Modeling is a hobby. And for me, it’s primarily a form of decompression. Years ago, I came across the idea of “western meditation”. Whereas eastern meditation is all about clearing the mind through intense focus on something internal, like breathing, western meditation uses intense focus on a task. When I’m “meditating” at the bench, focused on the kit in front of me, the rest of my mind is free to chew on stuff in the background. It’s so good for that purpose that I find myself feeling somewhat lost if I skip out on my nightly bench time.

But it’s not always…fun.

Satisfying? Rewarding? Frustrating? Tedious? Sure. But over the past several years, I don’t think I can say it’s always been fun. There have been stretches where I’ve had to drag myself into the chair. Slog through some bullshit on some kit. Get stuck down some rabbit hole I have to back out of. Shitty kits, phenomenal kits, building, painting, weathering, didn’t matter.

My recent decision to give 1/48 props another go was inspired – perhaps subconsciously – by a desire to recapture that sense of fun that seemed to have gone missing.

And it’s working. I’ve had more fun at the bench in the past few weeks than I’ve had in the last few years. But here’s the thing.

I don’t know why.

I know several things about my modeling preferences. I like good kits. I like detail and things that fit. I like clever engineering. I thrive on kits where it’s obvious someone gave a shit what they were doing when they designed it. I like painting and weathering. I don’t like scratchbuilding. I don’t like having to do shit that the kit should have done in the first place.

So. I’m working on two kits right now. HK’s 1/48 B-17G Flying Fortress, and Tamiya’s P-47M Thunderbolt. The Jug is going great, if slower than it should, just because the -17 takes so much more work. With the Jug, there’s a level of comfort. I’ve build some version of the kit twice before, and I’m rather familiar with P-47s. It’s fun bringing additional years of experience and tricks back to this kit.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to be having fun with the P-47. I love Jugs and the Tamiya kit is one of the all-time greats.

What’s surprising me is that I’m having fun with the B-17, too.

The HK B-17 is a curious beast. The exterior detail is absolutely gorgeous (there are some shape errors but those don’t bother me because I’m part of the 99.9% who would never notice them if they weren’t pointed out). The engineering is simple and (mostly) elegant. The wings fit wonderfully. The clear parts fit without weird gaps. It’s festooned with rivets.

But the interior isn’t even half-assed. It’s quarter-assed at best. The detail is soft, much of it in annoying relief, just molded to bulkheads and sidewalls like some 70s-era Monogram kit. The seats are atrocious. The control yokes are the worst I’ve ever seen on any kit that has control yokes.

The center console is a joke. The O2 tanks are molded into the cockpit sidewalls, turning into a masking nightmare.

The gun mounts? Laughable. When they exist. Somewhere along the way, HK forgot to provide any kind of mount for the cheek guns. So I had to fashion my own.

The chin and tail guns are these weird affairs where you have to install gun bodies onto these little stumps, and then they flop around. Alignment is nearly impossible. And then you have to thread the barrels through some distantly-positioned canvas cover, get them into the gun bodies, AND get them all to align. I noped out of that business and used magnets instead.

I spent quite a bit of time bringing things up to some level of snuff…

Only for it to be almost completely invisible.

Based on my proclivities, I should hate this kit by now. I should hate the laziness and the need to scratch things that should have been covered. I should hate the tedium and the flaws. They certainly piss me off. I can’t even say it’s the subject that’s driving me forward – the B-17 has never really blown my skirt up.

But curiously…I’m having fun. Like…a lot of fun.

I don’t know why. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s some changed circumstances at work that have me more invigorated? Maybe it’s the return to 1/48 scale? The less exhaustive builds mean I’m more willing to suffer through shit, or to scratchbuild something or whatnot, because I can keep moving pretty easily and not get bogged down for a month fixing something?

I really don’t know for certain. But I’m going to keep trying to put my finger on it – because if I can figure out what makes modeling not only a good decompression tool, but legit fun, I can be sure to keep working that in.

I spend most of today down in San Antonio at the annual ModelFiesta show/contest, and drove home with a whole bunch of thoughts banging around in my head. It’s been awhile since I’ve written a post about a contest, but I feel like this year’s calls for it for one big reason.

This year I participated in the judging.

That’s right. I was a judge.

Despite being approached several times about judging, I’ve always tended to decline. Why? I like walking the tables, grabbing lunch with fellow modelers, talking shop, really spending time with all the builds. But after hearing the refrain of “you can’t complain if you don’t judge” enough times, I figured what the hell.

While I’m glad I did it (if only so I can now complain!), ultimately, judging just isn’t for me. It doesn’t jive with my personality or how I prefer to evaluate builds. Plus, I left the San Antonio Event Center with only a passing idea of what was even on the tables outside of the aircraft categories.

Anyway. As I’ve done in the past, I’m just going to throw out thoughts on the show and the judging experience. I’m certain there is a narrative framework I could put everything into, but that would take longer and I want to get to the P-47M for a bit tonight.

“Overweathered” is a grossly overapplied term

While I don’t have the same fanatical rejection of the term “overweathered” as my fellow SMCG admin Will Pattison, it gets thrown about far too often, and incorrectly. Today I heard it several times, but in almost every case, it was an example not of overweathering, but poor weathering.

Charitably, modelers aren’t that great at articulating about weathering. And also charitably, I think “overweathered” became a thing to try to be clinical and avoid having to be critical.

But it’s also reinforced a bias among judges (and builders trying to score awards) against weathering. Which you can see every year from the Nats photo albums compared to other big shows around the world.

Don’t hate the player, hate the game

Whatever my frustrations with contests, the format, the lack of feedback, the results, the awards ceremonies that are 45 minutes too long, it’s important to distinguish those from the people, who are all volunteers, who are spread thin, and doing the best they can. Judging is a thankless job.

I think I’m just philosophically opposed to the IPMS rules

Or at least…the rules as they are applied to judging.

There’s a famous saying in the business world – “you are what you measure”. The idea is similar to target fixation. If you measure four goals, and are judged on those four goals, it’s just human nature to fixate on maximizing the numbers of those four. This is how you get huge companies laying off 30,000 people to make their quarterly earnings look better.

With judging…the instructions are to cull the herd by focusing on “the basics”. In the aircraft categories I was judging, this amounted to stabilizer, wheel, and gear strut alignment. There were some that were just wildly off. Wheels sitting all womperjawed, planes listing at 15 degrees. But there were others that got eliminated because a wheel was like two degrees off from another, or toed out by a handful of degrees.

Here’s the thing – I felt the pull, too. You are what you measure.

But during the judging and especially afterward, I felt gross about it.

There were some beautiful builds that got eliminated right out of the gate. Builds that in every single other aspect were better than some of the ones that placed, simply because a wheel sat just a few degrees from perfect.

If we started from another measure – smooth paint, crisply painted canopy frames, no visible decal film or silvering, whatever – the outcome would have been different.

I prefer to look at the whole model. But now I have a better understanding of how really great builds can get chucked aside on what, to me, seem like technicalities, or at the very least a focus on just one small slice of a build.

The lack of feedback sucks

Yes, I know if you’re curious why your build didn’t placed, or placed the way it did, you can always go ask the judges and they’ll look up the notes. But that strikes me as narrow and inefficient. And honestly, the feedback isn’t substantial. Obscuring subjects to protect the innocent, let’s say there was a Yak-3 on the table that was very clean, very beautiful, but it got eliminated in the first pass because one wheel was sitting slightly aft of the other. And that person wants to know why they were eliminated when another model placed.

The only note that would likely be recorded would be about that wheel.

Honestly if I had my druthers, I would ditch the awards ceremony entirely – or for everything but the main category and best of show winners – and use that time for feedback clinics.

The only thing learning they got eliminated for a tiny wheel issue will drive a modeler to improve is their wheel alignment. It ignores the rest of the kit.

Award ceremonies are the worst

There. Has. To. Be. A. Better. Way.

This year’s award ceremony stretched over an hour. Every category, every three winners, their names, where they’re from, the tortured reading of weird subject names. At the end of the day when everyone’s a bit worn out from standing around all day.

And for most modelers there…there are entire classes that they’re not going to care about. I don’t care about the cars. I’m sure the car guys don’t like having to sit through armor and aircraft.

How could it be improved? Now that I’ve participated in judging and seen how it works, I have an idea.

As the categories are decided, the winners go up on a screen. Or hell, create a Facebook page for the contest and post them there. Place the award plaques next to the winning kits. That not only keeps momentum going throughout the usual mid-afternoon slump, it would let everyone see the winners instead of trying to remember what was what in the awards ceremony – and it would have the benefit of substantially shortening that ceremony.

It would also give those with questions – or seeking feedback – the chance to ask for it throughout the afternoon, rather than trying to corner the head judges after the ceremony, when everyone’s either leaving, or helping break down the contest and vendor tables.

Everything is silly and nothing matters

I’ve been entering builds into the Austin and San Antonio contests since 2011 and I’ve seen enough variability and WTF-ness to know that judging is capricious and that it’s really not worth getting worked up one way or another about the results. I’ve had builds win their category at one show and then not even place at the other, even against basically the same field.

It’s a common story in the modeling world.

I’ve had super-precise stuff knocked out, and I’ve had builds I’ve grabbed out of the display cabinet at the last minute, figuring they had no chance, win their categories. I’ve seen others’ builds place, and then not place.

I’ve seen enough to firmly believe that placing, or even winning category or class, is a bit hollow. And that not placing does not mean that your build is bad (or not as good or better than the winners).

Ultimately, you can let yourself be annoyed by the lack of consistency, or bemused by it. The kind of thing where you shake your head and chuckle. I choose the latter.

Okay…enough complaining. Back to the P-47M.

By day, I spend my time writing about various aspects of the cloud. And as something of an aficionado of tortured metaphors, for the past month or so I’ve been drawing various connections between what’s going on in modeling and the way that cloud is reshaping how businesses and people do the things they do.

WTF is cloud?

It’s possible to go pretty far down the rabbit hole here, but I’ll keep it as high level as possible. In the simplest possible terms, the cloud is just…computers that are somewhere else. That’s it.

For years, companies (and governments and…) ran their own private data centers. Many still do. These data centers – massive facilities packed full of rack after rack of servers, hard disks, networking gear, miles of cabling, and so on – handled everything from processing financial transactions to storing photos and other media, to hosting websites, to housing customer databases. You get the idea.

