It Worked!

Sometimes the manufacturers really do know what they’re talking about… I’ve been working on Tamiya’s 1:12^th scale Suzuki Katana off and on, a 2017 build that’s been on the shelf (full build post to come) and the wheel rims are in bright finish, which Tamiya recommend be done with an X-11 Chrome Silver enamel paint marker pen. I’ve never used their paint markers before and ordered one up with some trepidation, thoughts of floods of paint or dried-up tips going through my mind.

I searched YouTube for how-to videos and found one out of Russia which, though I could follow not a word, was pretty self-explanatory as far as appropriate touch for applying the tip to a surface was concerned. Even so, I put the job off at least a month before there was not one other thing to do on the project before this task.

Of course, when I finally opened the marker, gave it a good shake and started the flow, it worked perfectly. The corner of the chisel-tip seated comfortably into the wheel rim and I applied the paint in short, controlled sections. Before I knew it, it was done and the parts were set aside to dry. Some commentaries have remarked that this can take a long time, into the second day and still tacky, but I find myself wondering if that indicates the paint was insufficiently agitated beforehand. This oaint was dry in an hour.

               

The bright silver rim does not show up very well in the available-light photo at top, and the marker pen, which ships in a plastic shrink-wrap, has been resealed with tape at the cap juncture, to preserve paint life. The picture below shows the front wheel, with a gunmetal finish, and the chrome rim shines beautifully in a flash shot.

When these parts are ready to be handled, I can do most of the remaining build-up, indeed the only painting left to do is the front brake units and the rubber protector around the windshield transparency (fiddly masking required on both). But this project should hopefully come together quite quickly now.

Cheers, Mike Adamson

Brain Cells? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Brain Cells!

After a lifetime in the hobby you can become inured to the stink of the chemistry. Enamel paints, liquid glue designed to be a plastic solvent, cyanoacrylate glue, even the supposedly nontoxic acrylics which have a pleasing odour but can be rather not-good-for-you in an enclosed space.

I recently began to experience headaches after airbrushing. As readers of this blog will know, I more or less retired enamels a couple of years ago for reasons of toxicity, and because dragging the whole rig outside to spray was too much trouble. However, even with a window open and some moving air, after sessions spraying acrylics I was starting to get persistent headaches, and that tells me I was suffering mild toxicity effects. I’ve completed half a dozen models in the last two months so there has been more painting packed into a shorter time than any other in the last year, so perhaps a problem was due to show up. A paper dust mask was not stopping much so the only solution was to buy a professional respirator mask.

As it happened, I was on the last gasp of my compressed air cylinder and needed a changeover, so when I took the tank into the depot I asked about masks and was shown an excellent unit made by 3M Corporation. This is the real deal, with chemical scrubber cartridges and dust filters, and a fully sealed fit to the face. When you’re breathing through this you’re on cleaned air only!

I trialled it promptly and the results of are as follows: easy fit and adjustment, comfortable to wear, not too heavy, does not obstruct the fit of glasses. No faintest whiff of chemical odour penetrates the mask, and breathing is easy and regular. The most important point is that after two good sessions of painting no headache had occurred, which seems to demonstrate the point.

The chemical scrubber cartridges come in a sealed package because they are permanently reactive with air and will exhaust. The tip from the retailers is that whenever the mask is not in use the cartridges are removed and sealed in ziplock bags with as much air squeezed out as possible. Hopefully this will extend filter life to a reasonably economical degree.

The whole rig (mask, chemical cartridges, dust filter pads) set me back Aus$80, which is a fair bit of cash, but how do you put a price on your health? I would like to still be building models when I’m 90, and doing so with as many brain cells left alive as possible!

Product Review: Model Master Acryl Paints

The quest for less-obnoxious spray painting is never over, and while I have had great pleasure with the Tamiya acrylics range they just don’t have matches for many of the standard shades in use, whether German RLM shades or modern US Federal Standard colours. What few they do purport to match are actually very wide of the mark (for instance, their equivalents to RLM 02 grey, RLM 70 schwartzgrun, or British Sky are not satisfactory and require mixing to improve.)

The Pollyscale acrylic range is hard to find in Australia, and Humbrol acrylics are not imported, nor are Revell Aqueus. But recently, distributors have begun to bring in the Model Master Acryl range, and these are definitely worth a look. Colours are matched by precise industrial techniques, same as for the old standard MM enamels range, and the paints are supplied in the same old fashioned bottle. Some people have criticised the bottle design as hard to stir, favouring the Tamiya broad-neck type, but I have never had an issue, perhaps because I cut my teeth stirring paint in Humbrol tinlets, after which, it’s fair to say, anything is an improvement.

