Good morning,
Rainy outside today. Let's hope it clears up a bit by Sunday, because it's airshow time! Sanicole is taking place this weekend. There used to be lots of model sellers to be found at airshows, but that's sadly no longer the case... Still, lots of cool planes to look at, and that's always awesome.
Service announcement: Modelist will be closed 25-29 September. I'm taking a well-deserved short weekend holiday to Edinburgh.
So, what's on my desk?
The Williams F1 is finished. I had a nasty surprise when screwing in the wheels. F1 cars have very little ground clearance and I was a little worried that the rear right wheel wouldn't touch the ground (having broken the suspension frame). But it actually was the front wheels sitting too high. There's only one way these go together, and I'm positive I didn't make any mistakes, so I'm unsure how this happened:
As you can see, the small vertical plates on the ends of the front wing are sitting on the ground, instead of the wheels. I was wary of twisting the suspension tubes, not wanting to break anything. My solution: reposition the vertical plates a little higher. You can now see the positioning holes, but I feel it's more important that the wheels are actually touching the ground.
The small screws in the wheels need a drop of green on the right and red on the left. I guess these are handed screws in real life? I first painted them white to get a nice bright base, then applied the red (
XF-7) and green (
X-5).
Here are the final pictures:
The mirrors need a drop of gloss varnish, but otherwise this one is finished.
The PZL has also seen great progress.
I assembled the wheels, engine, propeller and wings. It actually looks like a plane now:
The pilot's headrest and cockpit sidings were painted with Burnt Umber oil paint on Saturday, giving it a few days to dry. It's still very shiny, so I think it needs a few more days... You can see the handholds in front of the cockpit. They're a few of the small PE parts that come extra in the 'Expert Set'. The windscreen still needs to be installed.
The PZL doesn't have a tailwheel, but a sprung dragger. The leather covers were also painted with Burnt Umber, but I removed most of the paint with a soft brush in this case, leaving just a faint, worn colour effect:
Finally, the wheel struts had steel wire rigging. I like
Uschi van der Rosten's elastic line for this. You can see a small length in front of the propeller:
It's very fine, and needs to be applied with a drop of superglue, a steady hand/tweezer and ton of patience. The result is pretty nice and adds to the detail:
These are just point-to-point and relatively easy. The PZL has some radio aerials as well, and these will be harder to get right. You can see the wires don't go from wing to tail, but terminate somewhere in front of the tail and loop back into the fuselage.
I think the easiest way to do this will be to use a small piece of tube, thread through the left and right wire separately, then use a third piece of wire to attach it to the tail section. Let's see how it goes...
Lastly, the Bergepanther. I keep making subassemblies, waiting for a quiet few minutes to airbrush them. One thing I thought needed some improvement is the floor of the compartment that goes where the turret used to be. The underside of this piece was completely blank, while the top has some nicely detailed wood planking. I decided to scribe the planks into the underside, because I'm still looking for opportunities to leave parts loose and show off the interio and this blank piece would stick out like a sore thumb.
I laid a piece of tape along a plank, then aligned my steel ruler on the other side and scribed the line:
Line by line I recreated the pattern (just parallel lines, basically) found on the top. I'm doing this now because I paint my wood effect with oils, which -as you'll know by now- take some time to dry. Here's the scribed piece, already primed (and the primer already damaged...):
That's all.
See you next week!