Data centers are also expensive. And data centers are finite. Remember the days when a new Game of Thrones would air and HBO Go or HBO Now or whatever they called it then would crash? That’s because HBO’s data center couldn’t scale to meet the demand.

The cloud basically takes that entire data center idea and outsources it. Instead of having to build and maintain and expand its own data centers, HBO now hosts it shit through Amazon Web Services (AWS). So does Netflix. Many of the apps and services you use every day run through the cloud – probably either AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.

Now…cloud is exactly like data centers, except that it’s completely different.

First, the cloud is networked. You’re not talking one data center. You’re talking a network of data centers, spread across multiple regions and availability zones, connected by what’s basically a fearsome, crazy fast private super internet. Need to house data locally in the EU because of GDPR regulations? With cloud, it’s a click of a button (well…maybe a bit more than that, but you don’t have to build a whole damn data center). Everyone binge watching some show about a crazy redneck and his tigers? Seed the video file across multiple regions.

Second, the cloud has a bunch of services built in that let companies take advantage of its unique characteristics. Unlike a data center, compute and storage capability on the cloud is for all intents and purposes infinite (if you’re willing to pay for it). This means you can scale up immediately so your shit doesn’t break under massive demand, for example. Increasingly, these services are being bundled and automated. Terms like Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) get thrown around, as does the misnomer of serverless computing. Serverless isn’t serverless at all. It just automates provisioning, scaling, and so on.

Third, with cloud you only pay for what you use. To go back to HBO again, that means they only have to pay for all servers and storage and so on at a massive scale precisely when a new show is released. No need to massively expand a private data center to handle a massive cliff in demand for a few days a year.

Undifferentiated tasks

One term that gets thrown around with cloud is undifferentiated tasks. This is a fancy way of saying “tedious work that doesn’t set you apart”. Netflix isn’t a data center logistics company. Neither is Capital One or Adobe or…you get the idea. Customers don’t give a shit about data centers. They give a shit when they can’t pay for something or can’t watch something. The cloud offloads a bunch of undifferentiated tasks.

In lazy personal terms, this would be like if you could pay someone else to do your dishes and laundry, get gas, organize your mail, do the grocery shopping, and so on, so you could focus on the stuff that sets you apart.

That’s exactly the bet that companies make on cloud. There’s the boring financial aspect – hoping that the pay for what you use model ends up saving money over building and maintaining data centers. But there’s also the bet that focusing resources on stuff that sets them apart will make companies more money, and make the whole thing worth it. And hey – when Netflix can expand its service to dozens of countries around the world on the same day and have it go off without a hitch? I’d say that’s worth it.

And the connection to modeling?

So what does any of this have to do with modeling?

Well, the cloud has already had a significant impact on modeling. Posting your stuff online? It’s almost certainly being hosted and stored in the cloud. Reading this? Same thing. Buying stuff from online retailers, or via eBay? Same thing. But that’s all underlying-gears-of-the-interwebs stuff that nobody cares about.

What I really wanted to focus on was that idea of undifferentiated tasks.

Modeling is packed with undifferentiated tasks. Gluing parts. Sanding seams. Cleaning your airbrush.

What do good kits, good aftermarket, good paint, new weathering products and 3D design and printing all have in common? They remove undifferentiated tasks.

Buying a metal barrel for your tank saves you from having to remove mold or join seams from a plastic barrel, and may also save you from fixing warping. A good kit can get you through assembly smoothly, increasing your likelihood of finishing the build (doubt me – see the explosion of F-14s built after Tamiya released their kit, or P-38s more recently). Good paint behaves predictably, reduces frustration, and renders a lot of the silly rituals people go through to make garbage paint work completely pointless.

Like cloud, aftermarket also offers you characteristics above and beyond the usual. Detail most of us would be hard-pressed to replicate even if we had the time and inclination (which most of us don’t). I mean…I just restarted work on the Trumpeter A-6, and just look at the fabric texturing on these True Details seats.

I don’t even know where I would begin to pull off something like that.

This extends all the way down to basic tools and consumables. Tamiya Extra Thin and other fast liquid solvents let you weld plastic together with little mess and little need to clamp stuff together and let it set for days. Good abrasives make sanding more efficient. A good saw enables you to make cleaner cuts, with less bodywork on the back end.

Vinyl cutters let us design and essentially print our own paint masks. In the past, that kind of thing had to be done by hand, with a sharp blade. 3D printers and 3D design software lets those with the patience to learn their mysterious ways design their own parts. And some of the work happening in that space is truly amazing.

The legacy mindset

Legacy thinking seems pretty endemic to the human race in general. It shows up in the old axiom about always preparing to fight the last war. It’s been the death of armies and empires time and time again. In my lifetime, it’s popped up over and over again. Kodak, Blockbuster, Borders. You could say it infects politics for sure – we’re still to a large extent mired in the same boomer fights from the 60s.

If cloud has a main opponent, it’s the legacy data center mindset. Even though there’s significant functional overlap, cloud demands a different vocabulary and a different mindset. It’s a massive simplification, but I tend to think of it as…the data center is all about managing your control over things. And the cloud is more about managing giving up control. The data center is the guy with a home theater and a coffee table strewn with five different remotes. The cloud is going through the one-time exercise to integrate everything, and then just getting to say “Alexa, turn on the TV”.

But giving up that control is uncomfortable! Changing your thinking is hard work. A lot of companies try moving to the cloud, run into problems, and before you know it, the status quo is back.

To use an example we’ve all seen in modeling. Modeler buys airbrush. Gets marginal results. Uses airbrush less and less. Becomes one of those people on the internet who talks about how airbrushing is too much work. The kind that makes those of us who use our airbrushes for just about everything we possibly can scratch our heads in bewilderment.

What this all boils down to

While all of this has been sort of bonking around in my head over the past few weeks, I’ve been struggling to sort out what it all amounts to. What’s the “so what?” of it all?

And I think, maybe, I’ve got a handle on it. And possibly a handle on a lot of the tedious drama that happens around this hobby, and around most human endeavors.

I think it has its foundations in legacy mindsets compared to those more embracing of change. But more than that, I think it comes back to the idea of undifferentiated tasks.

For some, there’s almost a love of those aspects of modeling. Of filling and sanding and every little step. It’s almost an artisanal approach. For others – and I count myself among them – there’s a desire to focus more on the aspects of a build that interest me, that let me put my own stamp on things. My personal area of interest is painting, weathering, and that jazz. I know others who love scratchbuilding, or who are falling down the rabbit hole of 3D design.

When I stop and think about various dramas of the recent past, a lot of them seem to break along this line.

I tend to go on at great length about engineering and fit of different model kits.

Now, a lot of people tend to bundle these together. But I view them as two separate things. Think of it a bit like the difference between a story and acting in a movie.

Engineering is all about the plan. The design. How something is supposed to go together. It’s, in essence, the story of the build.

Fit is all about execution. The plan is already in place. Now it’s a matter of doing. If engineering is how parts are supposed to fit together, fit is how well they actually do.

With most kits, there’s a breakdown. Usually because the engineering is making promises the fit can’t back up. You also have instances where the engineering is simply not builder-friendly. This is where you have parts that require four hands to get together, or places where you have to commit to something long before you’re able to test fit it with another assembly, only to find out down the road that you fucked yourself because you glued, I don’t know, part D38 in at slightly the wrong angle. Not that you could confirm the angles because you couldn’t test fit in the first place.

Tamiya gets it right

Thanks to the coronapocalypse, I’ve been working remotely since mid-March. And in that time, I’ve been going on what I call a volute-from-home adventure. Basically, when I’m thinking, or when I’m on conference calls, any time I’d typically be doodling or fighting the temptation to fall down the rabbit hole of the internet, I’ve instead been working on tanks. Mostly Shermans and Sherman-adjacent subjects. An Asuka M4A1. A Takom M31 recovery vehicle. A Rye Field Firefly Vc. All good kits, but all a bit sloppy in certain areas – a big one coming where the upper hull and lower hull join at the front glacis and transmission housing.

On most Sherman kits, the fit here is…fine. If you glue it. But it’s not great. And it is high enough up and prominent enough that you can’t hide glue work later on, after paint. So…you have to commit. Which can make loading the tracks later on a bit of a hassle.

Then, I started working on Tamiya’s Korea-era M4A3E8.

Tamiya does something rather different. Simple, but very clever from an engineering standpoint.

They have you install a little tab on the inside of the glacis.

Holy. Shit.

See, what this little tab does is ensure that the glacis and transmission cover sit in perfect alignment. Versus the butt join or weird little shelf bullshit seen in other Sherman kits.

This one is very builder friendly, in that it allows you to easily build, test fit, geek out about how cool your Sherman is looking, and then pop the upper hull off to get at shit and make painting and weathering a bit easier and less a game of getting into nooks and crannies.

As for fit – this is it with minimal cleanup. Even with some high spots from the sprue gates that need flattening, the fit is very good. But that’s Tamiya for you.

A lot of times, good kit engineering isn’t a bunch of ambitious clever bullshit. Often it’s just a simple tab that helps hold your shit together so you don’t have to.

As a modeler, I primarily stick to military vehicles, with the occasional detour into ridiculously OP city maintenance mechs.

For 2020, I’m looking to branch way outside of my comfort zone and tackle something completely different.

Figures.

Why?

In large part because my interest in history extends well beyond 20th and 21st century military vehicles. In college, I majored in history, with a focus on classical and early medieval Europe. And outside of some artillery and siege contraptions, you’re not going to find many military vehicles among the Romans, Byzantines, Visigoths, Franks and Normans.

What you will find are some pretty impressive-looking figures.

This won’t be my first time tackling figures. I did a few Verlinden jobs as a kid and…they were about as good as I could do at the time, which wasn’t very. Since my return to modeling, I’ve avoided them for a few reasons.

First, intimidation. Painting eyes, shield artwork, and other intricate shit has brought me up short.

Second, ignorance (see post title).

Third, I’m just not a fan of the prevailing painting style of hyper-accentuated, almost clownish highlights, shadows, rosy cheeks, and all that. While I have no idea what I’m doing, I do have a pretty good idea of what I don’t want to do.

Why come back to it now? A bit of a change of pace. A bit of a challenge. And a way to really develop my brush skills, particularly with painting small, intricate details. If nothing else, I figure I’ll be able to bring some of that back to my other work.

Let’s begin

The best advice I’ve received so far has come from Ian Candler: “honestly just start one up…pick something you actually want to do and for the love of god pick a good sculpt”.