Obviously, my base for comparison is the Tamiya range, and on that footing, I can make the following observations:

Model Master Acryls are a virtually odourless formulation, there is no ester-smell on opening the jars. Though it seems they separate into phases when standing, a shake seems to do most of the work, they need very little stirring and recombine fully. I have sprayed light and dark shades and they seem to have equivalent covering ability. Thinning is an issue in point, these paints seem to demand 25%, compared to 50% for Tamiya, meaning you use proportionally more paint from each bottle in any given job. Any more than 25% and spatter begins to develop, which if controlled through flow rates and brush motion sets down in a somewhat pebbly fashion, drying with excess gloss. The finish seems to be somewhat harder, more durable, than that of Tamiya paints, and it can be said that the paints go on and lie down differently, though I would be hard pressed to actually describe how. They certainly dry quickly, from a wet, almost pebbly application to a dry, satiny coat in a few minutes.

Random gloss patches have been reported by others but I have yet to encounter this phenomenon with these paints; in any case, if using topcoats, it’s neither here nor there. Another general criticism is their tendency to tip-dry, blocking the airbrush, which I have encountered when spraying a fairly large amount of paint in one session (doing the template technique on a set of tank wheels, for instance), however under normal circumstances this does not seem to be a bother (nor is it affected by increasing the thinning ratio). I image it will become more of an issue in warmer weather.

One last point, these paints are entirely appropriate for applying with a brush, something Tamiya paints really do not like to do. After many years of struggling with touch-ups in the Japanese range, I can now dip a brush and have the paints go on the way enamels do, rather than the frustrating wipe-on, wipe-off effect of the others.

At this point I have used only four paints from this range. I am thinning with Tamiya thinner which is completely compatible, and cleaning up with water, between airbrush strip-and-clean sessions using Tamiya thinner and a Paasche brush set (invaluable, the best buy I ever made for ensuring the airbrush remains fully serviceable at all times.) I will be expanding my range and applications, and expect to be trying their gull, ghost and compass greys in due course.

I would recommend Model Master Acryls to anyone painting indoors and who is interested in their health. The range is very large (it takes three pages at the Testor website to present them all), and as acrylics they can be mail-ordered by air from the US or elsewhere. See the range at:

http://www.testors.com/category/136648/Acrylic_Paints
I’m happy with their performance so far, and will continue to acquire shades, but I will be using them in concert with the Tamiya range which, though it may be just familiarity with these paints over so many years, seem to be a tiny bit more user-friendly in the way they go on when sprayed.

Close to Home

Last week the news could talk about little else than the disaster in Japan but the novelty seems to have worn off, they’re back to the staples of politics, crime and celebrity hijinx. Now you need to dig online to find that the radiation levels in Miyagi are now 100, 000 times the normal background levels, and that fallout has been detected in the environment as far away as Michigan. But it seems an impending British royal wedding is far more important than keeping people informed as to how bad the situation is – or constitutes a diversion from it.

Okay, off the soapbox and back to regular programming – but it was brought home to me sharply today when I dropped by my LHS for some Tamiya paint. I had used up my NATO Black and needed another coat on the tires for three tanks, including the StuG IV featured in my last post, and am down to a drop of German Dark Yellow also, but could only source the black. The chap on the counter checked the chain’s other store to see if they could have the yellow sent down for me, but it was sold out there also. Why? Japan…

One doesn’t normally think of the hobby supply chain being as time-sensitive as this. One imagines a container-load of stuff comes from a particular ‘industry of origin’ in to a particular distributor and is shared out around the country maybe two or three times a year, but a fortnight after a disaster in the country of origin supply is in a serious pinch here in Australia, and that makes you do a double-take.

Where would we be without our plastics-derived materials science? Quite apart from the health concerns, that microscopic particles of plastic migrate through our bodies and come to rest within our very living cells (and we plastic modellers must be more at risk of this than other parts of the community that have less intimate relationships with plastic than ours, which include solvent chemistry and sanding and other means of breaking it down into ever finer parts…), we seem to be highly dependent on plastic for our amusement. How many of us willingly grab a piece of natural wood and get to work building a replica? Well, that’s another stream of the hobby, isn’t it…? How many of us set up our lathe and milling machine and start knocking out working steam locomotives? That’s another part of the hobby. too. How many would tackle a wooden ship kit that costs a year’s savings? I’m not saying that any of these things is outside the hobby, I’m saying our stream is plastic modelling and as such is plastics-dependent. Interrupt the supply and we’ll feel it.

Back at the time of Desert Storm (“Gulf War I” for those who don’t remember that Iran and Iraq had been at war for ten years previously, referred to in the international media for that entire period as “the Gulf War”) it was discussed in the pages of FineScale Modeler and elsewhere that an international oil crisis would impact the hobby by changing the cost structures of manufacturing plastic. As it happens, this did not trickle down into any serious impediment to the hobby, but it illustrates the same sort of dependency.

