What's on my desk? Part 41.

October 15, 2024

Good morning,

October is already halfway over... Time flies when you're having fun.

Speaking of fun: let's start with the Tornado. It's nearing the end. Almost ready for delivery. I remembered to bring some weight from home: a small piece of lead sheet, which I cut and bent to fit into the nose.

Here's the plane without weight. It's sitting on its tail, because the center of gravity of the model is too far in the back. The ugly piece of metal underneath is the lead.

Now when I insert the lead into the nose, the plane rests on all wheels, as it should.

To keep the lead in place and prevent it from rattling around in there, I use paper kitchen towel to fill the space out and apply liberal amounts of liquid superglue. Doesn't matter if it's messy, this will be completely hidden anyway. As you can see in the next picture:

Here I've also added the airbrakes (next to the tail). The swinging wings are a bit useless, as the pylon underneath does not revolve. So I broke the spreader bar inside (remember the wings were not symmetric) and glued the wings in a fixed position. The Tornado is now nearly ready for painting (which is for the customer, not for me). I still need to do some filling/sanding and fix the weapon pylons under the wing, then mask and glue the canopy.

On to the houses, then. This project is also nearly done. I painted the pieces of the streetlight and made a lightbulb (severely out-of-scale, but eh) using a piece of clear sprue and a lighter to slightly melt and shape the 'bulb' part. The base I painted in a metal colour later on.

The glass in the light pole was a bit of challenge, being trapezoid instead of square. I used some post-it note to make a template, cutting it out of the sticky part. That way I could reuse it four times.

Like so:

This is the inside face, so it's a little messy. Once put together, it looks like this. To be perfectly honest, that top pyramidal part should not show a gap with the one below, but it didn't fit very well and I liked the look, so I kept it like this.

As a side note, a cheap plastic triangle ruler does not play well with a very sharp knife. As you can see in the below picture, it is now far from straight... The new one is on the right, and that gap between the two should definitely not be there.

Anyway, back to the house. I added some advertising posters to the side of the grey house, pasted one over the other, as would happen in real life. I may rip/distress a few of them, as they're looking way too clean. You can also see how the lightbulb fits in the streetlight in this picture, and how its absence would be conspicuous.

So here's where we are with the houses. I posed the café doors half-open. The street light is not fixed yet. Where do you think it should go?

The café sign and the posters on the side were printed on the instructions in full colour, cut out and pasted with water-thinned wood glue.

All that's left to do is adding some moss to the roofs (once I finally remember to bring the materials from home). I'm contemplating making rain gutters, as that's part of the main construction. Things like curtains and furniture I can always add later.

Finally, I've been eyeing the new Miniart Junkers F13 all week. I'm just going to start building it, because I really like how it looks. This is the kit I'm talking about: