What's on my desk? Part 87.
Good morning!
Holidays are over. Time to go back to work/school. Don't forget to relax, and what better way to do that than making models? :-)
Two service announcements:
-I've signed up for the Mechelenbon. Starting from sometime this week, you'll be able to pay in the shop with these coupons. :-)
-Friday, Saturday and Sunday it's braderie in Mechelen. Expect lots of people!
The F1 car is almost finished. I painted and mounted the rear view mirrors, fixed the rear/upper body and mounted the rear wing.
I'll mask off Thierry and give the entire vehicle a final satin coat, then put the wheels on. These are fixed with small screws, which then need a drop of red (left) or green (right) paint. Almost done!
PZL time: I used a cut-down toothpick to push down the decals into the corrugated panels. This resulted in some tearing here and there, which I then repainted with red, black or white. It's noticable, but these PZL fighters were pretty worn out by 1939, so frequent repainting would not have been unusual.
To give some contrast to the corrugation and panel lines, I applied a layer of Ammo-Mig 1613 PLW (Panel Line Wash) Blue Grey on the grey undersides, and 1612 PLW Green Brown on the khaki panel lines.
Here's a picture to show the difference it makes. You just paint the PLW over panel lines, and it's not necessary to work cleanly, because after a minute or so of drying time we wipe off the excess in the direction of airflow, creating some irregular dirt in one easy pass. This can then be enhanced with oils and other weathering products.
This is also where it comes in handy that I left everything disassembled...
The PLW goes over any decals, which is why they need to conform smoothly into the lines. Here's the underside of the wing, with the large Polish checkerboards. You can see some contrast in the panel lines even in the red parts:
On the fuselage, I used the PLW Green Brown, and also tried to produce some paint chipping with a Silver oil brusher (Ammo-Mig 3538). I should have done this after a matt coat, so that's next and I'll enhance the paint chipping later. Obviously here I've fixed the tailplanes as well:
Not too sure about the PLW. I might add another application to deepen the colour.
You'll also see the machine gun in the side of the fuselage doesn't fit too well. That's because there are photo-etched cooling sleeves provided in the 'Expert' set, but the recess in the fuselage doesn't take the extra thickness into account. I tried drilling these out a bit, but they're in a awkward angle and it's not easy to do.
I also started assembling the engine cowling. It's a nice tight fit, and the cooling pipes line up perfectly with the cylinders:
Lastly: the Bergepanther is progressing slowly. As it's a full interior vehicle, you need to build and paint multiple subassemblies before you can continue. I've built a number of these and primed them, ready for paint. I laid it all out in my 'spray box':
Tracks are always a big, tedious job on tanks and the tracks on the Panther have two guide teeth per link. As they're not completely flat and have a hole in them, it would be near impossible to cast the tracks in one piece. So the teeth and track links are separate. There are (2x88=) 176 links provided, times 2 equals 352 guide teeth...
Takom has an ingenious solution to assembling these: provide the teeth on a secondary sprue, glue entire runs at once, then cut off the second sprue. Here's what that looks like:
Still a chore, but faster and easier than fixing 352 small pieces one by one.
Thanks for reading.
See you next week!