What's on my desk? Part 46.

Good morning everyone,

I've no inspiration for an intro, so let's just dive right in.

Work on the Tortoise is progressing nicely, now that the tracks are firmly superglued on. First off, the gun travel lock. This is all kit parts, and they're very nice. If you're a bit careful, you can keep it fully working:

There are a number of electric cables running on the outside of the vehicle, in particular on the front, connectin to the smoke launchers. The kit provides these as thin plastic preshaped parts, but they leave a lot to be desired. Because they're so thin, they break easily (in fact every single one of mine broke). The connecting points are also very difficult to clean up. So I opted to replace them with thin metal wire. In Mechelen the trash bags come with baling wire to close up the bags. You get spares and are basically the same thickness as the plastic. Al you need to do is remove the plastic casing. They're nice and bendy and keep their shape well. You can see that the bends are not quite as sharp as the plastic, but that's due to my good-enough-itis. Once they're on the vehicle, they look quite good.

As you can see, I've been replacing parts on the vehicle here and there with the Voyager PE. I'm not using everything. Some of these things are waaay too fiddly for not that big of an improvement. But still, when working with this much PE, it really pays to have a bending tool. I use 'The Bug' by a company called the Small Shop. It's easy to use: put the part in the tool following the bend line, clamp it down, and bend using the blade tool. Makes your photo-etch life a whole lot easier.

Front view of where I am at the moment:

You can see the wires on the front with PE brackets, and the gun travel lock in place (this can still move up and down).

Rear view:

The seam lines on the back have been filled properly and given some armour plate texture. The PE box on the rear has some hinges which were a pain to assemble, and they look only okay-ish. But eh.

 

Finally, some news from the Junkers. The paint scheme features some red stripes, and a black pattern. I needed to paint the red first, because if I had done the black first and then sprayed the red, the dividing black-yellow line would have shone through the red.

A big problem with this one is the painting guide from Miniart is not very good. Art-wise it's really nice, but as a paint guide it's almost useless. Usually planes have panel lines, which can serve as a guide to where markings and paint lines go. As said before, the Junkers is covered in corrugated metal, without any panel lines to speak of. There are, however, lines of rivets where the skin was fixed to the internal structure. These are completely absent from the paint guide. So it's a matter of eyeballing and guesstimating where everything goes. The decals, cut out but not fixed yet, can provide some measure as well. My first effort of the red stripes was too narrow, judging by the decals, so I re-masked and sprayed an extra two corrugations.

Here's how I mask this: First, thin blue 'bendy' tape to make the demarcation. Then, wide (18mm) Tamiya tape to provide the first line of wide masking. Finally, some cheap blue painters tape, stuck on my hand a few times to remove some of the stickiness. These are going in the direction of the corrugation, so no major problems of underspray, where the paint creeps under the tape.

Once the red was done and dry, I started on the black masking. First taping off the red areas, then blue bendy tape for the demarcations. Most of this tape is going perpendicular to the corrugation, so I'll have to use a toothpick to get it down into the lines to avoid paint creeping under the tape. This is why I use the flexible tape here; regular tape would not have the stretch to go down properly. This time I used only yellow Tamiya tape for the general masking. The big curves on the front of the plane will be done with masking putty. 

Hopefully this all works out. Fingers crossed!

 

See you next week!