A Lifetime Since My Last Skyhawk

The Airfix 1:72 A-4B Skywawk (A03029) is the first Skyhawk I’ve done since I was a kid – and that one, some 44 years ago, was also an Airfix, the ancient-tool original! I’ve wanted to add those classic Douglas lines to my display case for a long time, and the new Airfix seemed an inexpensive place to start.

This is a nice kit to put together for the most part, but can bite you here and there. Alignment is generally fine but there were gaps at the wingroots and intakes. The former I dressed using white glue and capillary action, which seemed to work quite well, while the latter received traditional filler, though the repair is by no means invisible. The canopy fit is fair but can wander around in terms of seating the windscreen, while the main hood is too deep – it stands high at the rear hinges, as if designed to be displayed in the open position. There are delicate and fiddly parts, the landing gear especially, and I had to take a few days break to let my frustration settle down before resuming the job. The secondary strut on the nose gear snapped on the sprue and was simply omitted, in the interests of sanity.

Paintwork is MM Acryl Gull Gray over Tammy flat white, with Microscale Satin for the lustre. The decals are very good, but large ones grabbed very fast, resulting in the loss of one of the large NAVY titles – I’ll replace it next time I do one of these kits. Areas where multiple markings lie close together are served by single decals, which is a good idea, except that with the grab of these thin, lovely printings I dare not even try them – I cut away the modex numbers from the front insignia and applied them separately. The same would likely work for the rear flank decals – separate the elements and maybe they’ll slip better.

There are a number of omissions in this build – mine, more then the company’s. There is no decal for the “barbershop pole” effect on the arrester hook, and after attempting to cannibalise strip decal, which shattered at the first attempt, I dropped the hook into the receiver without glue so I can come back to it at a later date if the means comes to hand. Likewise the red edges of the gear bay doors are ignored – way too hard to freehand paint and I’ll need strip decals of some sort (reliable ones…) before I try. The intake warning markings are painted freehand around the curve (the sheet provides straight decals for them, which must be some sort of hobby company joke), and masking the correct narrower area for brush painting simply did not work. So it was brushed up to the adjoining panel line, and that was as good as it was going to get.

I’m more or less amazed that the landing gear is actually strong enough to hold the model up, but it seems to be. I had visions of its collapsing once the tanks were on, but superglue seems to have pinned everything up well enough. The Eduard masks for the canopy were their usual breeze to use, and their usual frustration when they pulled up both paint and decals as they came off. There are times I wonder why I bother to use them when the result is so shoddy -- then I imagine trying to hand paint canopy struts and I remember why.

Overall, a good model that looks the part on the shelf, but I’m reminded yet again that 1:72^nd scale is a real trial, and I prefer 1:48^th – so long as there’s somewhere to put the finished article. While doing this one I had the urge to grab a late-tool F-16 in the larger scale and just do it, but sense prevailed. Until that fabled new display case puts in an appearance, I must restrain my urge to build bigger!

Cheers, Mike

Seasonal Bench-Time: Making an End-of-Year Effort

It’s almost a cliché that pressures of life cut into our hobby time, and my 2017 experience has been probably the most extreme example of this to date. I finished one small kit early in the year, then, despite having a great many underway, found my energy, attention and time drained away to other things. Losing a parent at mid-year was one of life’s milestones and put a great dampener on things as trivial as creative entertainment… Then there was work – teaching the second semester anthropology course for First Years was quite a commitment, and my writing endeavours have certainly taken up time and application – I should finish the year with better than sixty new short stories, in quest of that fabled occupation, professional science fiction writer.

So it’s hardly a surprise that the hobby bench took a back seat this year, and only now, at the end of the year, have I been able to set things aside and make an attempt to finish up a few projects before the fireworks at New Year.

The one that wanted to be finished first was Tamiya’s vintage Brummbar, 35077, from 1976. This kit has long been eclipsed by the Dragon offerings, but, having built one of those a couple of years ago, I can safely say this one is a much easier build, for all its proportional problems. It depicts a first- to early-second series vehicle, and in reality these were delivered with zimmerit, without exception. However, I did not fancy a zimmerit job on this model, I wanted to explore painting techniques on an un-rippled hull, try to push my chipping approach in oils (inspired by some build photos I found on the web of an amazing chipping job performed on this very same kit.)