But where can we go without plastics or resins? Could any of us seriously set about building, say, a tank model, from wood? It’s not impossible, and would be a most interesting challenge… It would certainly foster one’s carpentry skills, and oblige one to be a craftsman in the old sense of the word, a machinist and tradesman. Building intricate, working models was something tradesmen used to do, and many of them are still found in museums. Engineers’ models for ship yards are a perfect example of precision scale modelling of a sort the world sees too little of today.

I wonder… A wooden Sherman or Tiger…? Lathed wheels, carved turret, lathed barrel, and so forth, and a hull planed from timber (the welded-hull M3A4 Sherman would be a prime candidate, or either main variant of the Tiger, with its milled slab armour). Fill the wood grain with woodstop or some homebrew filler of dope and a fine powder medium. Detail would be difficult, that’s for sure. Metal, probably... And those tracks would be rather obliged to be cast link by link, probably in whitemetal, pinned together and end up workable... And paint? Even our non-toxic mainstays are derived from plastic! (Which is worse for us, plastic or solvent fumes?) It’s all an interesting idea but is it really possible to obtain the realism and ease we expect in any other medium? Perhaps not.

I'm sure every one of us hopes and prays that Japan will get solidly on top of its shocking problems in the near future, and this will be wonderful for every imaginable human reason; certainly the road back for them will be neither swift nor simple. But, we may acknowledge with a certain chagrin, there are also the entirely unique needs of the hobby community, which has come to depend on Japan’s prolific engineering and commercial output to a considerable degree. In subtle ways, we’re already missing them.

Product Review: Tamiya Masking Tape

I remember building Revell's prototype F-16 when I was a kid, in the early 1970s, the one painted up in red, white and blue. The kit was molded in white so I let the white areas be raw plastic, and masked the hard-edge red and blue. I used cellotape, which over raw plastic had nothing to pull up and gave razor-sharp demarcations. I was very impressed with the edge work, less so with the finish of flat enamels slathered on thickly with a brush, and which somehow managed to migrate under the tape where it crossed detail.

Not long afterward I tackled Monogram's B-52D, painting the whole thing with a brush in Humbrol enamels. The white underside took coat after coat and must have looked like it had been done with a roller... Due to the size I used automotive masking tape and of course discovered the necessity of de-gluing the back. Even over well-cured, thick enamel the tape had a de-surfacing effect that was not attractive. I had planned to mask and paint the walkway stripes over the NMF but after early experiments abandoned the idea. Somehow paint would always migrate under, no matter how well-burnished the tape edge seemed to be...

I used to think joint dressing was the biggest drag in the hobby, but since the advent of both cyanoacrylate glue and better-engineered kits joints have become simply a part of the process, not the disfiguring headache they once were, and the necessity of masking the paintjob has rather moved to the fore as the most time-consuming task in reaching a really good result.

Household/automotive paper tape is not designed for delicate paints and you need to seriously de-glue it to stand a chance. Scotch brand invisible mending tape is not very sticky and produces a very sharp edge. The problem with these two is they are not very flexible, they don't deform easily around corners. In the US there is the blue 'painters' tape,' but I'm not aware of it (or an equivalent) in Australia. To be fair, I've not checked out hardware stores for the item, but there's not much point when you have an item like Tamiya tape in the tool draw.

If there was a perfect product for this application, I'd have to say Tamiya have nailed it. Their tape is low-tack, burnishes down tight, deforms readily, and peels off clean. I have yet to have it pull up sprayed acrylics or enamels over any properly prepared surface (the only time I had it take paint off right through to the plastic was attributable to a deposit left on the surface of the model by the cleaning agent I had used to degrease it). The tape is also essentially re-usable, I have used the same pieces of tape on multiple projects, simply by transferring them to another plastic surface where they can stick for weeks or months and again peel off cleanly.

The tape comes in a variety of widths from narrow to broad so you have the option of curving lines or bulk coverage. I usually put a strip down on my cutting mat and slice it up with a razor knife and steel rule into ultra-narrow pieces or shapes as the job calls for. The dispenser rolls are a good idea, too.

The FW 190 I have on the bench at the moment was masked in both hard and soft contexts. The unit markings featured yellow rudder, cowl and fuselage bands, and rather than go with the kit decals for these items I sprayed them at the same time as the rudder. After overnight curing I masked them with strips of Tamiya tape and carried on with the rest of the paintjob. Several days went by, then I removed the hard masks and discovered perfectly sharp edges, and perfect protection of the underlying paint from later applications.

