What's on my desk? Part 126.
Good morning,
It's June already, and in typical Belgian fashion, we're looking at a solid week of rain...
Last Sunday was KMK Scaleworld in Geel. Fun day; talked to a lot of people, made some sales, entered my Bloch in the contest... Here's a photo of my stand:
I'll need to register for a bit more space in the future...
Anyway, on to the models.
Let's start with the T-72. I ordered decals and headlights and these have now arrived.
Decals: these are from Echelon, and look great. Definitely a big improvement over the Amusing Hobby's 3 roundels:
Plenty of options and a nice detailed instruction sheet, containing FS paint numbers.
The headlights, though, were a complete waste of money. They're 3D printed in a clear resin. 3D prints usually already are pretty fragile, but these are just a disaster. There are way too many supports; you can't cut one without pulling loose several others. I immediately broke the first part with my first cut... Dut to the clear resin you can't see very well what is a print support and what is part of the headlight cover... Maybe I'm just not careful enough with these, but I would recommend against using these detail parts.
So I smeared a bit of putty over the existing plastic covers. I'll sand them smooth and have perfectly decent detail.
I taped off the turret ring in preparation for painting:
On Wednesday I spent most of the build meet on the tank tracks. I like the system Amusing Hobby have devised for these. Yes, you still need to cut and clean each individual track link, but they're joined together with pins, moulded at the correct spacing per 4. Take a look at the picture:
From left to right: a pile of track links as they are in the box - 5 links cut and cleaned - 5 more laid down on the template, with pins inserted on one side - a small length of track, still moveable.
Amusing Hobby says in the instructions that there should be 95 links per side. From experience, I know that number can be a bit inaccurate; could be 96 or 93... So I started on the wheels, to be able to make a length of track and wrap it around the suspension.
Here they are, primed and the seam line sanded off.
I'm slowly getting to the painting stage of the tank, which should be fun!
Next up: the McLaren.
I painted the exhausts and primed the panels I showed you last week. There are two panels that need to go in between the rear axles and suspension arms, so these need to be painted red first. That's something for this week.
Finally, the Viggen has received a gloss coat, which I completely screwed up. My airbrush didn't atomize the varnish properly and instead of fixing the problem first, I just stubbornly kept spraying. Result: the varnish came out in drops instead of a fine coat. I seem to be able to lightly polish the finish to fix it, so I'll be applying a lot of elbow grease this week to save my previous work...
That's it.
See you next week!