So, historical inaccuracy aside, I built the model straight from the box (the easy part), and decided on detailing. I grafted in some Dragon bits – the schkurtzen hangers, for instance, finer and more exact than the Tamiya parts, but they simply would not line up anything like accurately, therefore plans to add the Dragon etched skirt plates were also shelved.

As usual with old Tamiya Pz. IV kits, I added some detail inside the fenders in strip and rod styrene. These details were omitted from the kit for reasons of tooling limitations, but are easy enough to add.

By the time the model was “finished” and photographed, I realised I had also forgotten to paint the jack block and prep a Dragon braided-wire tow cable – these details are to follow whenever I get around to them!

The soul of this job was always going to be the painting. I got the project as far as the base colour overall (Tamiya Acrylics XF-60, lightened for scale effect with 25% XF-2, then given a slight lustre with 20% X-22). And there she sat for many months as I struggled with the other things life set before me, never quite feeling up to doing the rotbraun camo overspray, until recently.

I had been away from the hobby so long I made a number of mistakes – the first camo overspray was okay, but the mist coat to pull the finish together was the wrong shade, resulting in too light an effect and the rotbraun developing a pinkish tinge. I then realised I had used NATO brown instead of the WWII shade anyway! Talk about disconnected from the job… So, back up, mix a fresh round of base colour by the numbers, respray and start again, correct camo (XF-64), followed by XF-60 mist to tie it together.

Finally I got to grips with the oils, gave the whole beast a very thin wash of dark brown in enamel thinner (stinks to high heaven, gives me blazing headaches unless I have a wind blowing through the place and use a respirator mask), then switched to unthinned oils to profile all edges in a pale ochre, followed by the rust work – dark brown, red-brown, and the slightest touch of orange. This took about three sessions over some days, and the sheer extent of the work always left some bit needing more. I need to try the old scotchbrite-pad method for extensive areas of random chipping, it would really improve the result and speed things up.

More oils, pin washes around details, then dry pigment work on the muffler, and back to the air brush to spray the road grime coat on the underside and running gear. Here I made a mistake again, taking it too dark/heavy on the roadwheels so there was too much contrast against the drives and idlers. I didn’t spot this mismatch until the running gear was mounted, and with the Tamiya polycap attachment method they absolutely did not intend to come off again, so respraying was out. Instead I darkened the drives and idlers with a black oil wash to create a more even gradient between upper and lower areas and this seemed to suffice as an eleventh-hour save.

Decals are Archer crosses and Dragon numbers. I added a little pigment over them to tone down the brightness of the white, which always seems to work visually. The pioneer tools were sprayed on the sprue, given a dark brown wash to tone back the metallic, then fitted and treated with pigments for rust effects. The jack was sprayed hull colour and weathered appropriately.

The Brummbar had a plate over the muffler, possibly to protect the spare wheels from the heat and soot of the exhaust, but this plate is omitted here – there is  no way to fit the muffler with the plate installed, and the plate will not fit if the muffler goes on first, apparently. It strikes me as an unhappy consequence of driving the original Panzer IV kit’s lower hull engineering beyond its original design intent (either that or this bit was too fiddly for me, a very rare event in an early Tamiya kit!)

Last washes and pigments completed the dirt and rust effect all round, I added a radio antenna from wire, and she was essentially done. A great many unused parts went into storage, on which I will draw for future projects – the ample supply of individual track links will serve on a StuG IV at some point, the crew helmets will find service, the skirt plates also perhaps.

Okay, it’s not super-accurate, but it’s also neither super-difficult nor super-expensive, and it’s a fun model to build. The painting aspect is king here – as an example check out the last photo – the finished Brummbar against a Pz. IV J as far along as the scale-adjusted base colour. This really brings home to what degree the finishing techniques bring a model alive.

There’s a fortnight left in the year and I’m going to try to finish another couple of projects before the calendar turns.

Cheers, Mike Adamson