We’ve been having a pretty fun discussion over in the Scale Modelers Critique Group over the past few days about the relation (or not) of price and quality. Driven to an extent by Revell’s 1/32 P-51 and how it compares to Tamiya’s far pricier kit.

Price is a Dumb Metric

I’ve been on record, many times, with the opinion that price should not be a factor in considering how well one kit will go together versus another.

In the broader retail world there absolutely is a correlation between price and quality, sure. A nice pair of jeans will generally last a lot longer than a cheap pair from Old Navy or something. A nicer cordless drill will use a better battery and a motor made out of higher quality materials than some bargain unit you buy after stomping a few heads on Black Friday.

But in modeling the correlation becomes a lot looser. Because there are so many factors impacting price. You have the number and complexity of parts, which directly impacts tooling costs. You have regional pricing differences that often see the cost of, say, a Revell and a Hasegawa kit of the same subject flip-flop in price depending on where you buy them.

You have brand power – where a Tamiya or Wingnut Wings or whoever can charge more because of the strength of their reputation.

You also have age. Older kits are cheaper. Generally. Not always.

And in some instances, you have market pressure. Usually somewhere like eBay. But market pressure can also be a factor of subject, of the existence of competition, of the availability of a kit, and other factors.

But at the end of the day, the cost to tool parts that fit, or parts that are shape-accurate, is negligible over ones that don’t and aren’t.

You want evidence that price is a shitty metric? Look at the 1/32 109s from Revell, Hasegawa, and Trumpeter. As kits, they’re all more or less equal. Each succeeds in some areas where the others disappoint, and each disappoints in other areas, with amazingly little overlap.

The Tedious Car Analogy

The real inspiration for this post, though, isn’t exactly the whole price/quality debate, but one small part of it. And that’s this analogy:

“You shouldn’t expect a [insert luxury car brand] for a [insert economy car brand} price”

It’s a bad analogy. And I wanted to break it down. And since it’s TL;DR for the format of a Facebook comment, hey, blog post!

What Really Separates Luxury Cars?

The reason that luxury cars cost more than mainstream or economy cars is almost entirely in the luxury aspect. It’s fancier seats wrapped in fancier materials. It’s nicer cabins and more amenities. It’s thicker glass and insulation that deadens sound and vibration. Sometimes – if we’re talking about performance luxury – it may extend to larger brakes or fancier suspension or a more complicated engine.

And for the most part…that’s it. An Audi is a Volkswagen in nice clothes. An Acura is a dudded up Honda. Same for Lexus:Toyota, Cadillac:Chevy, Infiniti:Nissan and you get the idea.

Here Comes the Fallacy!

Here’s the problem with the analogy.

A car’s job is to car. Through some means – usually by burning petrochemicals to create small, contained explosions – it harnesses energy. This energy is transferred to a transmission, and by driveshaft to one or two axles, and ultimately to the wheels. The wheels turn, and the car goes. There are brakes to stop them from turning. And complicated linkage (usually) connected ultimately to a steering wheel. The driver and passengers travel in comfort inside of a contained area that is typically climate controlled and, these days, doesn’t leak when it rains.

This is the basic function of every car, from the cheapest shitbox to whatever the fuck Bugatti is putting on the road.

Now let’s look at model kits. A model’s job is to go from a collection of pieces – usually polystyrene plastic arranged on a frame (sprue) – to a miniature representation of the real thing. It’s two reasons for existing are to 1) fit together and 2) look reasonably like the thing it is representing. Everything else – just like a fucking heated steering wheel – is icing on the cake. Because we need more metaphors.

Even the Cheapest Car…

Let’s say I go out and buy the cheapest new car I can find – which I believe is the Nissan Versa at around $13,000. Nobody is going to confuse it with a Jaguar or a Mercedes. It’s not going to have a heated steering wheel. Hell, it probably won’t even have power seats. It won’t be as fast or as flashy. It would probably lose in a slalom.

But.

I fully fucking expect that Nissan Versa to car. I expect the engine to fire up when I turn the ignition. I expect the doors to close (and not leak!). I expect it to go when I put it in gear, and to take me where I need to go in a reliable fashion.

See Where I’m Going Yet?

Imagine this scenario. You buy a Nissan Versa. You go to drive to work and the door won’t stay shut, so you roll the window down and zip tie that fucker to the B pillar. Along the way, you realize that someone fucked up the wiring, so when you hit the brakes, instead of the brake lights lighting, the high beams flash. You can turn the wheel twice as far to the left as the right. And when you turn it right to full lock, the tire hits the fender. You try to take extra care when turning, but the passenger side mirror is thick and cloudy and you can’t see shit in it.

Would you then get out, shrug and say “well, I shouldn’t expect a Mercedes for Nissan Versa money”?

FUCK NO YOU WOULD NOT.

If you posted about your experience, would it be reasonable for someone else to reply “this guy in Germany drove his Versa to work so you can’t say it’s a shitty car”.

FUCK NO IT WOULD NOT.

But this shit passes for reasonable discourse in the modeling world every single day.

What Should We Expect (Demand?) From a Kit…Regardless of Price?

I get it, kind of. Revell’s pricing, at least with their new tool 1/32 kits, seems to defy certain laws of economics. I can’t imagine any other company releasing a 1/32 P-51 for anything less than, oh, $70. But they do. Or they have. And not just with the P-51. You’ve also got their Ju 88, He 111, Bf 109Gs, Fw 190, Ar 196 and Spitfire in recent years. It remains to be seen if the trend will continue under the new ownership, but at least as of this writing, the pricing seems very lowball for new tooled kits.

With a price that makes no damn sense, it’s certainly tempting to take sloppiness in stride. Especially because the modeling community as a whole seems to have very low standards – unless it has to do with some minute accuracy niggle.

Now…at $30, I certainly do not expect Tamiya levels of detail and engineering showmanship out of Revell’s Mustang. I expect a lower parts count and fewer posable or exposable details. I expect the overall detail level to be lower, and things like cockpit and gearbay and blast tube details to be more accurate-ish than accurate. I expect the decals and instructions to both be a bit…wanting.

And…I don’t expect the kind of engineering and fit that makes you sit back at your bench in amazement. Just like I wouldn’t expect a Nissan Versa to bring a big, shit-eating grin to my face bombing down some twisty country road the way a Jaguar XE would. But I do expect a dull, competent, workmanlike fit. Similar, in point of fact, to what Revell mostly pulled off with their Bf 109G-6.

Endnote

I don’t have Revell’s P-51, and so I can’t speak directly to its fit or lack thereof. Nor do I plan on buying the current boxing. If other variants are forthcoming, however – like a later D with the filleted tail or a P-51B/C, I will certainly pick one up and give it a go. As much as I love Tamiya’s big uberkits, I would certainly appreciate a more simplified option as well. If it fits.

A modeler’s bench is constantly shifting and evolving, almost like a living thing. Or at least that’s the case with mine. From the time I came back to the hobby with a cheap folding table from Costco, I’ve been tinkering and rejiggering.

For the past few years, though, my bench has been *fairly* static. I’ve made a few organizational tweaks – moved some paints here, some supplies there. Swapped out the fluorescent shop lights for LEDs. But the big stuff, I’ve left mostly alone.

November 2011

June 2018 (man smartphone cameras have come a LONG way)

With a sabbatical from work, however, I’ve had the opportunity to undertake some significant adjustments. A mid-life upgrade (MLU), if you will.

What wasn’t working?

Overall, I quite like my two-bench setup. Two big 66×24 shop benches arranged in an L shape around a weird corner of the garage. A large tool cabinet that holds tools, works in progress, and my selection of “pot” paints – Tamiya, Gunze and AK Real Color. Two bright shop lights. Even a monitor to help me keep tabs of framing issues while shooting videos.

But nothing is perfect, and I wanted to address four main annoyances.

Improve the spider and insect situation. My bench is in a garage. In Texas. I open the doors for ventilation, and even if I didn’t, insects find their way in. The worst by far are the tiny little spiders, a little bigger than a speck of dust, that shit webs all over everything. It’s easy enough to wipe them away, but all the nooks and crannies of the hutch that I’d repurposed to hold the light outriggers gave the little fuckers way too much purchase and it was a constant battle in warmer months (February-November) to keep them at bay. Close behind them are the rolling plagues of insects we get every year – crane flies, then june bugs, then crickets and the occasional grasshopper and cicada. Which of course the spiders catch, which means more spiders.

To help the situation, I wanted to get rid of the hutch and go for smoother, flatter surfaces that can easily be wiped down.

Reclaim bench space. I love Mr Paint. The stuff is fantastic. But the bottles do not fit in my tool cabinet the way Tamiya et al do. So I’d started using nail polish racks. These worked great, but took up a whole corner of the bench. I wanted to get them up on the wall, out of the way, but this meant…changes.

Reclaim the entire west bench. The west bench, or “construction” bench, has over the past few years become the “dumping ground” bench. It sucks having half your workspace basically unusable all the time.

Improve my video setup. Shooting good overhead video is…tricky. I’d been using a microphone arm modified to accept a ball head, but this had a tendency to jiggle, since it was mounted to the bench itself. Its range of motion also meant it was tricky to get shots up to the front edge of the bench where I normally work. I wanted a true overhead mount.

Opportunity presents itself

My employer has a pretty cool perk – after you hit five years, you get a five week sabbatical. Separate from the usual vacation time. Seems like lots of time to work on kits…but we’re traveling for roughly three of those weeks, so there’s time, but also lots of time away.

Not that I’m complaining about being away…

Rather than get some work in and then have to pause everything, I decided to use the time at home to attack the bench itself.

First things first – the work areas

A few years ago, I got a piece of white hardboard to act as a work surface for the “painting” bench. Mainly for the white background for better WIP photos. Along the way, I discovered the semi-gloss surface was easy to clean of insects and shit, but also of paint. A bit of IPA brought it right back.

But my hardboard only covered about two thirds of the bench.

So this time out, I made sure to cover both benches in their entirety.

West Bench – the “Construction” Bench

North Bench – the “Painting” Bench

Fuck the desk

Opposite the workbenches, but the garage door, I had a massive IKEA bench that, when it was clear, I would often use for video editing and whatnot. It was rarely clear, however.

Instead of fighting that battle over and over, I replaced it with some heavy duty shelving to hold kits, boxes for WIP projects, some of my more esoteric paints, as well as various computer bits, external drives and such.

Goodbye, hutch

The first decision I made was that the hutch had to go. Instead, I decided to add a backsplash to the painting bench. Using wood risers bolted to holes in the bench legs as upright supports.

After agonizing over materials, I opted for 1/2″ plywood with more white hardboard mounted to it. After clamping the two together to drill out a hole for the monitor cables (AC and HDMI), I screwed the plywood in place first, and then screwed the hardboard to the plywood. Much cleaner than the old setup, with no nooks and crannies for spiders to hide in.

Wall mount goodness

The monitor I’d been using was a repurposed computer monitor. It did the job, but it was huge. So I picked up a much smaller unit off Amazon, as well as an articulated wall mount.

Wall mounted nail polish racks were also acquired for the Mr Paint.

Turns out they have a LOT more space than the desk racks did…

Arming the camera

The ghetto microphone arm absolutely cannot work mounted above the desk, so I sucked it up and invested in a Manfrotto Magic Arm. And it’s amazing. Unscrew a big ass knob, and the whole thing loosens with multiple points of articulation. Tighten the knob, and it becomes immovable. Sturdy enough to hold my hefty Nikon D850 if I wished.

Outriggers and crossmembers, oh my

Up top, I replaced the wood outriggers I’d been using with 48″ L-shaped metal, similar to the stuff used to hang garage door openers. Lighter, sturdier, and easier to wipe down to keep the spiders at bay.

To install these, I screwed two two-foot lengths of 4×4 pine back to back atop some shitty cabinets I’ve had since the early 2000s. The 4x4s are rock solid and give just enough height to clear the backsplash.

The L shape of the outriggers also gave me a perfect way to install crossmembers for mounting the Manfrotto arm. Lengths of wood rest on the horizontal portion of the outriggers, and are secured with 1/4″ bolts and wingnuts. This way I can remove them or reposition them at need.

The little shit

At this point, most of the bench work is done, save for some cleanup behind the backsplash. The photo table is still all out of whack back there, and I want to move some lesser-used thinner-like-things back there, as well as some diorama supplies that don’t see anywhere near as much use as my paints and tools.

Aside from that, there’s general cleanup and organization from such a drastic upheaval. And I’m hoping to have all of that wrapped up before leaving on the next sabbatical vacation next week.

So when I come back at the end of June, I’ll be ready for a nice, fresh start. After wiping everything down for spider webs, of course.

Recently, SMCGer Jon Bryon shared an interesting post about increasing his productivity at the bench. It’s a thought-provoking read, but one part in particular has stuck with me:

Build in batches

Now, that doesn’t mean just have multiple WIPs going on at once. I means building the same subject, and frequently the same kit, in multiple.

I would scoff at the notion, but I’ve done it before, and the two times that come to mind, I’ve not only finished, but very much enjoyed the journey.

The first time around, it was P-47s. The Tamiya and Revellogram 1/48 Razorbacks, to be precise. Long enough ago that I wince a bit at them now, but they were a lot of fun at the time.

The second time was with a pair of 1/32 Bf 109s. This was back when Revell first dropped their 109G-6, and I tackled it together with a Revell ProModeller (Hasegawa mold) 109G-4.

Thinking ahead to what I want to tackle next, after the Su-35 is further along, I’m finding a lot of appeal in taking on another batch build.

The thing is…I’m not sure of the subject. I’m spoiled for choice.

Twin Mustangs

Back in 2011, Tamiya released their superlative 1/32 P-51D. It’s been seven years…and I still have yet to build one. But what about two of them?

One of them I’d build as a Swiss P-51. Most of these were done up in bare metal with dark blue anti-glare panels, but I also have markings for one that was apparently done in a drab green over light blue, with the same dark blue anti-glare, and the fun addition of red and silver neutrality stripes on the wings. Hmm.

The other I’d do as some sort of PTO Mustang. Perhaps a P-51K…

Or a photo-recon F-6D:

Super Bugs

On vacation recently, I happened to catch two EA-18G Growlers landing at NAS North Island in San Diego. This led to me throwing down for some big Trumpeter Super Bugs – the EA-18 and a two-seater F/A-18F.

At first, the Growler especially seems to be one of those aircraft that stays clean. But if you dig a bit deeper, you can find some really interesting examples:

The F/A-18F is very similar – lots of visual interest once you start digging.

Double Eagle

Another contender – Great Wall’s F-15 – particularly the F-15C and the D-Mold F-15K boxing.

For the C, I have a certain unexplainable affinity for the 44th Fighter Squadron based out of Okinawa.

For the K, well, I’d planned to build it as an E, but it appears that GWH is finally getting off their Mudhen ass, so there’s a decent chance I’d opt to do the K as a ROKAF Slam Eagle.

Choices, Choices

There are a few others floating around – like Trumpeter Skyraiders and Tamiya Corsairs…but they aren’t grabbing me the same way.

Of course, that may well change by the time I’m ready to dive in…

When you run a Facebook page with more than 13,000 followers, you get some…tedious questions.

I generally try to be understanding. Facebook’s algorithm can mean that only a few thousand people see any given post, and maybe they missed the paints being used, or what effect I’m after or whatever. Fair enough.

But there’s one question that pops up endlessly. Well, variations on the question, but yeah.

“What stand is that?”

“Where do you get that stand?”

“Is that a stand I can buy?”

I can get why people are interested. It’s a (mostly) cool stand. It’s one of the most commonly used items on my bench.

But here’s the thing. I’ve been using this stand for at least five years. This is not a thing that I just picked up a few weeks ago.

Questions about it with every post officially got old around four and a half years ago. And so over time I just…stopped answering.

So just like that other near-constant question, I’ve decided to do a quick post as an answer.

The stand is made by Flightpose. And you can buy them HERE.

A few years ago, I wrote about how Decals are Magic, and I still stand by that sentiment. Due to the variety of printers and substances and setting solutions, there is something in the way of alchemy about them. Some setting solutions work great on some decals, but not on others, and so on.

But revisiting that post in light of the #Flankoff disaster (a disaster of my own making for seeing early warning signs and pressing ahead anyway), I think there are a few additional points worth making…

You don’t need a gloss coat to apply decals…

It’s taken as gospel by a wide swath of the modeling community that you absolutely need a gloss coat to apply decals. That otherwise you will get the dreaded silvering. This is not true at all. It’s entirely possible to lay decals down over flat paint, and it’s entirely possible to get silvering even when a gloss coat is in place.

The key isn’t a gloss coat, it’s a smooth surface. With the lacquers that are increasingly in use today – Mr. Paint, Gunze Mr. Color and so on, if you’re doing it right, you should have a nice, smooth, semi-gloss surface to work with anyway. So a clear gloss coat is not necessary.

…but a clear coat may be good for preventing other complications

The thing about insurance is that you don’t need it until you need it. And by then it’s generally too late.

While a clear coat is not in any way mandatory for applying decals, going without opens you up to some interesting potential problems.

I’ve gone without clear coats on two different jets, and both times I’ve regretted doing so. Not because of silvering, but because of other shit that happened, that probably wouldn’t have happened if I’d had a clear in place beforehand.

First up, my Tamiya F-14A Tomcat.

My issues with this kit where minimal. The combination of Furball and Afterburner decals performed wonderfully for the most part.

But I ran into problems in a few places with my decal setting solution degrading the paint. Making the whole area a bit “sloshy”. This didn’t happen everywhere, though, and my best guess, based on comparing what was different about the areas, is that the solution wasn’t degrading the Mr. Paint, but the Badger Stynylrez I’d used as a primer on some areas of the airframe.

After a quick coat of Tamiya X-22, the issue went away entirely.

Second, the Great Wall Hobby Su-35 of #Flankoff fame.

Now. These decals had a whole other problem – thickness – that we’ll get to in a minute.

But. After the decals were down, I sprayed a coat of Gunze C181 semi-gloss clear. And then went to work trying (in vain) to sand the decal film back. And…what already stood out, stood out more.

This one is a bit of a mystery. But at a guess…lacquer clears can very, very subtly fuck with the colors they’re applied over. I’ve had it go completely bad a time or two, with clear coats almost eating away at the top layers of paint, but it’s been years. Still, a bit of, I don’t know, shifting seems to happen. And that shifting isn’t going to occur UNDER A DECAL. When you take that, and add some sanding effort over what’s ultimately some very thin layers of paint, I’m not totally surprised in retrospect.

Would applying a clear before the decals have prevented this shift? Maybe. It’s hard to be sure without a 1:1 control of these decals, this paint, etc.

But I did run into a similar conundrum with the Trumpeter Dauntless I built a while back. Trumpeter’s representation of the Hamilton Standard prop logos was laughable, so I stole some from one of Tamiya’s Corsairs. Knowing that Tamiya has a penchant for thick decals, and that I’d likely have to sand, I gave the prop a very durable gloss coat, applied the decals, gave it another heavy gloss coat, and got to sanding. With no discoloring of the carrier film.

Another example I’ve faced recently…on my Patriot. Where the decal setting solutions fucked with the paint.

Taken together…while yeah, a clear coat isn’t required for decals…I’ve had enough complications pop up around the decals that I’m going to go back to clear coating as a measure of insurance.

Thick decals vex the shit out of me

There are decals that are good and decals that are…less good. But as long as they’re thin, I can usually work with them.

With the Great Wall Su-35, though, I encountered something I haven’t faced in years. Thick decals. The last time I faced anything like it was with a Tamiya Fw 190A-3, where successive layers of clear coat did nothing to hide the visible ridges of the carrier film.

Well, that’s not quite true. There were the decals I printed for the F-14 using Testors decal paper.

Despite taking care to keep the top sealing layer of decal film thin, I didn’t realize that the backing film on the Testors shit was so thick. Fortunately I found another sheet with the right VF-24 markings and was able to rip and replace these without too much trouble.

With the Su-35, though, it wasn’t a case of a decal or two. It was dozens of them. All over the airframe. All of them thick.

Now…two of the three things that fucked the Su-35 are my fault. After cocking my head at the decals, I KEPT APPLYING MORE OF THEM. And after I hoped a clear coat would fix what might be just a sheen difference, and it didn’t, I KEPT SPRAYING.

If I hadn’t done those two things, removing the decals would have been easy enough with X-20A and elbow grease. Then I could have gone aftermarket and carried on.

But those two moments of stupid don’t change the face that the Great Wall decals are thick.

I’m quite confident in my ability to work with decals, to get them sucked into surface detail and have them not silver and all that jazz. Even understanding that there’s some alchemy in which setting solutions work with which decals.

But I have yet to find a safe method of dealing with thick carrier film. There’s the flood it with clear, sand it back option, but that’s only really doable on flat expanses like a prop face, and not what I’d consider a good solution for an aircraft with dozens of little stencils that would need that treatment all over it.

I guess for now the best solution is…if you find the decals are thick, STOP USING THEM and grab some alternates.

In the early days of my career, I specialized in secondary research and analysis. A lot of this involved combing through massive reams of established research – the Census, Forrester, RL Polk and so on – to answer questions, find stats, and make connections. In some industries, it’s amazing what you can draw out.

Modeling is not one of those industries. At least not with freely available materials. I haven’t looked, but an old joke we used to make about tricky research questions was that there’s always a report, and it’s always $5000. I’m sure someone, somewhere, has done some deep market study on modeling.

But I digress. Modeling, for most of us involved in it, is a bit of a black box of an industry. Manufacturers of kits and paints and aftermarket are either small, privately owned businesses, or subsidiaries of larger holding companies. We get occasional peeks behind the curtain, which we can expand on with our own relevant expertise, but there’s a lot of straight-up assumption and guessing and talking out of one’s ass that happens, too.

Recently, a prominent modeler got called out for such an instance of ass-talking, and instead of a simple mea culpa, instead went on a rambling justification that ended up borderline slandering a rather popular online retailer.

Out of some discussions in the aftermath, I decided to throw together a little survey, some market research, to maybe discover some nuances of at least a corner of this hobby. And…some nuances were found.

Now…I’m NOT a market researcher. And it’s been a decade and more since I’ve spent most of my work week elbow-deep in spreadsheets and pivot tables. And…I’ve been using the free version of Survey Monkey, which sucks ass for an kind of multivariate question. And the sampling is limited to a voluntary set from SMCG and followers of my Facebook page. As such, I wouldn’t put ultimate stock in this data. But it can still be worth some consideration.

Unsurprisingly, most respondents build aircraft and armor

Given the option to choose multiple subjects, this is hardly surprising. It’s been pointed out that I left out ships, and I totally did. But I’d guess, based on frequency, they’d be hovering around 10% or so.

The most popular scales are the most popular scales

Again, there is nothing particularly surprising here.

Purchases are made all over the damn place

Now…this is a ranked and weighted list, so if a particularly retailer showed higher in a ranking, they got a higher score. And this is one where SurveyMonkey’s clunky tools perhaps polluted some data, since it was forcing rankings of all stores until I could tell it to not force that.

Still, it’s interesting, given all the wailing about the death of local hobby shops, that the main purchase location seems to be…local hobby shops. Though eBay and Amazon are not far behind.

Other is a catch-all, a mix of retailers not listed here, purchases made at contest vendor tables, in buy-sell-trade groups and the like.

The one that really stands out here, in my opinion, is Hobbyworld-USA. It’s not surprise that Sprue Brothers is way up top, but Hobbyworld-USA is something of an upstart next to, say, Squadron, which is several places lower on the list. I have my suspicions for why they place where they place.

A lot of factors determine where purchases are made, but one matters more than the others

This is a set of data that I could spend hours digging into, if I wanted to (I don’t). But even just glancing at the charts, basically, everything matters. Every single factor pings over 50% as either somewhat or critically important. Price, selection, fast shipping and customer support are all valued more highly.

But the one item that seems make-or-break is a store having the item you’re looking for in stock.

This seems like a no-brainer for sure, but it’s got interesting implications for an inventory-intensive category. It makes it a real challenge to draw purchases with a lean model. But holding so much inventory is a challenge all its own, so there’s a clear opening for some sophisticated demand modeling to optimize inventory and selection.

Different retailers dominate in different aspects of the hobby

From this eyechart, it’s possible to see that there’s a lot more nuance hiding behind that ranking order a few questions up. Different retailers are used for different things. Scale Hobbyist is a popular destination for kits, but much less so for supplies, decals and aftermarket. Local shops don’t seem to be a great source for decals and aftermarket, but they trade well in paint. Hannants and eBay are popular for decals and aftermarket.

And one of the things that has endeared Hobbyworld-USA to many of us is their stocking of Mr. Paint as well as a host of other innovative paints and supplies – Kcolors and Mission Model Paints, Aizu tape, Infini cutting boards, Gunze GX paints. This shows up in neon lights in the Hobbyworld responses, and marks what to me is a clear differentiator.

Depending on interest, I may or may not wade into the actual data to look for some more interesting insights, but these topline ones still provide some good fodder to think over.

I am a mess.

It’s tempting to say that it’s just something that happens this time of year. Or to blame it on the heat (even though that’s abating now).

But, I know better.

The thing that’s fucking up my bench time, that has me turning in circles, second guessing myself, and generally not making headway?

It’s me.

This post is an attempt to get to the bottom of it.

What the fuck is going on?

So far, in 2018, I’ve finished two whole builds. Takom’s AML-90, which I’m marginally proud of, and Eduard’s tiny little 1/144 MiG-15UTI, which I’m not. I mean, it was a nice quick diversion, and it let me test out Tamiya’s new Lacquer Painto line in the form of LP-11 Silver, but it’s chock full of lazy mistakes, and I don’t feel like the scale or the scheme really left me much of anywhere to go in finishing it out.

This, on top of last year, when I only finished three builds…

Now. If we go back through 2018 and 2017 and the number of builds I’ve STARTED…the problem starts to emerge.

• 1/32 Trumpeter F-117 – Abandoned after the seventh or eighth go at filling the sink troughs in the wings and the realization that holding the beast of a kit while attacking those troughs was messing up my wrist.
• 1/48 Academy F-4C – Abandoned after just getting sick of it.
• 1/32 Trumpeter MiG-23MLD Flogger – Jacked up landing gear stance, due to too-tall nosegear and poor attempt by Trumpeter to compensate by leveling the stance, but leaving the Flogger looking like it was on it its tiptoes. Abandoned and limestoned.
• 1/48 Trumpeter MiG-21UM – Abandoned after frustrations with overall quality of the kit, particularly the cockpit and canopy
• 1/48 Kinetic Mirage IIIDE – Abandoned after discovering wing aileron and tip were catastrophically short-shot.
• 1/144 Bandai A-Wings – Abandoned after they just look too toylike to keep going forward with.
• 1/35 Trumpeter MIM-104 Patriot – WIP. This one got fully built and painted, and the trailer got into decals, and the AFV boxing proved to have terrible decals. With no aftermarket options, I picked up the Trumpeter boxing of the current-gen PAC-3 launcher, and it’s built, just waiting for paint, but I haven’t gotten back to it.
• 1/35 Meng T-72B3 – WIP. Top is painted. Bottom is painted. I burned a lot of energy having a go at multiple bases for this one, and haven’t been happy with any of them. Now that I’ve reached a “fuck it” point and am going baseless, weathering is proceeding.
• 1/35 Trumpeter M270 MLRS – WIP. Main assembly completed. Still need to do the tracks, paint the cab interior, and close everything up to start painting. I actually really love this kit – just haven’t gotten back to it yet. Too much ground stuff at once, I think.
• 1/35 Trumpeter URAL-4320 – WIP. It’s mostly built, partially primed, but I’m not really sure what I want to do with it, so it sits.
• 1/48 Kitty Hawk Su-35 – Left behind after the #Flankoff build stage.
• 1/48 Great Wall Hobby Su-35 – Set aside after thick-ass decals derailed a build that had been in-progress for months. It’s not gone, but…let’s be honest. It pretty much is.
• 1/35 Tiger Model ERC-90 F1 Lynx – WIP. I recently wrapped up the build review, and now it’s in weathering…after passing through three paint schemes. Another case of second-guessing (or third-guessing I suppose).
• 1/72 Flyhawk FT-17 (x2) – WIP. These lovely little things are painted and decaled and just waiting on the bases to get a bit further along so I can make sure I’m unified in my weathering.

All in all, that’s…quite a trail of bodies, and quite a stack of WIPs to wade through.

Now, unless things go totally off the rails, I anticipate finishing the ERC-90, T-72, and the two FT-17s in the near future. So that’ll put me at six completed builds so far this year, far outpacing the last several years.

But…three of them will be tiny little things.

What’s really going on here?

So far as I can tell, there are multiple factors at play that have been tripping me up. With each, I’m trying to identify solutions to get me around them.

A Fuck Imbalance – For any given build, I have a certain number of fucks to give. Kind of like the health meter in a video game. And some kits demand that more fucks be given. Could I have pushed through the Academy F-4C? Certainly. Ran out of fucks. Could I have ripped apart the landing gear on the MiG-23 or scratchbuilt my own? If I had the fucks to give. I didn’t have that many fucks to give about the Kinetic Mirage III…but if the kit hadn’t been short-shot, that probably would have been sufficient to get me through. As it turned out…not the case.

Solution: Fix the fuck imbalance. Find subjects that I give more of a fuck about, find kits that demand fewer fucks, or both.

Unsatisfied Base – One thing I’ve been tinkering with a lot since last year has been bases. I’ve managed exactly one effective base in the past, and think I pulled off a pretty solid one early this year with the AML-90. But…I keep trying and I keep feeling like I’m groping in the dark. It’s an area where I really want to improve, but I don’t yet feel like I have a sense of which levers to pull to get to what I want.

Solution: Experiment and learn with smaller, less ambitious bases using smaller-scale subjects. The FT-17s and their bases are a start.

Decal Sabotage – Decals have never really been a thing to fuck my builds in the past, but then it happened twice this year. Once with the Patriot and the shoddy AFV Club decals (plus AK Real Colors not reacting well to decal solvents), and the second time with the thick GWH Su-35 decals. It sucks getting so deep into a build and having something bring the whole thing down.

Solution: Test decals early. Do not just keep going if decals seem problematic. Do not trust/hope in a clear coat to fix the problem. Secure aftermarket decals as appropriate. Or, find more builds that don’t require any decals (though those are rare).

Not Having a Vision – This one is a bit squishy, since there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between having a vision for a build and completions. I knew exactly what I wanted for the MiG-23 and the MiG-21 and the F-4C and they all fell to the wayside. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with the AML-90, and it got done. But my current ERC-90 project is kind of emblematic of the whole lack of vision sending me in circles. It’s now in its third scheme option.

Solution: Have what I want to pull off mapped out better ahead of time.

Too Much Going On – This year has been a bit weird in that I was working from home for the first several weeks of the year, and had the opportunity to fart around with kits while on various calls or while trying to think something through. It was amazingly beneficial and something I wish I could do at the office as well, but alas. Anyway, that led to the build of several kits that then created a backlog on the painting side. A backlog that still exists. And while I’ve kinda-sorta done a good job of not starting a bunch of massive projects, since the Su-35 collapsed, I’ve started up four new kits. Granted, three of them have been small, intended as diversions and quick wins, but still.

Solution: Be more focused on one or two kits at a time. Work through the backlog. Load balance between big projects like 1/32 aircraft, and small, light affairs like 1/72 armor or Star Wars kits (which I’ve got some plans for).

What I think it really comes down to

Now, all of the issues listed above are very real issues. But are they causes, or just symptoms? Or excuses?

Talking with my fellow SMCG admins Will and Jim, I realized something.

Every single one of my favorite builds has started with a strong vision.

The Corsair, Me 262, Spitfire, French P-47, Tamiya F-14, Trumpeter Bf 109G-10…all of them got their start with one photo that set my imagination running. Not just for that type of aircraft…but for that one specific vision of that aircraft.

I don’t think there’s quite the same connection with armor…but with aircraft it certainly seems to be a thing.

With that in mind, I think my next build will be a return to that mold of powerful inspiration. And I might have just the subject.

Stay tuned. First I have to push a few kits over the line.

Back around the beginning of August, Patrick at MBK-USA asked if I’d be willing to take Tiger Model’s 1/35 ERC-90 F1 Lynx for a spin and share my thoughts. 

I typically don’t do the whole free-kit-build-review thing. I think it introduces, even subconsciously, a rose-colored filter that makes more favorably disposed toward the kit than you might otherwise be. But I was also just coming off the decal-induced Flankoff flameout, was in casting-about mode, and, well, Patrick knew just where to strike. I have a weakness for esoteric French armored cars. 

The Build – Reviewed

Tiger’s kit is…solid. Extravagantly decent. Radically middle-of-the-road. It doesn’t reach the top tier of Tamiya, or Meng, or Trumpeter and Hobby Boss. Maybe more in the universe of Takom. Better than the Academy armor kits I’ve experienced.

I won’t belabor the kit’s strengths and weaknesses here, and encourage you to have a gander at the in-box and build review videos if you want an in-depth look at the kit as it comes, and as it gets built up.  

Out the Other Side

Coming out the other side of the build, I moved into paint…which proved to be a shiftier target than I’d anticipated.

The kit features five scheme options. I originally had my sights set on one of the two digital camoflage schemes currently in use by the Mexican Army, but quickly noped away from that course when I started to appreciate the tedium that would be involved. Especially since Tiger gives you fuck all to pull the scheme off. No masks, no decals, not even a full view, just one side in profile. 

My next move was into the more traditional green/brown/black NATO scheme. 

While this was fine, something about it didn’t sit right with me. Hard to say what. Maybe it’s because I have plenty of other builds in mind that wear the same colors. Maybe it’s because image searches for the ERC-90 F1 invariably show a ton of ERC-90 F4s. And the F4 Sagaie gets all the cool camoflage, including that sweet, bright-green French take on the NATO scheme.

Anyway, with some more course corrections, I ended up doing a green-and-sand scheme that Mexico used in the 80s. 

Weathering?

Mexico tends to keep these ERC-90s quite clean. Which leaves…not a lot of fun to be had with weathering. Ultimately I went with some very gentle OPR work on the camoflage, some pigments and some enamels to represent dust, sand and so on. Even this seems to be far dirtier than reference photos suggest…which kinda sucks. But it got the job done.

What Works

Okay. So now that the ERC-90 is done and safely in the display cabinet, it’s time to look back and take stock and what works about the kit, and what doesn’t. Let’s start with the good.

• Engineering, detail and fit are mostly good. It feels like fit and precision suffer a drop-off aft of the rear tires, but forward of them, all is well. 
• The clear parts are exceptionally well done, particularly the searchlight lens.
• Buildup is not overly fussy. This is not a kit that will take you into the weeds or overwhelm with parts count for the sake of parts count. 
• It’s a cool French armored car and a nice break from all the Tigers everyone builds all the time. Or Panthers at the moment, I guess. 

What Doesn’t Work

This is going to be a longer list. That doesn’t mean that the bad outweighs the good on this kit…just…there are things you may want to be aware of in considering it, or building it, and these heads ups may come in handy. 

• Tiger picked the wrong variant. The ERC-90 F4 Sagaie is a far more interesting specimen than the F1 Lynx. Why? Well, the Lynx was not picked up by France, and was export sold to Mexico and Argentina and…that’s it. The F4 Sagaie, on the other hand, has been sold all over the damn place, and has seen extensive service, including with France. It gets dirty. It gets interesting camo schemes. It has a crazy-long barrel that adds to the inherent silliness of these armored cars. Think of it like how Trumpeter had 1/32 MiG-29s for years…but the silly naval variants that nobody bought. 
• Certain options are pointless. The metal springs are pointless on a non-workable suspension. The styrene tires are interesting in concept but fail in execution. I would have rather seen a resin muzzle brake, or masks or decals for the digital camo as value adds. 
• The fender mirrors are annoying and fragile. I ended up replacing the arms with wire. 
• Vinyl tires are bullshit because vinyl tires are bullshit. They don’t take paint or weathering well at all. They have annoying flash inside the wheels that interferes with the fit of the hubs. 
• The wheel/axle fit is bullshit. Only two of the six tires (the front two) have a positive fit sturdy enough for test-fitting. The mid and aft tires flop about and will fall out if you look at them funny. I really like to be able to test-fit the running gear, particularly on wheeled vehicles. 
• Wheel design = tire wobble. The wheels have what seems like a pretty slick arrangement where the back press-fits into the hub and allows it to spin. Unfortunately, with that spin comes some slop and play that allows the tires to lean. This happens even after gluing the wheels to the axles and can cause headaches, especially if you install the middle tires in the stowed position and the flop out at an angle. 
• Holy shit does this kit need resin tires. Seriously. 
• The fit of the aft parts leaves much to be desired. I don’t know what the deal is, but the water turbines, the articulated exhausts/air filters/whatever, the muffler and so on all exhibit far sloppier fit than the rest of the kit. Not a dealbreaker, but something to be on guard for. 
• The main gun could really benefit from a resin muzzle brake. This is my second French armored thing with this gun, and both attempts at it in styrene have disappointed. The Takom AML-90 uses a complicated arrangement of top and bottom plates and two vertical plates that draw their assembly inspiration from a house of cards. The Tiger kit uses top and bottom halves, with the vertical plates bisected horizontally. This is a lot easier to build, but has the distinct drawback of leaving very obvious join lines across prominent but hard to access parts. 

Highly Recommended?

Nope. I’m not going to highly recommend this kit. It’s solid, and if you have a thing for goofy French armored cars or an affinity for Mexican or Argentinian military vehicles, consider it right up your alley. 

With some aftermarket support – particularly for the tires and the muzzle brake – I’d put this one up a few notches. But ultimately, my personal call would be to wait for Tiger to drop an ERC-90 F4 Sagaie that they’d be crazy to not release. 

In my recent post digging into the various mental hangups and obstructions that have been screwing with my ability to get kits off the bench in a completed state, I touched on the idea of vision:

Now, all of the issues listed above are very real issues. But are they causes, or just symptoms? Or excuses?

Talking with my fellow SMCG admins Will and Jim, I realized something.

Every single one of my favorite builds has started with a strong vision.

The Corsair, Me 262, Spitfire, French P-47, Tamiya F-14, Trumpeter Bf 109G-10…all of them got their start with one photo that set my imagination running. Not just for that type of aircraft…but for that one specific vision of that aircraft.

It’s perhaps fitting that, a few days after throwing this post up, I finished my fourth build of the year, and one that was driving entirely by a strong vision.

In the afterglow of what I think might be my favorite armor build to date, at least in terms of the end result, I’ve decided to put “The Vision Thing” to the test in two upcoming builds.

Both of these builds are inspired by really strong references photos that just burrowed into my brain and insisted on being realized.

First Up

I have a lot of aircraft references that get me fired up. Like, a lot. But there’s one that keeps rising to the surface, and I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead and chase it.

That’s right. A Danish F-104G in that glorious battered green paint that seemed to be the Danish staple in the 70s and early 80s. I probably have a good dozen or so images of various Danish Starfigthers in all manner of glorious paint decay and touchup. Including this lovely one looking down from above, which is a pretty rare view.

Oh man. There’s a lot of fun to be had here.

So what kit will I be using to realize this vision? As if there were any other option:

Now, I built this kit a few years ago as an Italian F-104S, and despite my frustrations over the last 10% of the build and the clunkiness of some of the final details, overall I enjoyed the kit. I also feel like I pulled my punches in painting and weathering the 104S, and sort of see this as my chance to make amends.

Second Up

It has been a long time since I’ve dabbled in World War II armor. The last one that I actually completed came and went over four years ago. Since then, when I’ve built armor it’s typically been geared toward the late Cold War.

Of late though, I’ve been feeling an itch to build something VVSS (Vertical Volute Spring Suspension – the suspension used by Lees, Grants, Shermans etc). I can’t explain it, I just have.

Well, I’ve been bouncing around, considering my options. And then I came across this.

That’s an M4A1 with the 1st Armored Division in northern Italy in 1945, and holy shit is the dust and grime and leakage and staining just amazing.

It’s hard to be 100% certain, but it looks like this lovely specimen is done up in the olive drab and black camoflage seen on a good many Shermans during the war. Which is just a further reason to take it on.

Now, for this build, I’m having to go outside my stash. I have a few Shermans, but no M4A1 mid-production with the early suspension bogies featuring the centered return roller. Fortunately, Asuka nee Tasca makes just such a Sherman.

To this I’ll be adding a metal barrel (as you do), as well as probably a few aftermarket goodies to be named later.

Off to the races…soon

For the moment I still have two little FT-17s to finish up. But expect both of these kits to be up and running soon. Though the Sherman may lag slightly, as I have to wait for it to cross the Pacific.

Any requests on how you would like to see these builds covered? Blog? Video? Snarky Facebook posts? Sound off in the comments.

Two and a half years ago, I put the finishing touches on Italeri’s big F-104, which I’d built as an Italian F-104S ASA.

At the time, I was not particularly kind to the kit.

The kit has just enough charm to pull you through the early stages of the build, and once you’re closing the fuselage, you’re kind of committed. There’s a lot of grumbling about the trench-like panel lines and all…honestly those didn’t bother me that much. What did bother me was the sloppy molding, which left separation lines on every damn thing, the sloppy fit, which is easy enough to hide with massive pieces like wings, but becomes apparent late in the build when antennas and such are 1) tiny, 2) in need of cleanup and 3) too big to fit in their damn holes.

Now, for whatever reason, I’m in the initial stages of building another.

Oh, right…

Does this mean that I’ve revised my opinion of the kit? Not really. If anything, it means I get to go into the build with my eyes wide open to the various issues that will have to be faced and challenges overcome.

With that in mind, I thought it might be productive to do a rundown of considerations and plans of attack. Not only to organize them for myself, but for others who may be tackling this kit in the future.

The Fuselage

There are mold seams everywhere. Also flash. Almost everywhere you look on the F-104, there’s something to be cleaned up. Up front where the windscreen mounts? Flash. Along the inside face of the fuselage halves? Mold seams, I guess from some sort of insert. Gear struts? Same. Central gear bay truss? You guessed it. With this kit, cleanup is half the battle.

The question of the tail. As seems to be the rage, the F-104 is molded with its tail section as a separate piece. This sets up a choice – gluing the rear fuselage/tail to the main halves first, or joining the halves and then gluing things front-to-back. Last time I went front to back and didn’t suffer too badly for it. But I may try side-by-side this time. The main consideration of which way to go is the ability to clean up and fill the inside of the aft join without the exhaust nozzle making it impossible to do so.

The nose is rocky. For some reason, probably all due to sloppy molding, the kit exhibits varying texture across multiple part surfaces. Some are Hasegawa-like in their smoothness. Others have a very fine grit that will demand some sanding to smooth down. The nose is different. It’s literally wrinkled in places, particularly down by the tip. This has already been sorted out in the initial cleanup pass, but is something to look out for.

Drill baby drill. Depending on the particular version of the F-104 you are building, various holes have to be opened up from the inside to accommodate antennas and pylons. Much to my happiness, I found that many of these, particularly those associated with the most painful antennas last time around, do not apply to the Danish Starfighter. But I still had to open holes for the ventral Sidewinder mounts.

Landing gear silliness. Last time around, I had to install the gear struts very early in the build process. This time, I thought I’d look for an alternative. Yeah, NOPE. The nose strut is located by trapping between the two gear bay sidewalls. And the main gear is located by a central truss that goes down on top of them. This piece has to be in place to install the front and rear bulkhead parts that hold everything together. Any hack to install the gear later would set up even more problems than just dealing with them poking out.

Deal with it

The lower wings are warped. Holy shit. I don’t remember this from last time, but the lower wings have a pronounced droop out toward the tips, almost like we all wish rotor blades had as standard. This doesn’t seem to be a big deal, as the uppers are straight, and both are sort of sandwiched into the tip tank. But to keep the warp from pulling the uppers into any kind of droop, I’ll probably do the boil-and-straighten thing.

The Aftermarket

The aftermarket situation for the Italeri 104 is annoying. Mainly because of resin manufacturers’ tendency to give fewer than two shits about how things actually go together.  I know some modelers are perfectly happy hacking and grinding a kit to pieces to fit resin parts. And I know that I am not one of those. Unless we’re talking about a massive increase in detail, in an area that is highly visible. And even then I’m on the fence.

So my thoughts on aftermarket are based on that sort of middle ground…I want detail, and I want it to integrate well with the kit parts.

Cockpit – After reading that the Aires cockpit doesn’t fit well (SHOCKER), for some idiotic reason I decided to see what I thought of the CMK cockpit. Yeah, it doesn’t even attempt to fit. And the cockpit itself is at best a marginal improvement over the kit parts. Not worth it at all. Instead I’ll be relying on the kit cockpit for the most part.

For aftermarket, I’m certainly adding the Quickboost control stick, Airscale gauge decals, and a seat. Which brings me to…

The Ejection Seat – I’m sure the kit seat isn’t bad or anything. But to be honestly I’ve never even looked at it, even now that I’m tackling this kit for the second time. A 1/32 jet just demands the extra detail of a resin seat. When I did this kit the first time, I used Eduard’s MB seat. With the exception of the stupid PE belts, it was fantastic. Crisp, detailed, and it included a rail mount that was a drop-fit to the kit bulkhead.

Still…those damn PE belts.

For this go-round, I thought I’d try something else, and ordered a nice-looking seat from AMS Resin.

Is it nice-looking? Yes. Compared to the best seats I’ve seen, I’d probably give it, I don’t know, a B+. There’s some vagueness in some detail that holds it back slightly.

But the biggest problem is that it straight up doesn’t fit with the kit’s rail mount. Like, not even close.

So instead, I’ll be using an Eduard seat again. Where literally the only downside is those stupid PE belts, and those can be overcome.

Exhaust – Last time around, I used Eduard’s late exhaust nozzle and really loved the level of detail if afforded. This time around, I’ll be doing the same, albeit with the early J-79 nozzle. These are basically the same as the exhausts on the early F-4s like the B, C and D. It’s a drop-fit upgrade that does a lot to enhance the backside of the aircraft.

Wheels – I used Eduard’s Late F-104 Wheels last time, and will be using them again for the Danish Starfighter. Why? They’re wonderfully detailed, fit together well, and mount to the gear struts perfectly. Resin tires can sometimes mean a battle in exchange for detail, but these don’t.

Gear Bays – For some reason, I bought CMK’s main gear bay. It was a mistake. It doesn’t come close to fitting, and even if it did, it makes no provisions for the bulkheads to either side. Sure you get a small bit more wiring detail, but this is largely pointless considering that the forward gear bays are mostly closed except when the gear is actively extending and retracting. Save the money and stick with the kit bays.

Pitot Tube – The pitot tube on the F-104 is long and rather prominent (though not as prominent as some). It’s also painted in a sort of barber pole stripe, which is going to demand some strength to put up with the masking and handling. Last time around, I used Master’s excellent turned brass pitot tube, and will be doing so again this time.

Order of Attack

Italeri’s F-104 and the way it’s engineered calls for some advance planning in how to not only build, but paint the damn thing.

Cockpit – With the cockpit, it’s necessary to glue the rear bulkhead to the aft deck. The best way to do this is to tack it in place, and then use the fuselage halves to trap the parts and let them set up on their own. These can then be glued in along one side to ease assembly later on.

Gear Bay – The gear bay is something of a mess. But it seems best to do any additional plumbing, then paint the thing silver, then glue everything down (gear bay ceiling, gear bay, central truss, front and rear bulkheads), then glue it all into fuselage along one side (using the other side to trap and allow it to cure. But don’t forget, the front of the engine connects to the rear bulkhead.

Wings – Do to their fickle nature, this is certainly a kit where it makes sense to glue the wings on before bringing the fuselages together. This way you can work the interior of the join, which last time around called for shims to keep the wings at the proper dihedral.

Formation Lights – The Italeri’s formation lights install into the fuselage from the inside, which means…you get to fuss with masking them! The way I tackled this last time around was to prime and paint the area first. This way I could just drop a bit of tape on them and not have to worry further.

Exhaust – Fun story. The exhaust has to be installed from the inside of the tail. It’s not something you can plop into place after the fact. This is rather annoying, but it is what it is. You essentially have two routes here.

First, you can glue the full lengths of the fuselage together first, then install the engine between them and then bring the halves together.

Second, you can glue the fuselage halves together, and the tail halves together, separately. Then close them front to back. This leads to a bit more difficulty at that join (though not impossible). But it also makes it easier to clean up and paint the engine orifice in the back since you don’t have to try to work around the nozzle.

Intakes – The intakes on the F-104 are silver, with black cones and a black lip around the outer edge. The rest of the aircraft is…rarely black. A way around this is again a bit of advance planning – paint the surrounding fuselage area before installation. Easy peasy.

Ad Astra Per Aspera

My high school’s motto was “through adversity to the stars”. Considering it was a private school, the whole adversity part seems a bit silly, though I guess you could apply it to the academic rigor. Anyway, it seems a fitting motto for this kit, which presents you with plenty of advance planning before coming out the other side with a Starfighter.

Let’s get to work.

Over this past weekend, news broke wide open that Wingnut Wings, prolific maker of excellent World War I kits that aren’t Nieuports or SPADs, is developing a 1/32 Avro Lancaster.

Somewhere across the Pacific, the HK Models Team is currently banging their foreheads into their keyboards repeatedly. After all, they were supposed to release their own Lancaster years ago, but went back to revise it and, among other things, it was said they were going to incorporate a stressed skin effect into the surface detail. Then, when it broke cover…no stressed skin.

I’ve seen a few apologist comments about how the size of the CAD files made adding stressed skin prohibitive. 

Wingnut Wings clearly has a different take.

Not the first time

Wingnut’s Lancaster isn’t the first example of stressed skin. An argument could be made that Kinetic’s 1/32 F-86 was the first to show this in injection plastic, and Airfix’s 1/24 Typhoon certainly carried off the effect.

Not the last time, either

If you think the Wingnut Lancaster is going to be an aberration, guess again. If you think they didn’t take some inspiration from the Airfix Typhoon, guess again. As in any competitive industry, innovations get copied and spread far and wide. Look at the profusion of slide molding, of one-piece barrels for tanks, of one-piece missiles in more and more modern aircraft kits.

When I was a kid, raised panel lines were the norm. Though that was also in part due to what was available at the Michaels where I bought most of my kits growing up. Monogram and Testors, oh my. 

Still. Recessed panel lines had been around for some time, even then, and in the late 80s and 90s they pretty much completely displaced raised panel lines. Today, you can’t really find a new-tool aircraft kit that doesn’t use recessed panel lines. If there is raised detail, it’s saved for rivets and other fasteners. 

I can’t say for certain what the adoption curve is going to look like, but I’m going to say it now – the Wingnut Lancaster is a watershed moment. It is the arrival of full-on, slap-you-in-the-face stressed skin effects represented in plastic. In a scale that’s not a novelty (even if the size of this particular subject makes it one).

Nobody cares about Airfix doing whatever the fuck on their 1/24 aircraft, because they don’t play in 1/32 and haven’t been carrying the effect down to 1/48 scale. So the Typhoon is an aberration.

With the Lancaster, though, all bets are off. Now that they’ve busted out of the Great War, who knows what they’ll pull out next. A 1/32 Bf 109G-6? A Spitfire Mk.XIV? A Beaufighter to make all three people who love those hideous things happy? Whatever it is, you can bet it’ll have stressed skin.

For Tamiya, who’s used to rolling up and dropping a definitive version of a subject in 1/32, the threat of something on the level of that Lancaster is one they can’t take lightly. Anybody making WWII-era aircraft in 1/32 scale especially will be dipping their toes into this new water. 

A decade from now, we might well be shunning some new 1/32 kit because they couldn’t even be bothered to add even a hint of surface variation. 

If you’ve ever taken a photo of a model, you’ve almost certainly experienced it. A depth of field too shallow to show your entire build in sharp focus.

While it’s easy to mitigate on certain subjects, like figures and particularly squat tanks, it can be a real challenge to overcome on subjects with more splayed out geometries, such as long aircraft and ships. Even in the armor world, something like a T-72 with a ridiculously long barrel can be difficult to keep in focus.

What’s Happening?

Now, I’m not going to bother with an overly technical explanation of the way that optics work. To keep it simple, every optical system has a depth of field – a particular distance in front of and behind the focal point that is in focus. This depth of field varies based on a number of factors, such as aperture (the size of the lens opening) and distance to subject.

Our eyes have this feature, too, only we don’t notice it so much because we have a highly evolved, fast-switching autofocus capability. Still images don’t have that luxury, being, well, still images.

Aperture and depth of field (from here on, just DOF) have an inverse relationship. At a large aperture, such as f/2, a camera is letting in a ton of light, but outside of a specific focal point, that light is scattered over a much larger area, so it does not resolve sharply. At a smaller aperture, such as f/22, you’re essentially forcing light to travel through a much smaller opening, giving it less area to scatter. While this means less light, if you can hold the shutter open for a longer period of time, the smaller aperture and decreased scatter with yield a deeper DOF.

Subject distance matters because everything is relative. It’s easy to keep an entire mountain in focus because the thing is far away, so the distance between a face here and a crag there is nothing to the camera. Slap on a macro lens and try to shoot a picture of a bee or something, and the extremely close distance can give you shots where only a part of the bee is in focus.

How to Fix It

There are four ways to address DOF issues.

1. Crank down your aperture. Pushing your aperture smaller and smaller will, because of the inverse relationship, give you an increasingly deep DOF. There’s a tradeoff, however. Past a certain point, you pretty much must have a tripod. And the required shutter speeds can make shooting tedious. I’ve been known to shoot 6 second exposures at f/36.
2. Increase your distance-to-subject. Backing off from your subject will help keep more of it in focus, but this is not ideal because 1) you will then have to crop in and lose some resolution and 2) perspective shifts will limit your creative options. See my previous post of Focal Length for a more thorough rundown.
3. Get a smaller image sensor. Just as a larger aperture yields a narrower DOF, so does a larger image sensor. At equivalent apertures, a full-frame DSLR will have a narrower DOF than a point-and-shoot. The downside to this option is trading all the other benefits of a larger sensor for this one upside.
4. Stack multiple images. Thanks to computers, these days it is possible “stack” multiple images with multiple focus points so that they stitch together into a single image where your entire subject is in focus.

This last technique is the focus of this post.

Focus Stacking – What You Need

If you’re familiar with HDR photography, you might be aware that it is, essentially, exposure stacking. You take multiple shots of the same scene at different exposure settings, and then blend them together to pull more details out of both the highlights and the shadows.

I go through a more detailed explanation of HDR in my Tonal Crush post if you’re curious.

Focus stacking does the same thing, but with images using different focus points.

To pull this off you need a few things.

• A camera that lets you control focus. Whether by manual focus or by selecting specific focus points. Some cameras are now set up to do this automatically, and there are devices, such as Arsenal, that can kinda-sorta do it on their own. But the focus of this post is a bit more hands-on.
• A tripod. It’s almost impossible to shoot handheld and stay in the same position and select different focus points all at the same time.
• Focus stacking software. There are several options available, but of the ones I’ve tried, the most straightforward and consistent (perhaps because I’m used to the ways of Adobe) is Photoshop.

Focusing Your Stack – Importing and Loading Up

First thing’s first. Take pictures. Set up your camera and move from focal points near to far. Using my Nikon D850, I prefer to do this by using the tap-to-focus capability on the Live View monitor. But how you choose to do it doesn’t really matter. Once you have your images, dump them to your computer.

Personally, I use Adobe Lightroom to keep everything organized and do a good amount of my photo optimizing. Here, you can see the six exposures we’re going to be playing with for this example:

Now, Lightroom doesn’t support Focus Stacking (yet), so we have to move these images into Photoshop. It’s best to do so as layers, rather than a bunch of individual files. To do so, just right click, then select Edit In > Open as Layers in Photoshop.

Depending on the size of your files (D850 RAW files are…large) it might take a few moments to load everything up. When it’s done, you’ll see something like this. Note the different images are represented as different layers in the lower right panel.

Next, Auto-Align the Layers

Why? Because if you don’t, there’s a chance that you’ll get weird distortions in your final output. Aligning the layers is a quick step that erases that possibility.

First, select all the layers…

And then head to the main navbar and select Edit > Auto-Align Layers.

You’ll probably want to let Photoshop figure it out, so leave it on Auto.

Then hit OK and let it do its thing.

Will it Blend?

Once you’ve aligned the layers, it’s time to blend them. Go back to Edit, but this time select Auto-Blend Layers.

Be sure to select Stack Images as your blend method, then click OK and let Photoshop do it’s thing.

After a few minutes, you’ll get your output, all nice and in focus. Save it and head back to Lightroom to do any tweaks.

That’s…pretty much it. Is it a tedious process? Certainly. But it gets you to images that are nice and crisp from nose to tail and everywhere in between. Maybe overboard for something as simple as a “hey I glued the damn fuselage together” shot, but something to have in the toolkit for those final glamor shots.

The worst part about working on a 1/32 scale F-104 is contending with its shape. The combination of a long, cylindrical body and short, stubby little wings makes maneuvering the thing to different positions a logistical nightmare.

The complete inability to securely position it at anything other than an upright angle has led to plenty of frustrations both with painting and with masking, since getting at the tail or the undersides usually has involved having to hold it, robbing me of one of my hands. It’s also held me back from doing any kind of video surrounding this build.

Nothing insurmountable by any means, but certainly a quirk of building the F-104 if you decide to take one on.

Prime Time

So the aim of this post is to talk about the painting of the 104. I’ve decided to skip over the cockpit and the buildup and all of that because, meh. Boring. All you really need to know on that front is that the 104 is pretty good for an Italeri kit, which puts it pretty squarely in the “decent but vaguely disappointing” camp. The closest analog I can think of is probably, oh, Trumpeter’s 1/32 MiG-21 kits. Not bad per se, but they could certainly be much better. At least it’s a relatively simple build.

Anyway, in the leadup to priming, I did some pre-painting in specific areas just to make life easier, then laid down the black primer. For this I used a mix of Mr Surfacer 1500 and a new (to me) primer I’m putting through its paces, Modo MK-12. This stuff is quite a bit similar to MS1500, but seems to behave a bit more like Mr Surfacer 1200. That is…it goes down nicely, but perhaps very slightly rough. Then, when you swipe it with some fine grit sanding sponge, it just goes absolutely smooth.

Once the primer was down, I installed the windscreen and aft canopy (which took some careful shaving to fit…) and did some light mottling on the surface with MRP Swedish Dark Green.

After the install and cleanup around the windscreen were taken care of, I masked everything off.  Around the same time I went ahead and knocked out the spiraling on the pitot tube. It’s hard to get a really good look at this in the photos I have, but it seems to be dark green with a yellow stripe, so that’s what I went for.

The stripe was masked by spraying the pitot tube yellow, then wrapping it with some Aizu tape and spraying over it with SEA Dark Green.

The Main Event, Round 1

With all the little stuff out of the way, it was time to get to the main paintwork. Now…if I were doing a fresh Danish F-104, that’d be as easy as bombing the entire thing with dark green. But Danish 104s (and F-100s and Drakens and…) have a very pronounced wear pattern where the dark green seems to fade and desaturate. And subsequent touch-ups just highlight the hell out of this.

The challenge, really, is in the touch-ups. But there’s another one in sorting out just how exactly to fade and desaturate, especially given how completely different it can come across in photos of different 104s.

I originally started aiming for this bottom one, R-832. Starting with MRP Swedish Dark Green and SEA Dark Green and working lighter and more desaturated using tones such as Dark Gunship Gray (which is rather warmer and lighter than that shade, but works nicely here), Light Khaki and Brown-Green. I also found that PRU Pink works wonderfully to lighten and desaturate green tones.

Many different shades and slightly tweaked blends were put down in a marbled fashion, or highly thinned and applied almost as filter coats. By the end I had a nicely varied and faded looking aircraft.

Things Go Wrong

That’s when everything went wrong. I started laying down touch-ups, and while yeah, they were too precise, it was more that the touch-up contrast was way too strong.

So I slept on it overnight and decided that…yeah…I wasn’t happy with it. R-832 is a problematic one to tackle because the one image I have is relatively low-res and it’s tough to get a great sense of what all is going on. So I decided to shift to another F-104G, R-340.

The Main Event, Round 2

First thing’s first, the original paint had to be covered. After sanding it back slightly, I went over it with a few coats of MRP SEA Dark Green to re-establish a baseline. This worked out slightly lighter than the radome, which worked out nicely.

Next, marbling with MRP Light Khaki.

On top of this, I added some Field Green in places, as well as three different Olive Drab tones, sometimes mixed further with Light Khaki.

All slowly building up layers along the way.

After several layers, I got to this point…

And decided that I’d reached a good place to call it. It may look a bit patchy here, but that is by design. The first go-round revealed that the contrast of the paint touch-ups blew out a lot of the subtle variations in the faded out base coat, and I wanted to preserve more of that this time around, which requires pulling up just short of what might seem right.

Touch-Ups

While the faded and battered paint is in itself interesting, its the contrast with fresher touch-ups that make the Danish 104s crackle with visual interest. And recreating them is, in my opinion, critical to pulling one off.

My first bid at this fell woefully short. For the second go, I pulled out an old trick I’ve used with things like mottling in the past. Rather than going straight to SEA Dark Green, I went with a 50/50 mix of it and olive drab. This helps preserve separation from the base paint, but also reins it in somewhat so that it appears more unified.

To help with getting the spacing right for the various vertical touch-ups, I used a Sakura Micron brown brush pen to mark locations, then wiped it away, leaving faint brown lines. These I followed with my GSI PS-770.

I wish I could convey a more useful tip here…but it’s really…know your airbrush, know how to spray fine lines, and take your time. Be a bit intentionally sloppy. And change up the touch-up colors. In addition to mixing SEA Dark Green with olive drab, I mixed it with a different, darker olive drab, with field green, and even sprayed it straight in some places.

The ultimate result?

All of this brings us up to the end of main painting, and the spraying of the stencil markings, but that’s for a different post. Stay tuned.

2018 is just about over, and I don’t see anything coming off the bench in the next few days, so it’s time for the obligatory end-of-year post.

What a Year

2018 was an…eventful year. Before I get to what happened on the bench, I want to touch on everything that went on beyond it. Because damn was this year an emotional rollercoaster.

In February, we took the kids for their second ski trip, this time to Park City.

In April, we welcomed a new pupper into our life. We weren’t in a place to take on a puppy, but this was the last litter from Maizie’s mom and dad, and Maizie has turned out to be such an amazing dog that we couldn’t pass it up, so enter her sister from another litter, Mollie.

At the end of May, I took my sabbatical, a five-week vacation that’s a perk you get after your five year anniversary. And we went all over the damn place. First, the wife and I escaped to Mexico for a few days.

Then, we took the kids to San Diego…

…before heading up to Vancouver to hop on board a Disney cruise to Alaska…

Where we saw seals and bald eagles, humpback whales and calving glaciers. Where we took a train up into the mountains and a Beaver floatplane over fjords.

We also went to Disney World in November, and here and there I got to jet around the country for work. All told, there were some substantial breaks in benchtime action.

Then at the end of September, the ultimate disruption hit. I got laid off. In the world of marketing, and agencies in particular, it’s just one of those things that happens. This was actually my third time being laid off in the past seven years. In the past, modeling has been a sort of sanity-keeper during the ensuing resume sprucing and job hunting. And I suppose this time it was as well, but I found that my modeling game was thrown somewhat out of whack by the circumstances.

Happily, in mid-December, I accepted an offer with a great company, and am set to start soon after the new year, so that great stress of the past few months won’t be following me into 2019. And what’s more, I’m moving from the agency side to the client side, so I can kiss the hell that is timesheets goodbye.

What About the Bench?

During my sabbatical, I also took some time to do some updates to the bench itself. My goals were to 1) do something about the spider web-attracting, cobbled together hutch/lighting mount, 2) get paints off the actual bench surface to open up space and 3) find a better way to mount my camera for video work.

You can read all about the updates here, but I think the results are pretty striking. Of course, keeping it this clean is not something I excel at.

A Fast Start

2018 started out with a mostly blank slate. Late in 2017 I abandoned the two aircraft I’d been working on. Just…unhappy with them and unsatisfied with what I was doing at the bench overall. So I pulled out the little Takom AML-90 that I’d been working on earlier. DEF Model finally put out some resin tires for the thing (the kit tires are awful) so I was able to press ahead, using AK Real Colors to put out a fictitious scheme.

Weathering and my second or third attempt at a base later, I had my first completion of 2018 under my belt.

I also started playing around with some tiny 1/144 Bandai A-Wings, after my positive experience with their tiny X-Wing, but unlike the X-Wing, the detail on the A-Wings seemed heavy-handed, and I just couldn’t get over how toy-like they appeared, so they got shoved aside.

During the opening several weeks of the year, I found myself working from home while we waited for our new office space to be ready, and that gave me the opportunity to glue plastic together while sitting on conference calls or brainstorming concepts. I find I do some of my best thinking when building stuff, so on that front it was great. But it also left me with a few half-completed things.

The furthest progress I made was on the massive AFV Club boxing of Trumpeter’s Patriot. It was going swimmingly until I got screwed over by a combination of their shitty decals (a running 2018 theme) and bad reactions between AK Real Colors and decal solvents.

I picked up Trumpeter’s PAC-3 version, intending to push forward, and I did end up getting the trailer and missile boxes mostly built, but I have yet to revisit them for painting and whatnot.

During my work-from-home exile, I also got a good way through Meng’s T-72B3…

Trumpeter’s URAL 4320…

And Trumpeter’s M270 MLRS.

All of these were thoroughly enjoyable kits. There’s a slickness to the MLRS especially that blows me away. But for whatever reason I just haven’t gotten back to it.

Enter the Flankoff

In March, things got completely thrown out of whack with the Flankoff, a build-off between the Great Wall Hobby and Kitty Hawk Su-35 kits.

This was originally supposed to be just a naked build review, but I decided, despite not particularly caring much about the Su-35, to go whole hog on the GWH kit. This proved to be a major time sink, especially when I came to dealing with the exhausts and heat shielding.

Everything was going along well enough, but I was thrown a bit when the sabbatical hit and I found myself away from the bench for something like three weeks. When I got back, a lot of the enthusiasm for the Su-35 had bled off, and it fell away completely when the decals proved to be carrier film nightmares. This is also one that reinforced my belief in glossing before decals. Not because it’s necessary to prevent silvering. But as insurance to unify the finish, in case you need to take drastic steps to blend decals in and the like.

Ultimately, it was the decals…the prominent carrier film and the discoloration from lacquer clears slightly shifting the finish…that killed my drive to keep pushing forward on the GWH Su-35 at the end of July.

Quick Wins

Massively deflated by the Flankoff’s ignominious end, I wanted to get some quick wins before deciding on the next big project to sink my teeth into.

These came across multiple fronts. I decided to bring that T-72 from earlier in the year back out for painting. I also picked up Flyhawk’s neat little 1/72 FT-17s around the same time, along with a 1/144 Eduard MiG-15UTI. And on top of all that, I was offered a chance to review Tiger’s ERC-90 F1 Lynx.

Throughout August and September, these occupied most of my time, and I ended up finishing all of them in time for the annual Austin contest in early October.

Of all of them, I was happiest with the T-72, which has a fun scheme, some interesting weathering, and reasonably successful icicles.

The Flyhawk FT-17s were interesting as well. 1/72 scale armor is certainly a different beast than 1/35, and I think I got a bit turned around in the weathering stages. What works nicely in 1/35 piles up and kills contrast in 1/72, so I think some “stage makeup” planning might be called for in any future tiny tanks.

The Eduard MiG-15UTI? I don’t consider it very successful. While I loved the new Tamiya Lacquer Painto LP-11 for representing the silver lacquer finish, the panel lines were too heavy for the tiny scale and the result is a clean look that just comes across as toylike.

Last up for the September completions, we have the Tiger ERC-90 F1. Which was partially satisfying, partially not. There are some weak points on the kit – the tires, the articulating exhausts, the muffler and the water turbines are the major low points – that killed off my enthusiasm for maximum effort. There’s also the fact that the F1 is only used by Mexico and Argentina (and Argentina only has like 12) and is generally cleaner and far less interesting subject-wise than the ERC-90 F4 Sagaie. I entertained plans to do a digital camo scheme, but that faded with my enthusiasm.

Then I did a three-color NATO scheme, and for whatever reason it didn’t sit right with me, so I resettled on a tan-and-green number.

I was pretty happy with how the paint came out, but the scheme opened up problems in terms of weathering. Mainly it’s hard to do interesting, subtle desert-like weathering on this kind of yellow-tan color.

Overall, I’m glad I built it, but I’m not satisfied with it. I’m hoping Tiger does the right thing and makes an F4 variant so I can come back and take a fresh swing, since I do love my esoteric French armored cars.

A New Generation of WIPs

Right around the time I was wrapping these bastards up, I got laid off. Which threw my bench activities into a bit of a tailspin as I buckled down to get my portfolio site up and running and all of that jazz. I was a decent way into my main WIP at the time, a second go-round with Italeri’s F-104, and I won’t lie – it killed some of my enthusiasm for the project. I got off track with painting the damn thing, and had to reverse course and take a second stab, which thankfully came out how I wanted.

Now I’m limping through the weathering stages, not really feeling it, but close enough that I’ll definitely be seeing it through.

I’m also working on three other kits. Hasegawa’s 1/32 Ki-44…

Zoukei-Mura’s F-4D Phantom II, for a magazine article…

And a tiny Trumpeter T-80BV, as a nice distraction between the larger projects.

What’s Ahead of 2019?

For the coming year, I’m hoping to settle down a bit and be less all over the damn place. My hope is that, once I’m through this brace of kits that’s currently occupying my bench, I can find my ideal pace of one aircraft and one armor kit at a time. But I’ve also found that trying to plan too far ahead is a great way to totally screw myself for projects. So I’m just going to see what comes.

When Tamiya announced they were doing a new tooling of the M551 Sheridan, I had something of a mixed reaction.

The M551 is one of my favorite pieces of esoteric American armor – up there with the M18 Hellcat and M270 MLRS. But my fascination stems from the Desert Storm era mainly, and the Tamiya kit is looking like it’s going to represent a Vietnam-era 551.

Fortunately, Rye Field looks like it’s going to be coming right alongside to satisfy my Desert Storm urgings with its own M551A1.

But…I still want an excuse to build the Tamiya kit, you know? Even if Vietnam armor doesn’t ring my bell the way Desert Storm hardware does, Tamiya makes great kits.

Inspiration happened to strike when I was driving somewhere with my oldest and he asked me who my favorite Transformer was (we’d seen Bumblebee the day before).

Outside the obvious choice of Optimus Prime, there were a few second-tier Autobots who I always really liked. Wheeljack, who had those nifty ear things that pulsed when he talked. Cliffjumper, who was basically Bumblebee but red and competent. And the onomatopoeia-shouting Warpath. Warpath was a tank that would literally yell shit like “KA-BLAM!”. It was absolutely ridiculous, but hey, it’s a character trait that’s stuck with me for 30+ years, so that’s something.

Anyway…the reason Warpath is relevant is that he transformed into an M551 Sheridan…

Anyhow…that’s my plan (and my excuse) to build Tamiya’s M551. As fucking Warpath. In his vehicle mode. I’m not going to pretend for a moment like I have the skills or the patience to do the hacking necessary to pull off a robot mode. Still – a primer red and gray Sheridan with a big Autobot emblem on it should be different from a sea of olive drab 551s that are sure to result from Tamiya’s release.

Around the modeling interwebs, it seems like everyone is suddenly kung-fu fighting about “basic modeling skills” and, honestly, I have no desire to join in. It’s all stupid for a few reasons.

• There is no agreed-upon threshold for “basic”, so it’s all subjective.
• People who throw the term around non-ironically are usually humorless pedantic assholes, so whether or not it actually is condescending it comes across as such.
• And it’s just so…damn…tiresome.

Instead, I wanted to take a moment to explore some of the absurd rabbit holes that we can find ourselves running down as modelers. In the past 24 hours, I’ve encountered three. And as I was thinking on the drive to work this morning, the level of fucks given about such insignificant things is probably baffling to anybody on the outside.

Rabbit Hole 1: P-47 Blast Tubes

For the unaware, the P-47 Thunderbolt packed eight fifty-caliber machine guns, four in each wing. These were fitted with aluminum blast tubes that, at least for the inboard three, extend well beyond the leading edge of the wing. They’re a prominent feature of the Jug, and Trumpeter’s way of handling them is asinine.

Basically, Trumpeter would have you install the guns, install the tubes, and then slide a leading edge housing over them. This is stupid because 1) it makes cleaning up that area substantially more annoying and 2) it presents challenges in painting and weathering, since the tubes are bare metal.

I go into this silliness in a bit more detail in my first installment of the P-47 build log if you want to see it a bit better for yourself. But the basic gist is this: I’m willing to go to lengths to be able to install the tubes after the fact, because it will make basically every other part of the build go more smoothly and create fewer chances for fuckups.

In tackling this problem, I first took to filing off the slightly raised collars at the base of the brass Master replacements. But even so, sliding the tubes in from the front, it’s very difficult to find the machine gun bodies, and would be even worse with the wings closed. Add to that the inboard gun seems to sit high, resulting in a tube sitting at a depressed angle compared to the rest, and it’s a shitty solution.

Hasegawa has a cleaner solution where the tubes are cut down, and slot into a wall inside the wing much closer to the leading edge. When I build Trumpeter’s P-47D-30 six years ago, I basically took this solution and applied it to the Trumpeter kit.

Now I’m thinking of doing the same again. It’s a cleaner solution than any other. So my plan is to build a little wall inside the wing, and put some kind of magnetic sheet on it. Then glue 1mm x 1mm magnets to the back of the chopped-down tubes. The difficulty is cutting turned brass at the necessary level of precision. I’m going to give it a go, but I’ve also got a set of Quickboost resin tubes on order as a backup.

Rabbit Hole 2: P-47 Curtiss Electric Prop

The P-47 used a fuckton of props throughout its life. But the Razorback pretty much used one – a relatively narrow-profile cuffed Curtiss Electric number frequently called the toothpick, since that’s what it looks like relative to the massive paddle props of later Jugs.

Trumpeter provides four props with its P-47 kits, and the toothpick is one of them, but its rather…fat…in both width and thickness. I spent a decent amount of time the other night attacking it with sanding sticks to thin it down and narrow its profile.

But…the whole time I was also wishing there was another option. To the extent of considering running down an ancient 1/32 Revell Razorback. Then a thought struck me – what about Hasegawa? I’ve got a 1/32 Hasegawa P-47M, after all. Seems unlikely they’d put the toothpick in, since they never did a Razorback, but then again, Trumpeter throws it in with the P-47N, so who knows right?

Well, I looked online and – while I will have to confirm later on when I can dig the box out – Hasegawa includes a Curtiss Electric toothpick for some reason. So…yoink! I’ll probably be stealing that to use on the Trumpeter kit.

Rabbit Hole 3: Bravo Hornet

So I had this crazy idea to bring not one, not two, but three builds to the bench now that I’ve wrapped up the F-104 and F-4D. The third? An F/A-18B Hornet in a rather striking aggressor scheme that first appeared in late 2017, I believe, and has recently been showing up in pics with some rather compelling wear, tear and grime. Furball Aero-Design just released a new 1/32 sheet with this scheme included, giving me all the impetus I needed.

Just one problem. Academy never kitted an F/A-18B.

Not to be deterred, I tracked down a Kinetic boxing of the Academy Hornet that supposedly allows you to build any legacy variant (A, A+, B, C, D). All was well and good until this morning, when I woke up to a refund and apologies that the seller did not, in fact, have the kit.

Well shit. What to do?

The key thing that I need is the A/B tails. I have the Avionix B conversion and that’ll be nice for the cockpit, but one of the tails is kinda melty, and besides I’d rather not have to use heavy resin so far aft if I can avoid it.

I happen to have an Academy A+, but it’s slated for a Canadian CF-18. And two Ds…perfect for the two-seater canopy, but it’s got them C/D tails.

I’ve also got a started then put-away-fucked-by-shitting-aftermarket-intake-screen-detail F/A-18C that is basically useless here. Except as a parts donor and maybe construction or paint mule.

Ultimately? I decided to pick up another A+. By combining it with one of the Ds, I can do a bit of transmogrification and turn an A+ and a D into a B…and a C. Or close enough to satisfy myself.

Silly? Yeah. Pricey? Academy 1/32 Hornets aren’t cheap and are getting hard to find, so…yeah. But still cheaper than the Kinetic boxing. So I guess I’ve got that going for me.

Now I’m rumbling around with the idea of building not just the B, but possibly a NAWDC F/A-18C as well. There’s an interesting brown and white number that I’ve got my eye on.

Hmm.

Four 1/32 builds on the go at the same time is probably a bit much. A rabbit hole of its own.

When you live in central Texas, the heat is part of the bargain. Yes, we get breakfast tacos and more queso than you can shake a tortilla chip at. Amazing BBQ, some damn tasty burgers, and a spring and fall that most of the country would kill for. We spend our winters usually somewhere in the 50s and 60s and nobody owns a snow shovel.

But the summers are a motherfucker.

May and June are generally okay. The heat comes and goes. The nights are still pleasant. But with July, it starts becoming oppressive. And that only ratchets up with August. For a little taste, here’s what the next week looks like in Austin.

The daytime heat you mostly work around. If you have stuff to do outside, you do it in the morning or the evening, when it’s not quite so ridiculous. Even in August I can still go mountain biking, just so long as I’m done by say 10:30 at the latest.

The real morale-killer is the nights. See, the forecast up there is a lie. The only time you’ll actually experience the 70s this time of year is at like 5 in the morning. As I write this, at 11 PM, it’s still 88, and it’s muggy. The portable AC that I use to keep the bench moderately comfortable in the summer months can’t cope with it, and it will only cycle on about 2 minutes out of every five.

Up until mid-July I was pushing through pretty well. I managed to polish off my big Trumpeter P-47 and, even though I’m procrastinating on the 1/32 Corsair and using the heat as an excuse, I managed to get my 1/32 P-51 off the ground.

But having just returned from several days in Key West, I find myself in a state of nope.

As a quick aside – I actually think the heat in Key West is worse than it is here. It may technically be 15 degrees cooler, but it’s SO DAMN HUMID that you’re basically sweating the entire time. Didn’t help that the pool where we stayed was so warm that it wasn’t refreshing at all. The only time I felt comfortable was when we went snorkeling.

But now that I’m back, I just can’t keep the bench going in this heat. Which is annoying. The bench is my decompression time, and life is plenty busy right now! Maybe the need for that decompression will force me out into the heat again in a few days, but for the time being, I’m planning to wait until things moderate a little bit before tackling anything of note. At least until my AC unit can run at least half the time!

Four years ago, I wrote about this hobby’s fascination (to put it mildly) with German WWII subjects. And it elicited a lot of discussion (again, to put it mildly). And this was all before Trump. Before Brexit. Before Charlottesville and “good people on both sides”. Before this troubling surge in white supremacy that seems to be turning increasingly violent.

With the world in a different place than it was four years ago, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit the topic and take stock.

Previously On…

If you don’t want to read through the previous post, or all 150+ comments that followed, here’s a TL;DR:

• In terms of kit availability, German subjects are definitely over-represented relative to other WWII combatants, most notably in armor.
• The reason is likely capitalism. That is, a high demand for German WWII kits. They sell.
• There’s a distinction to be made between those who build the occasional German subject as part of a larger interest in World War II overall, and those who build only (or overwhelmingly) German subjects.
• The latter doesn’t necessarily imply one is part of the master race booster club, but, you know, be prepared for some raised eyebrows.
• The tendency to slap crosses and swastikas on Star Wars and Gundam stuff is weird (and you never see it done with other combatants).
• A lot of comments get very defensive or downright hostile.

Nazisplaining

Even now, four years on, I’ll get comments about that post calling me oversensitive and then explaining that the reason the commenter is into German shit is simple. And it usually boils down to something like “they look cooler”. Or the camo schemes are more interesting. Which, to me, is about as shallow a reason as you can find. It’s like my six-year-old picking out Hot Wheels cars. But in the main we’re talking about grown-ass men.

The Cop and the KKK Memorabilia

Today I came across a story about a family who was house shopping and looked at one particular house – a cop’s house – where they found Confederate memorabilia and a KKK application framed and hanging on a wall in a bedroom. The family is Afro-Hispanic and it understandably freaked them out (bonus – the cop was cleared of fatally shooting a black man in 2009). The rest of the story isn’t all that germane to this post, but one passage really stood out to me:

“His wife, Reyna Mathis, who is Hispanic, recalled the situation as “uncomfortable.” She said her family collects items from the Detroit Red Wings and the University of Michigan because they are proud of those affiliations, which is why she questions how he could keep racist items up in his home if he didn’t associate with them.”

And that got me thinking. How we choose to decorate our homes is absolutely a reflection of who we are. Reyna’s point about being proud of those affiliations is, well, on point. I have a small collection of sports memorabilia, and it’s from teams and athletes that I like (not the Red Wings). Nolan Ryan. Andy Moog. Brett Hull. Patrick Roy. There’s a vintage Ben-Hur poster in our living room because it’s one of my favorite movies.

If we were selling our house and some potential buyers came by to look at it, they’d find in my models an interest in World War II and late Cold War aviation, with a side helping of weird French armored cars. But what deductions would potential buyers make at a cabinet stuffed with Bf 109s and Fw 190s? Or a shelf full of SS troopers and Star Wars imperial subjects in German markings? I don’t think they’d be out of bounds at all concluding “this guy has a hard-on for nazis”.

Something I would put to everyone who’s gotten all defensive or snowflakey or who’s railed “I don’t care what anyone thinks” about building mostly German WWII shit. How would you explain a display cabinet full of swastika-adorned things to a potential homebuyer? Or a potential love interest? Or the parents of your kids’ friends? Or…you get the idea.

“Oh, I just think the paint schemes were cooler” sounds a bit hollow in this situation.

You’re Probably Not a Nazi

Building mostly or exclusively German WWII shit doesn’t mean you are a neo-nazi or a white supremacist. I’m sure some small percentage are. And I’m guessing that if a neo-nazi or white supremacist builds models, they probably gravitate toward the Third Reich. But I’d bet that for most it’s something way more subconscious. Something that hasn’t been thought deeply about at all, which is why I get all the comments about how cool their camo was. Or maybe there’s some kind of “playing with the taboo” thing at play (which is how a lot of radicalization can get started, but nevermind that).

All I would ask, if you find the wave of butthurt rolling over you, is to stop and think. Really, truly, deeply think, about why you build the subjects you build.

Times They Are a Changing?

One thing I’ve noticed, now that I think about it, is that the Third Reich wave seems to have crested. The past four years have seen several prominent releases – Tamiya’s Bf 109, a whole bunch of tanks from Meng and Takom and RFM and so on – but they don’t seem to be showing up quite as thick in the online community or on the contest tables that I’ve seen. The WWII releases making the biggest splashes, at least in aircraft, seem to be on the allied side. There’s been a wave of British subjects like the Lancaster, Typhoon, Tempest, and most recently Airfix’s Spitfire XIV. And of late it seems like P-51s have been all the rage, from the slew of Airfix releases to the big Revell 1/32 D-5 to Eduard’s just-released new tool.

And World War II in general seems to be slipping off just a bit as a renewed focus on more modern subjects takes hold. I see a lot more Tamiya F-14s and Zoukei F-4s getting built than I do Tamiya 109s. People are losing their shit over Academy’s AH-1Z. There seems to be a lot more excitement over M551 Sheridans than yet another Panther.

I don’t know if this is all cyclical or some kind of generational thing as more Gen Xers and older Millennials find their way into (or back into) the hobby. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing for the subjects that adorned their Desert Storm trading cards and late 80s/early 90s air show memories. Hell, maybe it’s just that German subjects are just so saturated in the market right now. Or maybe the broader sociopolitical moment is giving more people pause, even if on a subconscious level.

Who can say for sure? I know I can’t. But it’ll be something interesting to keep an eye on for the next four years.

In mid-2010, nearly a decade, two kids, two dogs, and six jobs ago, I was restless. With our daughter’s birth weeks away, I was casting about for something I could do at home, and that I could easily step away from to deal with newborn stuff. My wife suggested that I give modeling a shot. I’d done it as a kid, after all, and it seemed less of an investment than my idea of restoring an old Land Rover.

Looking back, maybe fixing up a Series III 109 would have been the cheaper route!

Modeling got its hooks into me fast. It proved an amazing decompression tool, and a great way to disengage my brain and let it chew away at other things in the background. It let me work with my hands. It kept me from going stir crazy. It led to stupid fights on the internet.

Everyone’s doing those decade challenge posts right now, but I thought it’d be interesting to do a retrospective on every single damn thing I’ve built since picking the hobby back up again, and see what’s changed along the way.

2010

1- Tamiya 1/48 P-51B Mustang – “Shangri-La”

So, my first aborted attempt at modeling was with a 1/48 Revell SBD Dauntless. It’s a kit that dates back to 1960, and it’s just not very good at all. I quickly switched gears, relegated the Fail Dauntless to paint mule status, and had a go at Tamiya’s 1/48 P-51B. At the time it was already something like 15 years old, but it went together in true Tamiya fashion and gave me a strong springboard back into the hobby.

When people suggest newcomers get some garbage kit or another to cut their teeth on, I always wince. It seems to me that these mid-90s Tamiya kits are a far smoother introduction (or reintroduction) to gluing bits of plastic together and slathering them in pigments suspended in chemical solutions.

2- Accurate Miniatures SBD-3 Dauntless

Displeasure with the Revell kit aside, the Dauntless is one of my favorite aircraft. From a historical perspective, it might be the most significant aircraft the United States fielded, as it was a major workhose in the critical year of 1942. And from an aesthetic perspective, it’s got a certain functional ugliness to it that resonates with me.

The AccuMini kit is certainly far better than the Revell, but the engineering is frustrating, particularly the weird top/bottom way the cockpit builds. It makes test-fitting almost impossible, so you just have to hope it all works out.

This Dauntless also saw the beginning – and end – of my experiments using Vallejo Model Color for main paintwork. It can be done, but…

3 & 4 – Hobby Boss 1/48 F4F-3 Wildcats

After the Dauntless, I took on Hobby Boss’ Wildcat. Actually, two of them. Overall, a decent kit, with one glaring screaming flaw. The main canopy is too thick to be posed open, but doesn’t sit right with the windscreen, so can’t be posed shut, either. I had to resort to vacform canopies.

Since I was doing these for the kids, and didn’t really have much of an idea of what I was doing yet, I neglected to weather them in any way. The result is…not my favorite.

5 – Zvezda 1/48 La-5

Zvezda’s La-5 is weird. There’s a sense of…this isn’t going to work. Especially with the surprisingly busy cockpit and engine. But after a bit of finagling, everything fits into place with a suddenness that’s as satisfying as popping your neck after you’ve been trying for days.

The paint on this was White Ensign, and, well, NEVER AGAIN. This stuff wouldn’t stay in suspension with any enamel thinners, leaving just a dense paste of crap at the bottom of my airbrush.

Also, the La-5 is a gorgeous little plane, but it’s…little. It’s a crime that nobody has made a good one in 1/32.

6 – Eduard 1/48 Yak-3

This kit dates to Eduard before they got good. It’s simplistic and the detail is soft and blobby. I also made the mistake of trying to mask the camo with play-doh, which, never again. Lesson learned on that front.

2011

7 – Tamiya 1/48 P-47D-25 Thunderbolt – “Hairless Joe”

Hands down my favorite 1/48 prop kit, Tamiya’s Jug is a masterpiece of engineering and a joy to build. This one was probably the first where I started to kick into a higher gear.

8 – Tamiya 1/35 M4 Sherman Early Production

A simple, quick-building kit. Looking at it now, I should have gone PE on the light guards and drilled out the driver’s machine gun. The weathering’s a bit simplistic, but for my first tank in a super long time, I was pretty happy with it.

9 – Eduard 1/32 Bf 109E-7 Trop

My first 1/32 build. At the time, with the display space I had, this was the upper bound of what I could do size-wise, but I really enjoyed the larger scale.

The kit itself? A mix of good and not good. The cowl is NOT designed to be installed closed, and I was about to give up and fling the damn thing into the trash when a last bit of effort caused it to seat just so.

10 – Tamiya 1/48 Mosquito NF.II

Kit was fine. Peddinghaus decals were garbage. So was my ability to paint something overall black and have it be interesting.

11 – AFV Club 1/35 Achilles Mk.IIc

A janky kit in many ways (SOOO many ejector pin marks, soft detail inside the turret, garbage tracks), but a fun one to paint and weather.

12 – Wingnut Wings 1/32 Sopwith Pup RNAS

My first experience with Wingnut. My first biplane. My first experience with rigging. And painting wood grain. A fantastic kit that I can’t recommend enough. Don’t let rigging scare you – it’s tedious, but there’s a certain zen-like thing to it, especially with these Wingnut kits.

13 – Dragon 1/35 Panzer IV Ausf G

Decent. My first experience with metal track links. I fucked up the snow effects. This build also started my discomfort with building anything SS-related.

14 – Tamiya 1/32 Spitfire Mk.VIII – “Fargo Express”

Superlative kit. Not a fan of my gun staining, the too-clean rest of the aircraft, or the chipping. But I still dig the exhaust staining I got out of this one. Believe it or not, this is actually when I started playing with varying the surface finish.

15 – Tamiya 1/48 P-51D Mustang – “Petie 2nd”

The build that got me through a layoff.

16 – Cyber-Hobby 1/35 Panzer III Ausf L “Vorpanzer”

A fun little kit where I started getting more sophisticated with my armor weathering.

17 – Tamiya 1/48 Fw-190A-3

I honestly wish I could forget this one. Not my finest hour by a long shot. I rushed to finish it before a move, for one, and the thick Tamiya decals didn’t do it any favors.

18 – Dragon 1/35 T-34/85

Another relatively quick build amid move craziness. I keep waiting for the T-34 to become the next “it tank” from Meng and Takom to tackle another one.

2012

19 – Tamiya 1/48 P-47D-20 Thunderbolt – “Magic Carpet”

Magic Carpet is, in my opinion, one of the most striking Razorback schemes you can find, and it participated in the famous furball at airfield Y-29 during Operation Bodenplatte.

This is one where…I like the scheme, but feel that I didn’t really capture it. The metallics don’t look like bare metal. They look like silver paint.

20 – Revellogram 1/48 P-47D-20 – “The Bug”

Look. Tamiya’s Jug is superlative. But if I were to recommend a second, it would be the old Revellogram kit. It builds well and can be found cheap. Others – Hasegawa, Academy, etc – are just half-measures between the two ends of the spectrum.

21 – Pacific Coast Models 1/32 Fiat G.55 Centauro

Not a great kit, but I had a blast building it. Including scratchbuilding the flaps and certain scoops and things. This kit taught me the power of tonal crush, with the vibrant, contrasty splinter camo completely hiding small variations in the paintwork.

22- Hasegawa 1/48 N1K1 George

Bad attempts at salt chipping and salt weathering.

23 – Revell 1/48 PV-1 Ventura

Adventures in weathering tricolor camo! My first painted markings (octopus courtesy of Maketar). Weathering isn’t that hot, but it’s the out of register stars and bars that drive this one off a cliff for me.

24 – Tamiya 1/48 Dewoitine D.520

Quite possibly the last of my pre-shaded builds, and even on this one I was pushing into adding additional depth and variation. Still love the D.520 – one day I’ll go after that 1/32 Azur kit.

25 – Tamiya 1/48 P-51B Mustang – “The Hun Hunter ~ Texas”

Tamiya’s P-51B remains one of my favorite kits, and Henry Brown is a fascinating figure with some borderline ridiculous war stories. His Mustang also has a fairly rare scheme of RAF Dark Green over bare metal – it was one I knew I had to do. I think I could have done it better. One day.

26 – HK Models 1/32 B-25J Mitchell – “Bottoms-Up II”

Can’t believe it’s been 7 years since I wrapped this thing up – it’s a solid kit on its own, but also ripe for going detail crazy. When I finished mine, aftermarket wasn’t really available save for machine gun barrels and some corrected props. I’ve got two more of these – a gun-nosed J and a gunship H – that I really want to get to.

This was also the kit where I got started with black-basing in a kind of accidental discovery fashion.

27 – Hasegawa 1/32 Bf 109G-6 in Swiss service

Neutrality stripes are visually very striking, but they also trick the eye. Subtle tonal shifts in the brown and green camo get crushed together, unnoticeable. A good lesson for future builds.

28 & 29 – Eduard 1/144 MiG-21MF Fishbeds – Czech and Polish

Final quick-turn builds for 2012. These are great kits considering they can literally both fit on a business card.

2013

30 – Hobby Boss 1/48 Messerschmitt Me 262A-1a/U4

Hobby Boss does a pretty solid job with this kit – I wish I’d done a better job with the decals. The massive nose cannon was also a bit of a mess since I was adapting a metal cannon intended for (I believe) an He 219 or Me 410 or something. This ended up being my last 1/48 WWII subject.

31 – Trumpeter 1/32 P-47D-27 Thunderbolt in French service

My first – and not my last – tangle with Trumpeter’s great-and-troubled Jug lineup. While it has its annoyances (ammo doors, leading edge gun fairings, overboard engine and turbosupercharger detail that’s invisible and complicates everything, shoddy gear struts, poor wingroot fit along the underside), I much prefer it as a kit to Hasegawa’s effort. That four-piece cowl of theirs is just awful, and I have yet to see one built that manages to hide it.

32 – Wingnut Wings 1/32 Sopwith Snipe (Late)

Second Wingnut kit. If anything, the Snipe is a better kit than the Pup.

33 – Panda 1/16 Pz.Kpfw 38(t)

Is Panda’s big 38(t) a great kit? Not really. It’d be passable in 1/35, but in 1/16 several details seem chunky. Fortunately for it, most aspects of the actual tank are pretty chunky and crude, too. 1/16 is a great size for this tiny tank though – gives it a lot of presence, but doesn’t overwhelm the way later/larger tanks do.

34 – Hasegawa `1/32 Messerschmitt Bf 109G-4/R6

When Revell released their 1/32 109G-6, I opted to do a double build alongside a Hasegawa for direct comparison. The Hasegawa got built up as a Regia Aeronautica example.

35 – Revell 1/32 Messerschmitt Bf 109G-6

Revell’s G-6 is frustrating. Like all 1/32 G-6 kits. They all get some stuff really right, and drop the ball elsewhere. And annoyingly, there’s like zero overlap in their failures.

36 – Hasegawa 1/32 Ki-84 Hayate

Good kit. Bullshit lack of aftermarket support. Happy with many parts of it, but I wince at the chipping.

2014

37 – Trumpeter 1/32 Messerschmitt Me 262A-2a

Probably still one of my favorite builds – Trumpeter’s kit is solid, and this one reflects a real-life example abandoned off the runways at an airbase outside Innsbruck. Recreating the bare panels with puttied joins, the collapsed landing gear, the hazed canopy, all presented a fun challenge and the opportunity for an interesting, unusual presentation.