With that in mind, I went hunting, and came back with this snazzy 75mm Byzantine skoutatos from Altores.

The Byzatines had a very interesting sort of evolution from the Roman legion. With the legion, the focus was the legionnaires. Cavalry, skirmishers, archers, all more or less played supporting and harassing roles. But facing off with the Persians (and later various Islamic states) and their highly mobile fighting style, legions wouldn’t cut it. Just ask Crassus. Oh, wait…

In time, Byzantine tactics came to focus on the heavy cavalry, the cataphracts. Infantry acted in a supporting role, and was organized into chiliarchiai, units of 1000 containing roughly a third toxotai (archers and skirmishers), and two thirds skoutatoi, named for their shields (skouton). Unlike earlier Roman legions, these were truly mixed formations that used combined arms to operate effectively, and typically as an anchor and support for the cavalry.

This dude represents an 10th century skoutatos. Obviously armored in a chainmail tunic. He’s lofting a spathion, basically an evolution of the Roman spatha (the long cavalry sword – Maximus used one in Gladiator) that came to more resemble a European arming sword. Just one problem.

The sword was warped all to fuck. Now…I did manage to straighten it in some hot water. But it kept bending back, so I ultimately trapped it between two metal rulers (using the cork backsides) in a vice to let it set up. Then I fucked it all up with a butterfingers move while releasing the vice, and the sword snapped.

Yeah…fuck that noise.

Rather than trying to fix the sword, which I was kinda bummed about anyway, I decided to go a different route. Skoutatoi carried spathions, sure, but their main weapon was a long spear called a kontarion. Like, 12-14 feet long. I figured that would look rather striking, so I lopped off the sword, drilled out the hand, and readied a piece of 1mm brass rod as the shaft. The spearhead is another story for a later time.

To deal with the sword, I scratchbuilt the crossguard and hilt, added the original pommel, and stuck them onto the scabbard. The result looks pretty awesome so far:

Now primed and with those modifications made, I got my start blocking in the various colors. From what I can gather, colors could vary and were usually coordinated at a unit level for quick identification. So I guess one unit might be in blues, another in greens, and so on. I opted for blue, with plans to do several variations between the tunic, shield, and horsehair plume stuck to the helmet.

For the chainmail, I’ve used Ammo’s Steel. The blue tunic is Vallejo pale gray blue, and the pants and boots are AK and Vallejo paints. My initial skintone base was a mix of MRP Tan and Pale Roundel Red.

Next, I hit the various leather torso bits and the straps hanging from the helmet with MRP figure acrylic Brown Leather and Scale75 Arabic Shadow. The face got a mix of Scale75 Basic Flesh and Pink Flesh which to my eyes looks way better than my shitty MRP mix.

And…that’s where things stand now. Since I’m getting out of the blocking phase, I’m going to have to start playing with shadows and highlights and different tones, and to be honest it scares the shit out of me. But there’s no better way to learn than by doing, so…stay tuned!

Over the past few weeks, the idea of Mustangs has been coalescing over at SMCG. I’ve been focused mainly on the Intruder, with a bit of increasingly halfhearted dabbling in figures, but the Mustang worm has slowly wriggled its way into my brain.

My initial plan was to tackle Eduard’s new VLR Mustang, but the other night, inspiration struck, and struck hard.

Instead of building one 1/48 Mustang, I’m going to build three. And I’m setting myself the crazy ambitious goal of having them done by October 1st.

Why the fuck?

Believe it or not, there’s a method to this madness.

First – I’ve done double builds before and I’ve enjoyed them immensely. Not long after I came back to the hobby, I tackled the Tamiya and Monogram P-47 Razorbacks side-by-side. 

A few years later, when Revell dropped their new-tool Bf 109G-6, I built it alongside the venerable Hasegawa 109 (in ProModeller G-4 form). And two years ago, there was the whole Flankoff thing between Kittyhawk and GWH.

There’s also the time I built two 1/144 Eduard MiG-21s and two 1/72 Flyhawk FT-17s, but I don’t really count those as they were both cases of two kits in one box. And tiny.

Whatever the case, I have a positive history with building multiples of the same subject from different manufacturers – so why not a stable of Mustangs?

Second, I have a tendency to go down the rabbit hole on builds. Last year, the 1/32 Jug and Corsair each took me about six months. The Intruder is probably going to be around the same time commitment. Even the 1/48 P-47M I built earlier this year took about 3 1/2 months. 

By setting myself a (completely arbitrary) date of October 1, I’m basically giving myself about six weeks to finish three aircraft. There’s every chance I’ll slide past that by a bit. After all, it’s not like there’d be consequences. 

But still…I’m hoping to set a quick pace, keep moving, and not get bogged down in detailing or fits of accuracy. 

And third, I have a Tamiyastang that’s about a week’s worth of work away from paint. I’m itching to get back to it, and with these three, I can give those bare metal muscles a workout beforehand. 

Considerations

Moving fast is going to mean a few things. 

No super-detailing. These are going to be run-and-gun builds, so I won’t be slowing down to do shit like wire up radio boxes or gear bays. There will be some aftermarket, but only with things like seatbelts, exhausts, and wheels, and only when they will save me time and effort. For example – installing nice resin exhausts will take less time than drilling out a bunch of tiny ass holes and snapping several drill bits.

No (or limited) paint masks. There’s a decent chance that I’ll paint the insignias and fuselage codes, but nothing else. And even on the insignias, I may just resort to decals. We’ll see. It really comes down to what takes longer – the initial application of the masks, or the potential long-tail work of blending decals in and hiding carrier film. 

Accuracy sacrifices. P-51Ds had pretty intricately colored gearbays, with one common arrangement being a bare metal “roof” and chromate spar and stringers. Mine will in all likelihood be just…chromate. I may also make choices in the name of coolness or ease. For example, photos seem to indicate the F-51 Airfix chose to depict sported diamond tread tires and a good old cuffed Hamilton Standard prop. But I will quite likely go with grooved tires and the cuffless prop. In the case of the tires, Airfix couldn’t carry the diamond tread detail past the sidewalls, and they use a mounting arrangement that doesn’t play nice with aftermarket tires. In the case of the props – the cuffless is just the cooler looking one.

The Kits

Let’s take a look at the three kits in play.

Eduard P-51D-5 Mustang

The Eduard kit is the current belle of the ball when it comes to pony kits. Highly detailed, probably closer to the Tamiya 1/32 kit than their older 1/48 kit in terms of detail and parts count. There are a ton of options for this kit, but also word of some intense fussiness and some questionable engineering choices. 

Meng P-51D(-15?) Mustang

Meng’s kit came out like two years ago and it seems like it was promptly forgotten about. In part that’s because it’s designed as a fucking snap-together kit. Though I think in the world where Bandai exists, it’s time for modelers to be open to snap kits also being awesome kits. Kinda like how Mini blew up the notion that small cars had to be shitty, cheap penalty boxes. It looks really nice in the box, with the exception of the fugly one-piece main gearbay, so we’ll see.

Airfix F-51D Mustang

If there’s a black sheep of the group, here it is. The Airfix is another recent tooling and looks decent enough. There are some goofy choices going on, though. Like molding the lap belts to an actual part of the fucking seat. Again, deep breaths, move fast. It also looks relatively simpler than the Eduard, and that may end up being a huge strength as we progress. 

Schemes will be revealed in good time, though I will say the Airfix F-51 perhaps interests me the most, since it’s going to be the odd one out. It’s pretty well known that Mustangs’ wings weren’t bare metal, but painted in an aluminum lacquer. Well, after World War II, a number of Mustangs also had their fuselages painted in aluminum lacquer, which I guess makes sense, since it’s probably more durable for extended service than bare metal. When you look at postwar Mustangs – ANG birds, F-51s in Korea, and those with foreign operators like Canada, you can see plenty of examples of lacquered-up fuselages. One giveaway is that the heat-resistant steel panel surrounding the exhausts no longer has that distinctive, darker tone, but blends with the rest of the airframe. 

Well, Airfix went and chose an F-51 that appears to have been painted – and I’m going to treat it as such. 

Stay tuned. The first #ponybash action got underway last night with the first batch of cockpit priming and some initial color work in the tailwheel bays and radiator ducting.

Our brains are weird. Or at least mine is. Let’s explore a weird quirk where different genres seem to play by different rules.

This morning I had an epiphany. I think it’s been building for some time, but it just broke over me all at once.

The “rules” that I apply when researching, planning, and executing aircraft builds actually stifle me when I switch over to armor.

The fuck does that mean?

Aircraft Rules

When I set out to build an aircraft, I almost always start with a reference photo (or photos). Something catches my eye. The wear and tear, the staining, the nose art, the colors. Which leads me down a rabbit hole of researching the squadron and the area of operations. I end up learning all kinds of “small history” of a specific unit or pilot, some of the quirks, and have a grand old time trying to recreate a little slice of history.

…you get the idea.

Now, you’d think this sort of mental process would translate 1:1 over to armor, right?

I certainly have a ton of “ooooh I want to build that!” off of reference photos. But it rarely comes together when armor’s in play.

Armor Fizzles

Back in 2018, the company I was with moved offices, and we all had to work from home for about three months during the buildout. This gave me an opportunity to build while working – particularly during calls or while doing the “thinking” part of the job. Never ceases to amaze me how well focusing on getting stuff together lets the brain chew through knotty shit in the background.

I had a ton of inspiration. Here are just a few examples.

Of them all…precisely one got built and painted and finished.

The rest all got built…to a point…and no further. To this day they sit, waiting for me to want to pay attention to them.

With COVID and the extended WFH situation throughout most of 2020, I’ve had a similar opportunity to slap together armor kits while I’m working. And I’ve slapped together a lot. Several Shermans. An M3-based M31 recovery vehicle. An M551 Sheridan. A Takom Gepard. Know how many of them I’ve even gotten into paint?

Two. And the Gepard has been sitting for months at this point.

Another Way?

That’s not to say I haven’t finished armor kits. Or even that I haven’t finished any that were inspired by references. Since 2018, I’ve finished two little 1/72 FT-17s, an ERC-90, AML-90, that T-72, and a DANA 152mm self-propelled gun.

But the ones I finished the fastest? With the least fuss and foot-dragging, and most enjoyment?

They were all ones where I said “fuck it”, didn’t bother with building toward references, and just did my own thing.

