What's on my desk? Part 136.
Good morning!
Another fine summer's day and another fine day for modelling.
Remember: this weekend Modelist will be closed, from Friday 14 until Tuesday 18. We'll be back on Wednesday 19, but there won't be a build meet then.
The next airbrush workshop will take place on Sunday, September 27th. I'll post it on the homepage today.
On to the models then.
First off: the Corsair has received both its colours and its feet:
The tires are molded slightly flat, so you need to position them carefully on a horizontal surface, making sure the flat bulge is firmly on the ground. The landing gear legs' shock absorbers are also molded fully compressed. Together these give the impression that there's some real weight to the aircraft. A nice touch!
The nose is taped on temporarily for a gloss varnish. Once decals and weathering are done, I can remove it, insert the engine and fix it permanently. Antenna masts are also left off until the last step.
I've completed the engine wiring using brown thread. In the end I didn't particularly like the brown, so I gave the 'wires' a perfunctory lick of Tamiya X-32 Titanium Silver.
They're all but invisible now. :-)
The engine was finished with a wash of Ammo-Mig 1407 Engine Grime.
The second aircraft on my desk is the Fairey Battle. The kit is older than me (and even creakier), so the detail is raised, not engraved. I started constructing and priming the cockpit:
The spatter inside the left fuselage half is due to a mistake I made. The primer came out a bit too thick, so I wanted to thin it but grabbed the wrong bottle. This is the result if you thin primer with airbrush cleaner...
It's not a disaster. It still needs some layers of paint and it's inside the fuselage anyway, so it will be invisible.
Tank time!
I've been looking at other models of the Strv103 and some photos of the real thing. I wanted to do something to make my model stand out a bit, but which doesn't take too much work. So I decided to show the spade under the nose of the vehicle deployed, ready for use.
I only needed to drill some small holes in the pivot points:
Then using two toothpicks, I could hold it in the correct angle while the glue on the two supports dried:
Then it was priming time. The 103 is very cluttered (there are jerrycans and some sort of rods mounted on the side), so I have a lot of parts that need to be painted separately. This is not even half of all the separated parts:
You can see on the commander's hatch (the round thing) I primed this in the same session as the Battle, and the cleaner-primer mishap has its results here too. I'll spray another layer of primer to smooth out the coat.
Finally: Jolie Brise. I left the deck to dry over the weekend and then had to sand the ribs into a taper, ready for the hull planking. The first plank I glued (with white glue) on Saturday, so I'll be able to remove the clamps in a few minutes. Hopefully it's fixed nicely...
Once the first one is firmly in place, the others will be easier to lay down...
I'll see how much work I can get done in the next three days. I'll try to write at least a short blog post next Wednesday.
See you next week!