38 – Tamiya 1/35 Challenger 1 MBT

Britain’s Challenger 1 is possibly my favorite modern-ish tank. And while the Tamiya kit is solid in many respects, it pains me that we don’t have a good, modern take on the kit from Takom, Meng, RFM or the other upstarts. I thought we were heading that way after the Chieftain kits, but everyone’s fallen into a WWII-shaped hole.

39 – Trumpeter 1/48 MiG-21F-13

This abandoned F-13 didn’t come out quite the way I’d hoped, but it was a great lesson in paint fading, chipping, streaking, and masking markings.

40 – Trumpeter 1/35 T-80BV

Over the years, Trumpeter has become perhaps my favorite 35th scale manufacturer. Their kits may be a bit fussy, but the detail and engineering have gotten very good in the past few years.

41 – Hobby Boss 1/35 T-26 Mod. 1933

Better snow effects than my Panzer IV, but still something off.

42 – Trumpeter 1/35 LAV-AT

Not my finest hour. This is an older Trumpeter kit, and it shows, with a lot of what should be transparencies made up of just solid plastic. I also struggled with the weathering. Bah.

43 – Hasegawa 1/48 A-4F Skyhawk

Shiny fucking tires aside, this is one that I’m fairly happy with. Furball Aero-Design’s decals are world class.

44 – Trumpeter 1/32 Messerschmitt Bf 109G-10/U4/R2

This striking recce 109 was flown into a US airbase near the end of the war, and as such it has a handful of really good reference photos showing the interesting camoflage, missing gear doors, heavy exhaust staining, and more. Of the various late 109 kits on the market, I have to say I’ve had the most fun building Trumpeter’s offering, even if it’s not perfect.

2015

45 – Tamiya 1/32 Vought F4U-1 “Birdcage” Corsair

Speaking of perfect kits, Tamiya’s Corsairs come damn close. Had an absolute blast on this one, though the mismatched tires – very evident in the one reference this particular aircraft has – require constant explanation.

46 – Kitty Hawk 1/48 AH-1Z Zulu Viper

Not all Kitty Hawk kits are garbage – the Zulu actually fits together quite well, and its failings are more in minor aspects of detail, such as the lack of clear seeker heads for the Hellfires, the inaccurate sensor ball, etc.

47 – Kinetic 1/48 F-5B Freedom Fighter

This kit has some serious fit issues between the forward and aft fuselages, but it was a pleasure to do the Greek camo thing. I feel like I failed capturing the filth on the aft fuselage sides though.

48 – Takom 1/35 Leopard C2

I’ve got a real weak spot for late Cold War armor. Probably because that’s when I was growing up, collecting Desert Storm trading cards, and going to airshows. Canada’s Leopard 1 “remix” is a great example, and this one was mostly fun to build, but a bit clunky compared with Takom’s newer kits.

2016

49 – Italeri 1/32 F-104S ASA Starfighter

Italeri’s big 104 is frustration. It goes together decently, but really falls apart toward the end of the build, where attaching things like gear doors and (on the S ASA variant) antennae becomes a rolling caravan of suck. Still…I don’t even like the 104, and I’ve already built two of these.

50 – Revell 1/72 Royal Navy Sea King Hu.5

This kit was mostly decent, but the stupid landing gear and their pontoon housings were straight trash.

51 – Trumpeter 1/32 SBD-5 Dauntless

Fun with tricolor camo. Next time I build one of these, though, I will NOT be replacing the center dive flap bay. It took easily half of this thing’s total build time and added nothing to it.

2017

52 – Tamiya 1/48 F-14A Tomcat

As usual, Tamiya turns in a great kit. It may be lacking in some small areas (gear bay detail, cockpit detail), but the fit and engineering must be experienced to be believed. Weathering TPS schemes is fun.

53 – Bandai 1/72* A-Wing

I had a picture in my head that I didn’t come all that close to pulling off with this one.

54 – Bandai 1/144 T-65 X-Wing

This tiny little starfighter was a fun, quick job to at least get something done.

2018

55 – Takom 1/35 Panhard AML-90

This little guy was a lot of fun to work on. I will be building more in the future.

56 – Eduard 1/144 MiG-15 UTI

A silver lacquered aircraft doesn’t leave you many places to go in 1/144. Unsatisfying finish was unsatisfying.

57 – Tiger Model 1/35 Panhard ERC-90 F1 Lynx

This kit should have been the more widely-serving F4 Sagaie. Overall, the kit is solid, with a few weak spots out back. The lack of resin tires (they may exist now for all I know) also annoyed significantly. And I wish so much that someone would provide mirror decals for the mirrors, the way Tamiya does for their car kits.

58 – Meng 1/35 T-72B3

This striking blue/white/black scheme is part of Tank Biathlon livery, and was a lot of fun to paint and weather. Meng’s T-72 is a wonderful kit, which helps quite a bit.

59 & 60 – Flyhawk 1/72 Renault FT-17s

Oh wow, these kits are tiny, but very well engineered and a blast to build. If I go after them again, I’ll definitely be using the PE replacements for certain handles and brackets, though.

2019

61 – Italeri F-104G Starfighter – Danish service

Hello, I’m a glutton for punishment. Tackling the Italeri 104 again, this time going for the extremely faded, beaten look that many Danish 104s managed to get over time.

62 – Zoukei-Mura 1/48 F-4D Phantom II

A mostly good kit with a few small foibles (thick slime light frames, shoddy control surfaces). Looking forward to building many more ZM Phantoms in time.

63 – Trumpeter 1/32 P-47D-20 Thunderbolt – “Little Rock-ette”

This striking 318th Fighter Group scheme, with blue striping and bare metal cowl and tail, has been calling out to me for some time, so I finally went for it. The Razorback kit lacks the dorsal fuselage bullshit of the bubbletops, but it makes up for it with an absolute shitshow of a windscreen installation. Again – good but troubled kit.

64 – Tamiya 1/32 Goodyear FG-1D Corsair

Weathering over gloss sea blue has always scared the shit out of me, but I finally sucked it up for this Okinawa-based VMF-323 Corsair.

65 – Hobby Boss 1/35 DANA 152mm SPG

Not gonna lie. I built this one entirely because it looks cool and has a striking camo scheme. The kit itself is not as good as Hobby Boss/Trumpeter’s newer kits, but you can see how this was an evolutionary step on the way to, say, the HEMTT or the HIMARS.

66 – Wave “1/35th-ish” Tomahawk / Warhammer / Blowy Boi

I have fond memories of the Warhammer and other mechs from childhood, but I never got into the actual RPG. So I give precisely zero fucks about various clans and whatnot. While it’s supposed to be 1/72, I built it as a 1/35 robot thing, stuck with the shit job of cleaning up some leaf-covered streets.

It’s 2020, and this year I’m doing something a bit different. After years focused on 1/32 scale, I’m kicking the year off with a pair of 1/48 WWII subjects.

If you don’t immediately recognize them, that smaller one is a 1/48 Tamiya P-47M, and the larger one is HK’s new 1/48 B-17G Flying Fortress.

It’s been a long time…

While I’ve done a number of modern subjects in 1/48 (like THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS), I haven’t completed a 1/48 WWII subject since February 2013 – Hobby Boss’ Me 262A-1a/U4:

So…why did I venture away from 1/48? And why am I now coming back?

In 2012, I really started falling into 1/32 scale. That year I build PCM’s Fiat G.55, a Hasegawa 109, HK’s B-25J, and got a decent way into a Trumpeter P-47. I fell in love with the scale, the larger canvas, and the sheer presence that 1/32 kits possess in abundance.

After that 262, I tried my hand at Eduard’s then-new Spitfire Mk.IXc and, while it’s a lovely kit, I just ran out of interest in it, and dove wholeheartedly into 1/32.

There and back again

While I love the presence of 1/32, it’s not without its drawbacks. Several of these I knew at the time, others have kind of manifested themselves over the intervening years.

• Subject selection isn’t as good. It’s just not. It’s certainly been improving, but when you have a scale that mainly consists of three players – Trumpeter, Hasegawa, and Tamiya, you run out of runway pretty quick, and a particular subject may only be represented by a single, flawed kit.
• Kit quality is variable. There are some great kits in 1/32 – like Tamiya’s Corsair lineup. But for the most part the options are good to average, and usually beset by a handful of nagging frustrations. Even Tamiya’s great P-51 has a rather shoddy cowl design. Trumpeter’s bubbletop P-47s have a terrible dorsal spine that doesn’t line up to the fuselage well, their wings are too thick, leading to poor fit at the underside wingroot, the ammo doors don’t fit, the gun fairings don’t fit, the cowl-to-fuselage join is remarkably poor, and so on.
• Aftermarket support lags 1/48. This too has been improving, but not enough. Marking options lag and certain subjects are just shit out of luck. What to spiff up the very lacking interior of HK’s B-25? Your options mostly begin and end with Eduard PE. Want aftermarket tires to replace the vinyl horror shows in Trumpeter’s Dauntless? Tough shit. Want…anything for Hasegawa’s Ki-84? NOPE.
• 1/32 kits are a time suck. I build slower nowadays than I used to. Part of that is advancing skill and patience and precision. But a huge part of it is just that 1/32 aircraft take a lot damn longer to get together. Often it’s a crapshoot whether or not a kit will hold my interest long enough to get it together. The same applies to 1/48, but even then, I typically manage to push quarter scale kits into or very nearly into paint before pulling the eject handle. With 1/32, it’s usually somewhere around the cockpit stage.

When I review the stuff I’ve built – or attempted to build – in 1/32 over the past several years, the truth of the matter is that there’s almost always a better, well-regarded kit in 1/48 that I could have aimed at. Academy F/A-18B that I had to cobble together from at least two kits? Could have just bought Kinetic’s F/A-18B. Trumpeter P-47D-20? There’s Tamiya’s superlative Razorback. Tamiya P-51s? There’s Meng’s very nice kit, and now Eduard is in the mix as well. Italeri F-104? Kinetic’s F-104 looks miles better. Trumpeter F-117? Tamiya, again. Trumpeter MiG-23MLD? Could have just as easily gone for their 1/48.

And 1/48 kits have been improving steadily since I wandered off to 1/32. Great Wall’s Su-35 is an amazing piece of engineering. Zoukei’s F-4 Phantoms are great. Tamiya’s new Bf 109 and Ki-61 and P-38 are all engineering marvels. Eduard’s wowing everyone with the new Mustang. Zvezda’s done some amazing VVS kits like the Pe-2. ICM is shocking everyone with the quality of their latest kits like the MiG-25 and B-26 Invader.

I don’t have any intention of abandoning 1/32. But I want to see how I fare with 1/48 again. Maybe I can get through projects on a more regular basis, keep myself from running out of fucks before a project gets fun, and keep my skills a bit more tuned since I’m not stuck waiting 6 months between weathering sessions.

How’s it going?

So far, so…decent. I’ve been mostly stuck in the cockpits and internals of both kits so far, and my elation is tempered with disappointment at HK’s quarter-assed treatment of the B-17’s internals.

P-47M – to aftermarket or not to aftermarket?

Tamiya’s Jug presented me with an easy choice early on. I’d snagged the Aires cockpit, planning to replace the kit parts entirely, but then I started looking at them side-by-side. There are a few details where the Aires set clearly wins out – the seat is much thinner, the throttle quadrant better detailed, and the gunsight a significant improvement. But the main cockpit parts? I saw no reason to put the kit parts aside.

Instead, I added a bit of detail and called it a day.

Both the kit and Aires seat/bulkhead arrangements feature the same problem – the seat frame’s crossbar is molded right into the bulkhead. The problem with that? P-47 harnesses looped over the back of that crossbar to anchor lower down the frame. I fixed that by shaving the crossbar off the bulkhead, adding some tubing to the Tamiya kit seat frame, and adding the Aires seat to that.

Once I had the few mods I made, details I added, and some bits from the Aires cockpit ported over, I primed everything and then gave it a coat of MRP Gunship Green, which matches the commonly-agreed FS code associated with Dark Dull Green.

At this point, I’ve been a bit on hold waiting for an Eduard Look panel to show up. I was going to use a Yahu panel, but Eduard makes one specific to the M, and that already has a cutout for where the gunsight mounts.

So while I wait, I’ve been working on the other kit.

HK B-17 – are you fucking kidding me right now?

HK’s B-17 looks absolutely gorgeous – if you’re looking at the exterior detail. Once you glimpse what’s going on with the internals, it’s another matter entirely. I think the Monogram kit might be more generous with the detail.

I mean…this is the center console.

The control yokes are no great shakes, either, so I’m scratchbuilding replacements. Can you guess which is which?

Now, to an extent I get being a bit halfassed with a B-17’s interior. Most of it will be buried the second you close the fuselage halves. But if there are two things are that prominently visible through the windscreen – it’s the center console and the control yokes!

The sad detail failfest continues with the tanks mounted on the cockpit walls. These should have been separate parts. Putting shit in relief like this is just lazy, and it dumps the tedium onto the modeler who has to mask around these fucking pills because they’re supposed to be yellow.

Again – everything will be pretty obscured once the plane is closed up, so I’m not so upset at the poor detail elsewhere in the internals. But encountering it in a few high-visibility spots is annoying.

Fortunately, Eduard has just dropped their B-17 PE set, and it may offer a reprieve and some additional detail for critical areas. So…I think I may be setting the Fort aside and paying attention to the Jug while I wait a few days.

Assorted musings

• While the B-17’s interior sadness hacks me off, it’s also given me the push I needed to decide fuck it, I’m closing the bomb bay.
• One thing that I’m going to have to adjust to if 1/48 is going to be a thing for me – the relative lack of radial engine detail compared to 1/32. The P-47M, great as it is, doesn’t have an ignition ring for the engine!
• I’m worried about the ability of the Silhouette to cut stencil masks for these – particularly the P-47M, which has some intricate nose art and stupid thin color surrounds for the fuselage codes. We shall see.