This also extends to armor-adjacent stuff…

And of all the armor I’ve worked on this year – the one that’s raced ahead of all the others? That will almost certainly be finished? ICM’s Panhard 178. I wasn’t a huge fan of the very subdued scheme options, and I wasn’t a fan of the kit’s main gun at all, so I said fuck it and replaced it with a Bushmaster chaingun. Accuracy totally blown, I decided to just, again, go my own way and have fun with it.

Embracing the Quirk

I don’t know why my love of research and references totally works for aircraft, but not for armor. It just…doesn’t. So I think I’m going to try untethering my armor builds more and more from reality and our fixed timeline. Go more representative. Go more what-if. Go more adventurous.

Hewing to references isn’t doing it. And going in more imaginative directions is certainly preferable to a bunch of unpainted kits piling up.

The Pan-Pan up there may be just the start.

At the very end of 2019, I set out on a return to 1/48 scale, in the form of both an HK Models B-17G (that…didn’t fare so well) and Tamiya’s venerable P-47. Specifically the P-47M. And more specifically, “Fire Ball”, a 63rd Fighter Squadron M that I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

And…I decided to film the whole thing.

The result? An absolutely massive, 34-installment build series stretching from mid-January to mid-April. Hit the pic below to go check out the whole playlist.

Precisely because I put so much into the video side of this build, it received barely a mention here on the blog. Which on the one hand, kinda sucks. But on the other hand, I’m only one person, with plenty of other things occupying my time, and sometimes something’s gotta give. Keeping various online platforms in perfect sync is often one of those things.

But for those who haven’t been up on the P-47M, here are a few photos and some links to the highlights of the build videos. Enjoy.

Blame it on Desert Storm. Blame it on Flight of the Intruder. Blame it on my own predilection toward ungainly and ugly and fearsomely effective aircraft. Whatever the case, the A-6 Intruder is one of my favorite aircraft, period. And almost certainly my favorite carrier-based aircraft.

I knew from the moment Trumpeter announced their 1/32 Intruders that doing one would be in the cards, but it still took awhile. I originally got started on it in 2015, but just ran out of steam. For whatever reason, 2020 just seemed like the right time to bring it back out and go down its very large rabbit hole.

21 videos and something like 6 months later, I finally took it off the bench. Easily one of my most…expansive projects to date. Check out the whole playlist below:

Precisely because I put so much into the video side of this build, it received barely a mention here on the blog. Which on the one hand, kinda sucks. But on the other hand, I’m only one person, with plenty of other things occupying my time, and sometimes something’s gotta give. Keeping various online platforms in perfect sync is often one of those things.

But for those who haven’t been up on the A-6E Intruder, here are a few photos and some links to the highlights of the build videos. Enjoy.

It started with an idea. Build an Eduard P-51 Mustang. There was a bit of a pony fad going on over in SMCG at the time, and with all the discussion around the kit, I just had to see what it was like for myself.

Then it grew into something else. What if, in addition to just the Eduardstang, I also tackled Meng and Airfix ponies? And set an arbitrary done date of October 1st? A mere six weeks?

#ponybash was born.

So…way more than six weeks on, the #ponybash adventure is finally at an end. How did it go? Well. Lessons were learned. Let’s go through each contender.

How’d it go? Airfix

If Dante had experienced Airfix, he would have added another level to hell. No, not for building Airfix kits. For dismissing Airfix kits, and having to wade through paragraphs of mushy exposition heaped upon you by shambling Airfix homers.

The Airfix didn’t last long.

Why? The cockpit detail was what I could most charitably call disappointing. The seat looks like someone saw a P-51 seat once and tried to draw it decades later from memory. The molding of the seat supports together with really clunky lap belts is just head-scratching.

The soft plastic and Somme-like surface detail pushed my enthusiasm down further. And it was seeing this combination of fit and detail that finally pushed my fuckmeter to empty.

Please don’t slide into my DMs about the innovative way to address all the radiator guts. Or Airfix’s proud history. Or how you can pose the control surfaces. I DON’T CARE.

This kit may be great for an Airfix kit, but compared to the other Mustangs, it’s absolutely marginal.

Next.

How’d it go? Meng

Not gonna lie. I had higher hopes for the Meng. And right away, its cockpit is better than the Airfix. The seat actually looks like a P-51 seat, and that’s a nice bonus!

The real killers for me were two things. First – the sidewall detail is just completely inadequate, even in 1/48. The throttle quadrant is nothing more than a shallow raised portion on the port sidewall. That’s it. And the way the kit is designed and broken down, aftermarket fixes aren’t going to be incoming.

The second was the snap-fit engineering. I get that Meng was basically trying to pull a Bandai here. But one thing I dislike about Bandai kits is that you can’t test-fit easily. And in the case of the Mengstang, that’s doubly so, as I’m not entirely sure how to remove the big fit lugs without possibly stressing the fuselage surface. The necessities of snap-fit also limit aftermarket potential of things like wheels. Meeeeh.

Ultimately, the Meng carried on as a handy paint mule for the Eduard build. And in that role it did a great job.

How’d it go? Eduard

The Eduard P-51D-5 is DONE!

After building the Airfix, Meng, and Tamiya (more on that in a moment) Mustangs, I can say with complete, absolute confidence that Eduard’s pony is the current king of the hill.

Seriously, pick an aspect of the kit. Plastic quality. Detail. Engineering. Fit. Accuracy. The Eduard is aces on all of them. The only true weakness it has is some detail fade headed toward the fuselage centerline – particularly on the upper cowl.

Want to go through the Airfix, Meng, and Eduard kits? Check out the intro episode of the #ponybash:

Then follow it up with the rest, focused on the one Mustang you should be building:

How’d it go? Tamiya

After giving the Airfix and Meng kits the boot, I threw in a late wildcard – a Tamiya F-51.

Why?

First, because I wasn’t exactly impressed with the Airfix or Meng kits and figured the Tamiya kit deserved consideration. I have fond memories of building their P-51D nearly a decade ago.

Second, I was curious if bringing the cockpit “up to snuff” and finding a way around the idiotic windscreen “glass-to-plastic” join would kick the Tamiya up a notch.

Third, I wanted a testbed for painting and weathering an all-lacquered Mustang.

Call it an advanced mule. A testbed. In some areas it got a lot more attention than a regular build might. Like making way for and test-fitting the Meng windscreen.

Other areas it got way less – like my rather lazy underside cleanup and lazier-still underside insignia placement.

See. I realized early on that, while it’s still a good kit, the Tamiya Mustang is 25 years old, and it’s really showing its age against the excellent of the Eduard Mustang. Knowing a kit is so thoroughly outclassed makes it hard put a ton into it. I know that gets some people all excited, but knowing I’m cycling on an inferior kit when a far better one is right there…not my thing.

Treating the Tamiya kit more like a mule or a testbed for learning basically let me finish it. And is something I need to maybe learn for the future. When a build loses my interest, or when it gets away from me, or the kit and I just don’t have a connection, switching in to testbed mode may be a way to get those things done, and get more value out of them at the same time.

Want to follow along with the #fonybash? The whole video series awaits below:

What’s next?

Now that the #ponybash is a wrap, my next immediate project is getting the Trumpeter 1/32 P-40F painted, weathered, and over the line. Then trying to wrap up two armor projects (hopefully before the year’s out) – RFM’s T-34/85 and ICM’s Panhard 178.

After that, I believe it’s time for a P-38…

Holy shit we made it to 2021!

Since I’ve already gone and done a 2020 wrap video, I’m not going to belabor everything by typing it out again.

If you’re in a TL;DW mood, here’s the gist.

• Five completions this year – the P-47M Thunderbolt, A-6E Intruder, Eduard P-51D-5 Mustang, Tamiya F-51D Mustang, and Rye Field T-34/85
• Two kits that just didn’t get wrapped up in time for the new year – Trumpeter’s P-40F and ICM’s Panhard 178
• Several WFHWIP armor builds are in a sort of pre-primer limbo with no immediate next step in sight. It’s too bad that slapping together armor kits is a great way to let my brain chew on work challenges – it means I’m building kits way faster than I can move them into the paint stage.
• Figures are hard. I’ve started four this year and two are still actively in progress.

What’s on tap for 2021?

I’ve got big plans for 2021. Probably bigger than I’ll be able to actually pull off. But we’ll see!

Finish the P-40. It’s close. It’s in weathering. It should (fingers crossed) be done by the end of January.

Undisclosed quick-turn build. Stay tuned.

Lightning time. One the P-40 wraps, Tamiya’s P-38F is the next aircraft hitting my bench. But there will also be a guest appearance by Trumpeter’s 1/32 P-38L. I’ll be using it for a build review of Red Fox Studio’s new Quick Set Instrument Panel upgrade set. Not sure whether I’ll carry through to the entire kit or not – it really depends on how I’m feeling when I get to that point.

Figuring out figures. I’ve got two in-progress that I don’t hate. But I could be much better. I want to spend part of 2021 getting to a point of at least Dunning-Kruger levels of confidence about my abilities with figure work.

Doogs Models 3D. This will be the year that I finally get off my ass to figure out at least the basics of 3D printing. And designing parts. I gave it a very half-hearted go in 2020 and it was a total bust. This year it needs more discipline behind it and could be a good project for that summertime heat.

Armor experiments. The RFM T-34/85 really revealed a lot of my bad habits and deficiencies in armor building (or rather – painting and weathering). In 2021, I’m going to be tearing down my approach and rebuilding it piece by piece, getting out of my comfort zone and into several techniques I’ve never really given a fair shake. This one’s extremely ambitious and already pretty highly structured – details to come soon. I think it’ll be fun!

Better bench video. I’m replacing my dying Panasonic V770 with a Fujifilm X-S10 mirrorless number. A better camera doesn’t automatically make for better video, but the larger sensor with a better dynamic range should let me capture subtle tonal variations that the V770 is missing. And I’ll have the ability to flex to 4K if I want. And I may well do so, when the subject calls for it.

That’s…a lot. Stay tuned! It’s going to be an active year.

I’ve tried recording a video on this three times now, and each time it’s devolved into a rambling mess (even more so than usual!). So instead, I’m going to give words a go.

3D printing has a relatively steep learning curve. There are a slew of arcane rituals you have to sort out. Rituals that you probably have no clue about as you unpack your first 3D printer. Leveling the build plate. Sanding the build plate. Washing and curing. Handling hazardous materials with care.

But by far the steepest and most encompassing part of the learning curve for me has been the slow, grinding process of finding the range.

Finding the range

If you’re familiar with artillery, or archery, or urinals, or pretty much any kind of ballistic trajectory, you’re probably familiar with the concept of finding the range. You fire your first shot, and it goes long. So you adjust a few variables, fire your second shot, and it goes short. But with those two results, you’ve bracketed your target, and now you can start tweaking your variables toward the middle until you hit what you’re aiming at.

3D printing is pretty much like that.

Except, with things like 16″ naval guns and urinals, you pretty much know the results of your firing solution right away. So you can adjust on the fly.

3D printing isn’t like that at all. It’s a long, slow process. In some ways, it reminds me of the days of film (remember film?), where you wouldn’t know how a picture came out until you processed your roll. Even very small 3D prints can take a good hour or so. Larger prints can take literally days depending on your settings. So you fire your shot and then…you wait.

Small, incremental changes we can believe in

I lucked out with my first 3D print, Bold Miniatures’ Lilith bust. It wasn’t perfect, but it printed nicely enough and didn’t fail.

Still, I had no real idea what I was doing, and my next prints became a string of failures.

If you want to really stall your progress, do what I did next – change a bunch of variables all at once. That way, when the print fails again – or even succeeds – you have no idea what lever did what to get you into that position. It’s the best!

With 3D printing, you have a number of variables in play. So many that it can be daunting at first.

You have hardware variables. What kind of printer are you using?

You have consumables issues. What kind of resin are you using?

You have physics variables. How big and/or heavy is the thing you’re trying to 3D print. Just because you can print a little calibration square doesn’t mean you’re good to go on a big 1/12 figure.

You have software variables. What slicer are you using? What CAD and other programs to manipulate your files?

And on top of all of that, you have your print settlings. There are a lot of them, but I would consider only four to be truly success/fail relevant.

Exposure Time

This is how long the LCD screen flips on for. With a mono printer like the Sonic Mini and Mighty 4K, this is rather short – I usually float somewhere between 2 and 2.65 seconds. Going one way or another doesn’t seem to make a huge amount of difference to my eye, but I’ve found that a successful print at one setting with one resin will fail with another resin. So…as you jump from resin to resin, you may need to adjust your exposure.

My pet theory is that this has to do with light absorption. Black seems happiest with lower exposure times, and when I’ve had failures with same/same it’s been switching to something like gray or beige from black.

Layer Height

This should be self explanatory. Resin printers print in layers. Each layer is a certain height. I’ve printed anywhere from .03mm to .015mm and had successes across the range, with the major difference being how fucking long it takes to print something (hint – twice as long at .015 since you have twice as many layers). BUT as you adjust layers, you also need to adjust your exposure settings. What works at .015 may leave your shit pooled in the resin vat at .03mm.

Lifting Speed

After the printer exposes a layer, the build plate lifts up to allow more resin to flow underneath for the next layer. This speed is another crucial setting – at least for Phrozen printers. I know some printers seem happy at relatively fast lift speeds of 150-180mm/min, but I’ve found all those speeds do for my printers is rip shit off its supports. Once I dropped my lift speed to around 40, my success rate shot way up.

Base Exposure

Another critical setting is the base exposure. This is for the first layers of a print, and you want them to really grip the build plate. Otherwise you can have a print completely fail as it fails to adhere and just collects in the resin vat. Or you can have a weak bond that delaminates and results in a warped print.

But there’s a catch. Go too high with your base exposure and you end up backing those base layers to the build plate to the point that they are extremely difficult to remove. One of my early prints adhered so effectively that I had to literally bust out a rock hammer and an xacto with a chisel blade and literally chip it away.

My Phrozen Sonic Mighty 4K is a particular challenge in this regard. In its natural state, it has a very narrow threshold – around 17-19 seconds per base layer – where it will more or less reliably hold a print, but also still be more or less removable at the end.

Fortunately, I’ve found a great solution to this particular setting challenge – flexible build plates like those offered by Wham Bam, Sovol, and others. With these, you install a magnetic pad onto the build plate, then slap a thin, flexible steel sheet on it and use that as your build surface. At the end of the print, pull the plate off, then bend it, and the print either pops off, or lifts an edge enough that it’s easy to get in there with a palette knife to break the rest of the seal. No more chiseling.

Now, the ease of removal and the faster post-print processing is nice, but the real benefit of these things is that they take base exposure time off the table. What I mean by that is that you can absolutely crank it – I took mine up to 30 seconds printing Cobb Vanth on his speeder seat and it popped off just as sure as all the others.

Another variable – supports and support strategy

Perhaps just as important as any numerical setting you choose is the type, number, and arrangement of supports you use.

Supports gave me a bunch of trouble early on – either failing to hold the print…

Or turning the area where they were attached into a pebbly awfulness.

It’s taken me awhile to figure shit out, but I finally had an epiphany. Supports serve two purposes. One is to ensure that details get filled and printed correctly by preventing islands and shit like that. The other is to act as load bearing members to hold the print to the build plate.

And there is no reason these have to be the same supports.

So here’s what I’ve started doing. Using the lightest supports I can for general support work. These are 0.2mm in diameter where they contact the print, and 0.15mm deep. Unless I’m printing something really light, they won’t hold shit. But they don’t have to, because I’ll also drop a few medium and heavy supports in out of the way places where they can hold shit up and wreck shit around them and it won’t matter, because it’s on the bottom of a foot or something.

Ever since I’ve started using this detail-vs-load bearing thing, I haven’t had a single print fail by tearing free of its supports. So I guess I’m doing something right?

How you can find the range faster

Want to take less than two months to figure out some consistent print settings and develop Dunning-Kruger levels of expertise?

Find some recommended settings for your printer and resin. Here are the settings I used on my Mini 4K with Anycubic Craftsman Beige resin to score a really gorgeous print of Russell Crowe’s Maximus from Gladiator:

Keep a print log. Your settings, what you’re printing, and how it fared. If you get a failure, mark it down as a learning experience and try to work out why it happened. I can generally remember back like one or two prints, but not seven! A print log makes it easy to go back and refer to what went right or wrong in the past. I keep mine in Google Slides, because it’s easy to dump screenshots into it instead of typing everything out.

If you get a failed print, don’t panic! Diagnose what happened. Or at least try to. And then change one variable. Think of it like the scientific method. Develop a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Rinse and repeat.

Be patient! Even small prints can take HOURS depending on your settings. My recommendation is to try to get into a cadence of doing a print a day (or…as you get into bigger prints, as close to that as you can manage). Take the completed print (or failed print) off the build plate, reset everything, and go again. Check on it a few hours in – once the build plate surface is rising high enough out of the vat to actually see what’s happening- to make sure it’s actually printing properly, but otherwise, just get on with your day.

Sticking with it

I’m not gonna lie. 3D printing can be extremely discouraging at first when you have no fucking clue what’s going on. But as you start to stack up successful prints and really explore what you can do, it becomes rather rewarding – and definitely frees you up in terms of the kinds of things you can build and paint.

It just takes climbing that learning curve and finding the range.

I thought my favorite part of 3D printing would be the ability to access a whole bunch of stuff that just isn’t available in injection-molded kit form (or even resin). And that’s certainly awesome. I mean, I love that I’m working on a 1/48 TIE Interceptor and slowly but surely printing out a 1/12 Cobb Vanth speeder. Because even if Bandai ever gets off their ass and starts making new Star Wars kits, you just know they’d do that speeder in maybe 1/48. Maybe. Surely never in 1/12, where it’s 20 inches long.

I love that I have a Witch King and Maximus and ED-209 and a Babylon 5 Star Fury and a U-Wing and…yeah. Lots to love.

But I kinda expected that wading into it, you know?

What I really love

No. My favorite part, that kinda took me by surprise, is the ability to take an STL and make it my own.

For instance…I can scale the files to whatever size I want. All it takes is a bit of math if I want to hit a particular scale. The TIE Interceptor I’m working on was originally 1/68, and I resized it to 1/48. Imagine being able to do that with plastic kits – and make Tamiya’s P-38 a 1/32 kit just like that.

I can also modify, slice, and otherwise fuck with the files to really make them my own.

That canopy frame on the TIE? I made that. Because the original was way too thick to accommodate clear acetate for the glass.

Or, let’s consider good ol’ Cobb Vanth. When I received the physical speeder kit from Merlin Models in January, I was…disappointed. For a number of reasons. But one of them was that Cobb doesn’t sit well on the speeder seat. He kinda floats on top of it, his hands don’t line up with the handgrips, and the grips are way too small. Plus, while I know it’s accurate to The Mandalorian, I think it’s kinda lame that he’s riding without the Boba Fett helmet on, and I wanted him to be wearing it.

Enter Meshmixer. With this app, you can cut things up, separate the shells of an STL, resize specific elements, and even arrange and combine separate STLs into one.

So that’s exactly what I did.

I sliced off the top of Cobb’s head and replaced it with the little dome thing on the back of the seat meant to hold the helmet. Then I replaced that part of the seat with the part from the original seat. I positioned the good marshal better on the seat, and even a bit into the seat to simulate, you know, actual weight, and to align his feet and hands with the footrests and grips.

Last but not least, I enlarged the grips so that they were a better fit for said hands.

Once that was done and I made as sure as I could digitally that the helmet would fit, I combined everything and got printing.

It took me a bit of time to get the settings right for such a big, complicated, heavy print, but get there I did.

And…come on. That’s just awesome.

A few episodes back, the Plastic Posse Podcast guys were discussing differences between aircraft and armor modelers and came down on the opinion that armor modelers are, generally, a friendlier bunch than aircraft modelers. (note: if anybody wants to help me remember the episode, I’ll gladly update to reflect)

At the time, I didn’t really agree with their assessment. While I primarily focus on aircraft, I dabble in armor as well, and I get to interact with modelers of all stripes and persuasions. And at first blush, I don’t see much difference between the two outside of the obvious subject nuances.

But something about it stuck in my mind. And over the past few weeks, I’ve been chewing on it and come to find that I agree with Doug, Scott, TJ and JB, albeit for different reasons than the ones they gave.

Right for the wrong reasons

Let me be clear right out of the gate. Tons of aircraft modelers are warm, generous, lovely people. Most of the contingent I tend to run with at the local Texas shows are aircraft guys. If I had to stick a label on myself, I’m an aircraft guy.

But here’s the difference. There is a slice of the aircraft modeling community that I just do not see among armor modelers. A slice that is snide, condescending, petty, dogmatic, self-important and gatekeeping.

In other words, there’s a slice of assholes among aircraft modelers. And they’re a drag on the community.

What do I mean, exactly?

Another disclaimer is in order. I am not omniscient. I do not have eyes on every forum or group in the hobby. This is my take, based on my perception of the places where I do follow the conversations. It’s also in no way scientifically or statistically anything, since conducting any kind of survey would be the wildest of goose chases.

As this asshole epiphany clicked into place, I found myself going down the list of eyerolling annoyances that can be found in this hobby. And every single one stems from – again from my experience – aircraft modelers. Let’s run through a few, shall we?

Paint “rules”. Spend any amount of time in any modeling community, be it a forum or social media or in person, and you’ll run across various paint dogmas. You must put down a gloss coat before decals. You can’t spray lacquers over acrylics. You have to use the manufacturer’s recommended thinner. None of these are true, and they are easily disproven by doing your own shit at your own bench. By spraying lacquers over acrylics. By putting decals down on sandpaper without silvering. By using MLT with everything. Yet they persist again and again and again.

Armor modelers are the ones who do crazy shit like thinning Vallejo with MLT or make a sprayable paint slurry out of weathering pencils. And sure they don’t have to deal with anywhere near the same number of annoying decals as aircraft builders – but those decals often have to go down over zimmerit or cast texture or prominent bolts or pistol ports or whatever. There seems to be more understanding that a gloss coat is not going to get you to a smooth surface, because often that smooth surface just doesn’t exist.

The hobby is dying. I don’t feel like I see this as often anymore, but whenever I do, it’s coming from aircraft or car guys, usually combined with bemoaning the death of the local hobby shop and some vague aspersions cast toward “kids these days”. No such attitude among armor modelers. Why? Maybe it’s the steady stream of new, very good kits. In the past few years, Meng, Takom, Rye Field, Border and others have appeared on the scene and thrived. Trumpeter has seriously upped its quality. Tamiya keeps pumping out a small-but-steady stream of new releases, and have singlehandedly stood up 1/48 as a viable armor scale. Maybe it’s the World of Tanks-inspired interest from younger modelers.

Assembler vs. Modeler. Armor seems to have a much more live-and-let-live attitude. Want to scratchbuild something that’s not kitted? Awesome! Want to build out of the box? Cool. Only want to build fall-together kits? More power to you. Want to buy aftermarket tracks? Avoid these, they’re rubbish. There seems to be a tacit acceptance that different people have different preferences. I’ve never seen anyone shamed for building a Meng Whippet and not wanting to fuck with the woeful old Emhar kit. Mike Rinaldi says he doesn’t waste his time with subpar kits, and nobody calls him an assembler.

But in the aircraft world? Get an aftermarket instrument panel and some wanker will say you’re cheating. Is a kit engineered poorly? Are resin exhaust cans too small or too large in diameter to match the kit you’re working on? Get ready to be met with the assertion that you must be an assembler and that real modelers don’t say anything and fix whatever is wrong. There’s a fundamental lack of understanding that what comes in the box or the sleeve and the act of fixing it are two different things. Or, no, I’m convinced that understanding is there, but it’s trumped by the desire to condescend and to puff yourself up at the (perceived) belittling of others. But it’s never, ever the manufacturer’s error.

In armor, when this comes up, it’s much healthier. More along the lines of…Takom really fucked the football there, and that’s super annoying, but here’s a way around it.

A crew chief would never… Want to weather an aircraft? Guess what! Even piles of reference photos won’t be enough to convince some quarters that aircraft get dirty or that your weathering is true to the subject (and…who even says it has to be…modeling is what you want it to be…but that’s another post). In armor this does show up from time to time, usually with the whole “tanks only survived for a few weeks” argument. But that’s not entirely true, is usually applied to things like rust, and whatever the case, there’s more acceptance of stylized approaches.

Just be grateful… Every time some second or third-tier producer shits out a marginal tool of an aircraft subject, it gets defended by “just be grateful someone makes a kit at all”, usually appended with some of that modeler vs. assembler bullshit laid out a few paragraphs up.

Well, except for Trumpeter for some reason. Any little error (and they certainly make them) gets amplified as a fatal flaw that makes the kit garbage. My favorite example of that is the casual dismissal of Trumpeter’s 1/32 109s. Nevermind that there’s a thriving aftermarket trade in parts to correct all the misses on the Hasegawa kit.

Again, armor seems more clear-eyed. It’s possible to mix a degree of gratitude with a degree of regret that a kit gets this and that and this other thing wrong. Or to put them on blast for poor fit, lackluster surface detail, dumb tracks. If the drive sprockets don’t fit the tracks, that’s the manufacturer’s fuckup to own (or in some cases, aftermarket track makers).

Rotten apples and whatnot

I think that’s enough for you to get the gist of what I’m talking about. And as we know from Star Wars fans and vegans, a slice of assholes can color perceptions of the entire group, and drive people away.

I can only imagine what a newcomer to the hobby makes of the shitty drama that seems to infect corners of the community. I can’t imagine condescension and gatekeeping draw people into the community, or encourage them to actively participate. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe younger gundam modelers love being told that what they do isn’t real modeling by some smug old white guy clutching his Airfix kits like they’re Sauron’s ring.

Why the assholes?

Why are they more prevalent among the aircraft community? Fuck if I know. The only guess I can even hazard is that aircraft kits have a generally longer history than armor. That’s not to say that armor is like some recent discovery, but when you hear English dudes go on and on about buying bags of Airfix kits from the chemist or whatever the fuck, it’s always planes. Armor, seems to me like it was a red-headed stepchild for longer, so maybe its tropes didn’t ossify quite the same way.

Tips on not being an asshole

These are pretty simple.

First is that golden rule of treating others the way you’d like to be treated.

Second, play the ball, not the man. Don’t take it into the personal. Especially over shit that’s objective.

Don’t conflate things. A kit comes in a box. Skills don’t. Neither do patience or inspiration or stubbornness. So just fucking discuss what’s in the box.

Understand that modeling is actually many hobbies. Not everybody wants to scratchbuild or weather or pursue absolute accuracy. A kit that gets the shape of an intake slightly wrong might be fatally flawed to you, but that may not be a big deal to someone else. You may prioritize engineering and fit while someone else likes the challenge of fighting an old kit. You may prefer painting to building, or building to painting. And you know what? It’s ALL FINE. It’s possible to respect and embrace different preferences instead of being a gatekeeping shitditch who insists that every has to enjoy their hobby the way you do if they’re to be “real modelers”.

Learn to give a fuck and not give a fuck at the same time. Look, for almost all of us, this is a hobby. And that means two things. First, it means it’s a matter of passion for us. We can absolutely go deep and geek out over minute things, be they subject details, techniques, tools, execution, photography, whatever. Second, being a hobby also means that modeling is a leisure activity. It’s a frivolous pursuit that is in no way, shape or form life or death. Or even financial hardship or malnutrition. It’s all just fucking plastic that we slather with chemicals. By all means, go down the geek rabbit hole, but try to keep in mind, as you do, that you’re doing so because you like it, and you want to, and in the bigger scheme of things, it’s a silly diversion from real life.

Or maybe just…build armor? I guess?

“I’ve lost my mojo…”

How many times have you heard this or one of its near-infinite variations? Probably a lot. It’s an annoyingly common complaint in the modeling community.

And it fundamentally misunderstands motivation and how it works.

On Resistance

For a number of years, writing was my hobby. That ended when my career shifted into full-bore copywriting. Turns out writing for fun loses some of its effectiveness when you’re also writing for work. But when I was writing, no book, no piece of advice or sage wisdom or whatever, had a bigger impact on me than Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art.

See, Pressfield doesn’t talk about mojo. He doesn’t talk about writer’s block. Instead, he talks about Resistance. Yes, with a proper noun, ascribing it a kind of mythical status like we’d ascribe to the Fates of the Furies of the Greek pantheon. Resistance takes many forms. External factors like time or illness or caring for a loved one. Internal factors like laziness, procrastination, and the various mental roadblocks we use to sabotage ourselves.

Resistance – in all its forms – is the friction that keeps us from getting about our creative work. I’m tired. I’m just not feeling it today. I’ve lost my mojo.

Pressfield’s prescription for beating Resistance?

Do the work. Sit your ass down and fucking write. Even if what you write is shit, write. Build the muscle memory and the neural pathways of writing. Tired? Write. Stressed out about something at work? Write. Knee hurts? Write.

A popular term for this approach among writers is “Butt in Chair”.

And it absolutely applies to modeling as well. You can’t get your mojo (as stupid a term as that is) back if you’re not modeling.

Motivation comes after you start

Modelers often speak of mojo like it’s some external thing. Like, I don’t know, the golden snitch from Harry Potter. A thing you have to catch. But here’s the thing — when you externalize it, you take away your own agency.

“I don’t know where my mojo went” is nothing more than an excuse. It’s the comforting little lie your brain gives you to justify not doing shit.

And if you sit around waiting for mojo to come home like some fickle cat, you’re again giving up your agency. And that’s how you get all those eyeroll threads where someone tells you to build something different, like a Star Wars kit or a Warhammer thing or whatever. Like some slightly different-shaped subject will magically attract your mojo from wherever its fucked off to.

Let me put a different thought out there. Mojo is bullshit. Motivation is the thing. And motivation is something internal. And it’s something we can control and even trigger.

Every Tuesday morning (well, since COVID), I go hiking or mountain biking before work. I love both. But I hate mornings. And every Monday evening, my brain starts up the negotiations. It’s going to be so early. And humid. And my knee’s been hurting. And and and.

When I head out to the trails on Tuesday morning, it’s always grudgingly. I’d rather be asleep. I’m stiff. Something invariably hurts. But then I hit the trail and I start moving. And something happens. I find myself enjoying it. I find myself pushing to see if I can beat my personal best times. Or pushing to cover a bit more ground, so long as I can get back in time for various meetings.

My motivation comes out after I start.

And the exact same thing is true of modeling.

You are your mojo

So here’s my…I don’t know…plea? Sincere hope?

Stop using misplaced mojo as an excuse. Stop thinking of it as some magic amulet you need in order to start.

Instead, do what Steven Pressfield suggests. Take all that shit keeping you away from the bench, and think of it as Resistance.

Instead of waiting until the conditions are just right, accept that they are almost never just right. And tell them to fuck off and start anyway.

Put your butt in the chair, do the work, and create an opening for real motivation — not the false idol of mojo — to spring forth.

When I got back into modeling in 2010, Tamiya already had a fearsome reputation for engineering and fit. At the time they were in the middle of their 1/32 Spitfire run, and those kits were something.

Over the last decade, it’s been amazing to watch them find higher and higher gears. The Mustang. The Corsair. The Mosquito. The F-14. The Bf 109G-6. The P-38. With each new release, they’ve evolved from extreme competence to what I can only call engineering swagger. It’s been really noticeable with the P-38. They’re showing off now.

And that’s never been more true than with the new 1/48 F-4B Phantom II. Good lord.

I’ll be starting mine in the near future. But for now, take a look at my test-fit review. It’s one thing to read about how this new Phantom is the best kit ever made. It’s another to see how it actually goes together.

My thanks to Danielle and Rudy at LionHeart Hobby in Kyle, Texas for getting this kit into my hands. If you’re anywhere in the area, be sure to stop by and check them out. And if you’re not, you can contact them at lionhearthobby.com – their webstore should be going live any day now, so keep an eye out!

Also, exclusive for Doogs Models followers – get 10% off Tamiya’s new F-4B from LionHeart! Just visit https://lionhearthobby.com/ and enter LIONHEART-DOOGS in the contact form to get the ball rolling.

Go deep on your Phantom variants. The demand is absolutely there.

A week ago, I got my hands on the new Tamiya F-4B Phantom. A few people scoffed when I called it the best kit ever produced. Or thought I was exaggerating when I said it was even better than the amazing P-38.

Then I uploaded my test-fit review, and, well, the kit absolutely speaks for itself.

“I’m convinced”

A common refrain I’ve heard since the new F-4 was announced has been “another Phantom?”

Or, to get a bit more nuanced, “Cool! An F-4! Too bad it’s a B, that’s my least favorite.”

There have been a lot of fence-sitters and wait-for-a-preferred-variant types. And a decent number of them have been won over just on the strength of seeing this beautiful F-4B go together. Variants be damned, this is too good to pass up.

Speaking of variants

Frustratingly, Tamiya doesn’t have the best history at covering off on variants. Probably the most notorious being the lack of an F-16D. But you could also point to the AD-4 Skyraider or F-14B Bombcat or any of the interesting expansion routes open to the 1/32 Spitfires. With a few new bits we could have easily had a 1/32 Spitfire Vc or XIVe, just to name two.

With the F-4, I’ve been expecting more of the same. The parts and engineering are certainly in play to quickly kit out an F-4C/D and an F-4J. I expect both of those will come.

I think there’s also a decent possibility that we’ll see an early F-4E with the hard wing, as well as an F-4EJ.

YGBSM

By far the most wished-for variants I’ve been seeing in comments are the long noses – the E, F, and particularly the G.

In a lot of ways, this makes sense. Yes, the Tamiya F-4B is amazing and blows even the rather good Zoukei-Mura F-4s out of the water. But, as modelers, we’ve received a number of short nose Phantoms over the last decade. Academy’s B/C/D/J/N lineup, and Zoukei-Mura’s C/D/J/S. Until the arrival of Z-M’s early E and EJ Kai in the last few months, the 80s-vintage Hasegawa kits were the only game in town. And often a very hard game to find.

Not only are the long nose variants cool, not only do they offer a ton of fantastic camo and marking possibilities, there also hasn’t been a new tool to scratch the itch in a long time.

Still, I’ve been replying to all these comments and telling them to not get their hopes up. Tamiya doesn’t do too great with variant coverage, they never touched the later variants with their 1/32 kits, so don’t expect it this time around.

But then I started thinking…why not?

The case for the long noses

Look. There’s no reason for Tamiya to listen to a thing I have to say. But in a world where a bunch of dorks screaming into the void managed to will the Snyder Cut into existence, who can say? Maybe there’s a chance. So here goes.

The slatted wings are the biggest hurdle. The main differentiator with all of the late Phantom variants is the slatted wing. There’s some other bullshit, too, but that’s the big one. Sure, the slatted wing would cost some money to design and tool. But it would also put Tamiya in easy range of a late E, the German F-4F, the F-4G Wild Weasel, and the F-4S. That would have to be one of the best possible ROIs in modeling.

What else could you possibly do with one or two sprues that would equal the sales of those variants?

Other differences can be covered by one small sprue. Want to go from a late E to an F to a G? For the most part, the differences between them could be covered by a single sprue each. In other words, if you make one, it’s a short step to making all the others.

Increased likelihood of repeat purchases. Let’s face it. The F-4B and the F-4J look more or less the same. And while there are a lot of high-viz schemes to choose from, that’s pretty much all there is to choose from. The chance to follow that up with a Euro I camo scheme, or that two-tone blue maritime scheme the JASDF used on F-4EJs, or the Hill scheme, or the cool Hellenic Air Force ghost scheme would probably inspire more repeat purchases than more high-viz options alone.

Little competition. The Tamiya F-4B has to compete with the Academy F-4B. And while quality-wise it’s no competition, the Academy is substantially cheaper and plenty of frugal modelers are more than happy to point that out. An F-4C/D or F-4J would have to not only compete with Academy, but Zoukei-Mura. Z-M’s kits are better than Academy, but their prices are closer to the Tamiya Phantoms, and their global distribution is a joke next to Tamiya’s. In long noses, the only significant competition would be from Z-M and from ancient Hasegawa kits.

While we’re at it, how about some RFs?

Another massively overlooked corner of Phantomland is the recce versions. Yeah, the RF-4B, but especially the RF-4C, RF-4E, and RF-4EJ. The reconnaissance variants served widely (and many are still in service today) and wear some of the most interesting schemes of all the Phantoms in terms of both coloration and wear.

Getting to an RF would be a bit dicey with the current breakdown of the Tamiya kit, considering the full-length port fuselage half and the different fuselage shape of the RFs starting just forward of the intake splitter plates. So I’d personally consider these the absolute least-likely options.

Still, ya know…it’d be nice.

Do it!

Looking at this clear-eyed, the chances of Tamiya kitting a new-tool F-4G Wild Weasel seem slim. But I think the business case and market demand are absolutely there, especially since they’ve already put the investment into an amazeballs Phantom kit and the design cost of most of the other elements could be spread across multiple releases. For an F-4G you’d really only have to fuss with the different tail tip, the chin mounted AN/APR-47 (or earlier 38), and a bit of cockpit detail. Really feeling froggy, you could throw in a sprue of ECM pods and AGM-88s.

Or Tamiya could do something even cooler, and explore using their detail sets as a way of creating Phantom variants. Instead of the PE and a metal barrel stuff you see with armor, imagine being able to buy a base F-4E (late production), and then buy sets for an F-4F, or an F-4E with TISEO, or an F-4G or an upgraded Greek F-4E Peace Icarus 2000. It could be an interesting way to provide the variant coverage modelers want without going all in on fully boxing so many separate variants.

Come on, Tamiya…you’ve got a chance to blow this wide open!

The US IPMS Nationals went down this past weekend in Las Vegas, and a surely as the rumble of thunder follows the flash of lightning and hell follows the rider on the pale horse, internet drama has inevitably followed Nats.

Is anyone really surprised?

This time, the drama isn’t just over one or two things though. It’s fucktangular. Completely fucked from multiple disparate directions.

To my mind, most of it has shades of almost every other internet donnybrook. And franky, thinking about it makes me tired. Some people don’t want anything to change. Other people say they want things to change, but they really don’t. And others want things to change but are dismissed as complainers. Sure, contest drama has its own little flavor. Stuff about nobody volunteering or “if you weren’t there you don’t know”.

But it’s all the same shit.

I don’t want to wade into or relitigate any of that stuff here. Because I’m lazy.

Instead I want to talk about two things that I think either turn off would-be attendees, or that leave massive cards just sitting on the table. Judging and pictures.

Judging

I’ve written about judging before. And a lot of what’s coming up in the sludgy tsunami of post-Nats internet clownfighting is the exact same shit.

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you judge?” Because I have judged. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like having to box into the eliminatory, cull-the-herd approach. It felt like collaborating.

Here’s the thing. I’m not opposed to the IPMS system in general. Trying to break down creative output into quantifiable elements that can be compared against one another? Okay. That’s cool. That’s one way to go.

My problem is the fervor for eliminating models, and doing it through one order of attack, starting with construction.

If you’re not familiar, the way judging typically goes in, say, an aircraft category, is you first look at construction. Any alignment issues with stabilizers or wheels or whatnot? Eliminated. Any ghost seams? Eliminated.

And since IPMS loves to do category splits, you end up judging something like a dozen aircraft per category, and if you eliminate 7-8 on construction technicalities, you’re left with only a handful in contention for hardware. And it’s likely that among that group you will find at least some finishing flaws that – in my opinion – are equal or greater sins to a small misalignment or a missed mold seam.

Depending on the day and the show, it can then become a matter of choosing the least bad.

Nevermind that there’s a stunning Frogfoot or YF-23 or whatever over there that got knocked out because one tire was toed out by a degree or two.

This method is stupid.

Theoretically, within this whole eliminatory approach, you could build a model perfectly, make sure everything is exactly, properly aligned, all the seams perfectly filled, then NOT FUCKING PAINT IT, and still have a chance at winning your category. Provided the other entrants had minor construction flaws.

Here’s why it is stupid.

• It is not a fair assessment of the entire build
• It provides little of value for the competing modelers to learn from. How useful is it to learn that your model didn’t place because a stabilizer was a hair off?
• True or not, it sets up an impression that IPMS judges don’t care about paint and finish.
• It rewards playing it safe and disincentivizes risk-taking and boldness. You wonder why US modeling shows are so much more bland than those we glimpse in other parts of the world? I think this is a big part of why.

Let me be clear.

Because I’m sure someone will try to misrepresent this, either through bad faith or bad reading comprehension:

I am not saying construction flaws should get a pass.

I am simply saying they should not be given pride of place.

The whole model should be evaluated and scored as such.

Using construction fuckups to eliminate builds out of the gate skews the results. If you started eliminating through paint and finishing fails, the winners would look different.

How can this be fixed? Simple. DON’T USE A SINGLE CRITERIA TO ELIMINATE CONTESTANTS.

Or at a minimum, maybe develop a tiering system, so like red-level fuckups in either construction or painting get you booted, but yellow keeps you in play.

Photos

Alright. Time for the second part of this complain-a-thon.

Let’s talk photos.

For anybody not attending Nats (the overwhelming majority of modelers), photos and some videos are the only real window into the event. And because marketing, awareness, and engagement efforts out of IPMS seem largely to not exist, said photos are the ambassador to the contest for casual modelers and even the modeling curious.

