What's on my desk? Part 98.
Good morning!
Temperatures are taking a dive, so what better way to spend cold, dark evenings than building models?
Over here I've given the McLaren a few gloss coats. Quite a bit of dust motes got caught in it, so I had to remove these. I'll give it another coat of varnish and then lightly polish the finish. Meanwhile, I've painted the inside frame of the windscreen. I decided that handpainting it would result in crooked lines. So out came the bendy tape and some masking putty. First I taped off the straight lines:
A small dollop of masking putty was then stuck on the front and shaped/pushed into place with a toothpick, looking through the window to check the position. The rest of the inside and outside I then masked off with yellow tape:
I cut out the window from the sprue and airbrushed with black primer (because I had it loaded for the Buckeye). The result is pretty good:
That small notch on the right I still need to correct.
With that done, I think the McLaren will be finished this week.
The Buckeye has received a bit of black primer over the cockpit hood. As this colour will shine through and represent the frames, I didn't want to use white first here:
Next it will receive a full coat of white primer, and then I can start applying colours.
The Bergepanther needs two more camouflage colours. I'm using an old set from Ammo. So old, in fact, that one of the paints in it was completely dried out in the jar...
To test the others and see the colours 'live' (so to speak), I decided to spray the wheels first. I airbrushed these free-hand (without masking) so the demarcation lines are a bit 'fuzzy', first the green (Ammo-0002 Olivgrün 2), then the brown (Ammo-0015 Schokobraun). The paints are still good, but I find the colours too dark. I'll try to lighten them a bit when spraying the vehicle itself.
This is about half of them, pinned with toothpicks on a piece of styrofoam, ready for a gloss coat. You can clearly see the camouflaged ones are very dark:
The Panther had a system of interleaved wheels (Schachtellaufwerk). I think only Germany ever used this system. You can see it on Tiger, Panther and a number of halftracks of World War 2. It quickly fell out of fashion after the war, because while it allows for low ground pressure and very good off-road performance, it's a maintenance nightmare. If one of the back wheels breaks, you need to dismount all of the wheels in front to reach the broken one.
For us modellers, it also means a LOT of wheels to paint. My Bergepanther here has 32 wheels + 4 spares. That's 36 tires to paint by hand... Here's all of them on a heap:
They're shiny because I gave them a gloss coat, ready for a dark wash. The too-dark colours are not a very big deal for the wheels, because they're going to be covered in dust anyway.
That's it.
See you next week!