better.  First thing was to make a tracing of the instrument decal, transfer it to styrene sheet and make a mounting piece for the decal.  Then I built the floor out to the sides, added forward and aft bulkheads, and cobbled together a sort of “bench” on either side of the pilot as a base for the various consoles.

I decided I kind of liked the pilot figure in this kit so started painting it up right from the start.  As an experiment I used Tamiya acrylics as I’ve always read they don’t hand brush well, but they seemed to go on nicely here.  Maybe getting good coverage on larger, flatter surfaces is more problematic.  The uniform was XF-13 and the boots Testors Gloss Black, with Humbrol Matt Black for the ejector seat.  For the face I custom mixed what looked to me like a Japanese skin tone using craft acrylics, and it turned out OK.  The visor was done with Tamiya Smoke, then carefully coated with Future for a glossy shine.  Since these photos I’ve repainted the gloves with XF-14 and the oxygen apparatus the same X-2 as the helmet.

Meanwhile the wheel wells had to be routed out.  This would have been a little easier if I hadn’t already glued the wing halves together…funny how I always start out thinking this will be a quick build, then immediately start reinventing the wheel.

Matter of fact, I’ve been reexamining my obvious AMS* in light of the recent 1/144 Hamp build.  Much as I enjoy the torture of attempting to invent a method for transforming the tiniest bits of plastic imaginable into something resembling a radial engine, it was getting a tad bit frustrating.  By contrast, 1/72 seems refreshing…it’s easier to see what I’m doing, and I can actually hold the part I’m working on with my fingers instead of constantly using tweezers.  Sometimes you have to give yourself a break.  No doubt 1/48 and 1/32 modellers are shaking their heads, and I do have that 1/48 Tamiya Rufe I’d love to break out sometime… 

*Advanced Modeller’s Sydrome – a fairly acute condition that renders the well-intentioned modeller just about incapable of building a kit right out of the box without improving, upgrading, scratchbuilding, and generally re-engineering the thing.