And if those outside the event looking in want to check out the winners and see the awesome caliber of modeling on display? They’re greeted with this.

I keep hearing IPMS wants to shake the perception that it’s out-of-touch.

This? Is not how you do that.

This looks, to borrow Julian Hosmer’s phrase, “old-timey”. The user experience is bad. Really bad. And from what I understand borderline unusable on mobile. But who looks at things on their phone in 2021?

The category cards? I don’t really care about feelings on these – they’re awful. Outlines, gradients, different colors, weird weights? I now have something to send to graphic designer friends who I want to fuck with.

The pictures are…not great either. I get it. Shooting models at shows is the suck. The lighting is bad, the background is cluttered. Time may be an issue.

But that’s no excuse for dark, underexposed pics or not filling the frame. The images are workmanlike at best, and honestly fall way short of what I saw attendees posting over the weekend.

Go have a look for yourself if you like.

Why this is not good

Again, the vast majority of modelers do not attend Nats for a variety of reasons. And again, these photos are thus, for them, the representation of it.

As a quick aside, there’s a lot of snark and shittiness about this. A lot of “if you want to see the models got to Nats” and similar unhelpfulness. Traveling to some random place that’s probably at least several hours away for a long weekend isn’t an easy swing for most people. For some, it’s too big of a lift physically. For others, it’s not financially feasible. Others have family and work considerations.

I would imagine the organizers, IPMS, and fans of Nats in general would want the show to look awesome and to be represented in as compelling a manner as possible. To get more people excited about next year. To draw more people down off the fence. To raise the thing’s cachet among the big global model events. You know – the kind of stuff that brings in more attendees, more sponsors, more coverage, and creates more possibilities.

Ways to improve things

I’ve worked in marketing for over 20 years now. I know content marketing and event marketing. I’ve been to trade shows and industry conferences. And there is so much possibility that’s just being left on the table.

Like…why aren’t seminars livestreamed? Or even archived so the people on the ground who can’t make the seminars for whatever reason can check them out later? CES was doing this 15 years ago. These days it’s stupid easy.

But we’re talking about photos.

So, from someone with direct experience promoting events as they’re happening, here are some ideas:

Build as much of the winners’ gallery as possible in advance. First, set up a gallery that was last updated in this millennium. Go with a full provider solution like SmugMug or one of many self-hosted options like Chevereto. Configure the folder and album hierarchies by genre (aircraft, armor etc) and then individual categories. Add a few extras where you know there will be splits. Snag someone with graphic design chops and great a template for the category cards. Make sure it all works and sort out your upload process.

Take pictures early. Judging happens on Friday night and apparently it lasts for hours. Take pics as it’s going on. Yes, this will involve taking pictures of more than just the winners – a lot more. But there won’t be the rush to take pics AND upload everything all at the same time on Saturday. I’ve always found it helpful to snap a picture of the category placard before taking pictures of the builds, so when you ingest them, you can easily batch tag photos to their relevant categories, which will make going through them to pull the winners a lot easier.

Take better pictures. As for volunteers early. Bring decent cameras. Assign photographers to genres or specific categories. Coordinate settings (and dial them in during the day on Friday so there’s less faffing about when it’s go tie). Collect SD cards and ingest.

Take better pictures, part 2. Get more compelling angles. Most of the “official” photos are taken from human height. Get lower and closer. Give the models some soul.

Now, if you want to really do something special, here’s a wild idea.

Rethink the entire registration process. Move it online. Encourage people to upload photos of their entries as part of the online registration. Then source those for the awards photos and just skip the whole trying to catalog everything step. This would also provide a great bank of photos that could be used in the run-up to Nats to tease the event and what’s coming on social media. Put QR codes on the table sheets that attendees and even judges can use to look up said pictures.

None of these things are a herculean lift. Hell, the out-there wild idea would actually take a lot of work off of the event staff. But they would require changing the way some things work.

In closing

There’s a lot of talk out there about growing the hobby and attracting younger audiences and pulling in people who don’t normally go to shows. And then it inevitably seems to slide back to “let’s be more accepting of gundams”.

But you dare to suggest that the online experience could be – and should be – worlds better, and there’s this wall of instant defensiveness. “You’re not there so you can’t say anything”. Because I’m not there, because I’m following from the outside, I can see how clunky and antiquated that side of this looks. And so can those younger modelers you so want to attract. Because they’re rolling their eyes and moving on to something more interesting.

The pushback feels like it’s coming from people just not even seeing a problem with state of things in the first place. And because of that, getting super defensive about it.

Personally, institutional inertia isn’t the hill I’d choose to die on.

Over on my recent Inflection Points video, Kyle Keller dropped a comment that I wanted to respond to:

Just remember friends it is a hobby that is supposed to be fun. I forget that from time to time, all the weather tricks are neat but very few actual aircraft ever had the type of weathering that is the norm these days does it look good sure is it accurate no so keep that in mind when you compare yourself to what people think something should look like.

Thing is, a proper response needs pictures. And YouTube’s comment system isn’t very good at that (given the nature of many YT comments, that’s probably a blessing). So I figured I’d take my response over here.

Supposed to be fun

First, sure, yes, the hobby’s supposed to be fun. But “fun” is a very nebulous term that means many different things to many different people. I mean, just consider the variety of kinks and fetishes that people have. Fun takes many shapes.

With modeling – or at least modeling as I approach it – I’m kinda reminded of the movie Pleasantville. And how the static, shallow pleasantness of black and white gives way to the full spectrum of human emotion. There’s passion and rage and regret and joy and introspection and it leads to growth and to change. To me, researching a subject is fun. Trying to do my best, and seeing that line move over time, is fun. Even the shitty parts give my mind something to engage with while it chews on bigger things in the background.

Fun is whatever it is to you. And that’s part of why this hobby is so engrossing, I think. There’s no pre-defined “fun”. It’s what each of us makes it.

Very few actual aircraft…

Now to this old saw that aircraft don’t actually have “the type of weathering that is the norm these days”.

In some cases, like highly stylistic takes on the Spanish school, or very aggressive panel line shading, sure. Absolutely. But the overwhelming majority of the aircraft I go after have their roots in real world references – and real world weathering. And I do my best to, if not replicate them, at least land in a representative ballpark. So I thought I’d do some side-bys of some of my various builds, and the references that inspired them.

In some cases I may exaggerate certain elements, or just fail to capture things the right way, but I think you’ll find that in a lot of cases I actually end up holding back compared to the real thing.

French P-47D-27

Me 262A-2a

Bf 109G-10/U4/R2

F4U-1 Birdcage Corsair

F-5B Freedom Fighter

F-104G Starfighter

P-47D-20 Thunderbolt

FG-1D Corsair

A-6E Intruder

P-38F Lightning

Recently, I started building the new I Heart Kit M3A1 Lee for the Plastic Posse Podcast’s M3/M4 Group Build.

Before we get into it, yes, I Heart Kit is a stupid name for a kitmaker. Whatever. It’s an imprint of Trumpeter and everything in the box screams Trumpeter, from the sprues to the instructions to the bags to the little insert of releases. Why the imprint with a stupid name? Dunno.

Anyway, as I went into the M3A1, I had thoughts.

#VoluteFromHome

Since COVID remade the world and set me to working from home, I’ve found that chucking together armor kits helps me work in a number of ways. It tamps down Zoom anxiety and helps keep me from getting distracted by the glories of the internet on long calls. It helps me background process concept ideas and clears my mind when I’m trying to crack a particularly tricky bit of copy.

As a result, I’ve built a lot of tanks since March 2020. And a lot of them have been of the volute suspension variety.

So when I started the IHK M3A1, I’d already banked some pretty recent experience in VVSS suspensions, and I’d learned a few lessons.

First, I always fuck myself with the suspension bogeys. The fit is always there, but not there enough to hold them in place with any kind of handling. So I glue them. And then I can’t work around them later for paint and weathering.

Second, mounting live-type tracks is a huge pain in the ass. Holding the tracks taught while securing them? Not enjoyable in any way.

The I Heart Kit Problem

Overall, the IHK M3A1 is a damn pretty okay kit. The only real complaint I have is the absolutely asinine approach the kit takes to tracks, but I rarely use kit tracks anyway, so I’m not really put out by that.

One place where it does frustrate, though, is its dinky bogey mounts. These consist of two little pins, and kind of a U-shaped collar. Plenty if you’re gluing them, but they won’t even support the lower hull and stand on their own.

This was unacceptable, so I decided to have a go at making a more workable solution that would give me a secure fit, but also let me pull them on and off as needed.

Magnets, motherfucker

That’s right. Magnets.

I’ve used magnets before to secure ordnance to aircraft, or in a more extreme case, the entire engine and cowling of a 1/32 P-47 to the fuselage.

But I’ve never used magnets with an armor build before.

So here’s what I did.

First, I drilled six 5mm holes in the lower hull, between the tiny little bogey mounting holes.

Second, I cut some strips of metal roof flashing and superglued them to some square styrene tube.

Third, I glued two 4x2mm neodymium magnets to the backside of each bogey, using the holes drilled in the lower hull as placement guides and installing them from the inside.

Fourth, once those magnets dried, I used THEM to help locate the flashing inside the lower hull, and glued that shit down tight.

The result? A surprisingly strong hold for the bogeys that keeps them in place, but also 100% removable.

I also got sick of the sprockets slipping off all the time, so after checking that I had some clearance between the end of the sprocket mounts and the inside of the sprocket itself, I glued two magnets on each side, one of the mount, one buried deep inside the sprocket wheel itself, and magnetized yet another part of the running gear.

Aside from ease of painting, what’s the point of this exactly?

Use Case!

Well, I discovered the true utility of this magnetic silliness today when I was trying to mount up the Masterclub T41 tracks.

My first attempt, with all the running gear in place and me placing the final end connectors in situ, was about one link too long, but I couldn’t go any shorter and actually close the loop.

The result was a very noticeable slackness between the rear bogey and the idler.

After fretting about this for a bit, I decided to rip everything off and mount the tracks with just the sprocket and idler. Then I shoved the bogeys back into place, starting with the front, then the rear, then the middle. Once I worked them to their mounting plates, the magnets helped them find their way home, and the result was a much better looking track profile.

Stupid? Yes. Effective? Also yes.

As far as I’m concerned, magnetizing VVSS bogeys is now standard operating procedure for my future builds.