The big resin Beta-1 bomber featured in the last couple of posts was also fully masked with Tamiya tape, a long and complex operation, but one which went off essentially without a hitch. The colour demarcations are as tight and sharp as you could possibly wish for, with absolutely no paint bleed-under or de-surfacing on removal.

Tamiya tape is an indispensable tool in my kit, and I recommend it without reservation.

Giving Up Enamels: Just Around the Corner?

I've posted a fair few times on the contrasting merits of enamels and acrylics, and despite being a lifetime enamel user I find I'm drifting toward acrylics more and more.

They don't go on as silky-smooth, they dry quicker in the airbrush tip, and for sure you need to get used to them, but the benefits really do weigh heavily in their favour. They're far less toxic, they come in larger bottles that have phenomenal shelf-life, there are enough shades around that you can either get a decent match right off the shelf or mix one without much bother, and they're durable enough to survive gentle handling. Their non-toxic nature means they're probably the only option for indoor spraying if you're health-conscious at all (brain cells, we don't need no stinkin' brain cells!), so you can paint through the winter without being well-enough heeled to have a spray booth/ fume hood in your workshop, and that's the majority of us. Also, enamel paint chemically attacks vinyl so if you fancy anything from anime subjects to dinosaurs via movie tie-in figures, acrylics will be your medium of choice.

They've come a long way in the last twenty years, and modern acrylics are seriously competing with traditional enamels. I've done mostly-acrylic paintjobs on my last eight armour kits, with oil-wash weathering over the top, and it's become my standard armour technique, so it may only have been a matter of time before the medium encroached on aircraft.

The Convair XAB-1 that I reviewed in the box in my last post, rather longer ago than I had imagined (apologies for the long delay in posting!) is now finished and submitted to the commissioning magazine, and it turned out to be an all-acrylic paintjob. I had intended to do the natural metal parts in enamel, but fate took a hand: I discovered I had no enamel thinner in stock other than the dirty thinner in the bottom of an old bottle I use to suspend oils for wash detailing, and as I was on a deadline I realised the metallic would have to be acrylic too. Fortunately I had the shades in hand, so I mixed Tamiya X-11 Chrome Silver with XF-16 Flat Aluminium (9:1) and laid it on in several decent coats. The underside white of the bomber was four coats of satin white mixed from X-2 Gloss White and XF-2 Flat White, while the red of the engine inlets, the chromate green of the wheel wells, satin black of the antiglare panel, dark metallic of the flaps and gunmetal of the exhausts were all previously mixed and sprayed in the same acrylic range.

I was impressed by the covering ability (with the exception of the white, and that's the nature of the beast where white is concerned), and the rapid drying which made multiple coats a practical proposition in a modest timeframe. The job became practical and the finish was entirely acceptable. Yes, the natural metal had a certain grain to it that an enamel job probably would not, and in future I will still work in enamels when the environmental conditions are right; but when they are not and there is a model to be finished, the less-toxic medium is now fully up to the job.

I have a Tamiya Fw 190 F-8 underway with an all-acrylic finish. I'll write a review of this excellent kit when she's done, and talk about mixing the RLM paint shades from the basic Tamiya range, an operation which, at time of writing this article, looks both simple and highly accurate (sometimes...).

Cheers, Mike

Fascination With “Type”

Sometimes, without consciously meaning to, we find ourselves on a single-type production line. It can happen for a variety of reasons, and plain fascination with a particular subject matter is probably the single most significant. The hobby is about entertainment, education and general knowledge come decidedly second, so when a hobbyist finds him or herself focussing on a particular subject it's probably because there's an abiding interest.

It might be that you're a fan of MOPAR muscle, and you're on your tenth 1:25th scale Chrysler Corp F-body pro-streeter in a row. Maybe you're an armour fan who belongs to the "panzers only" club because they're colourful. Maybe your thing is vintage biplanes and between them Roden and classic Aurora have occupied your bench time for the last two years.

Of course, it can creep up on you. I recently found myself building four Fw 190 fighters at the same time sort of. One was started four years ago, brought to the painting stage and almost forgotten, back in its box. One was a quick build to work with some AM decals, another was a long-delayed foray into building a leading manufacturer's offering with all the bells and whistles. The last was a chance to work in 1:32nd scale for the first time in twenty years, and only the fourth time ever, on the assumption that there will shortly be somewhere to store and display a model that size.

However it worked out, there are four German WWII fighters on my bench at the same time, which will mostly be in the same RLM 74/75/76 scheme, and that's a plus to production-line building. You can get at least two of them ready for the paintshop at the same time and do both from the same mixing and cleaning cycle, which reduces work and economises on air if you're not using a compressor.

Does it risk boredom? Seeing a long line of the same subject ahead of you can either whet your appetite for completion, as each finished build fuels the next, or dull it completely when some other fascinating body shape and colour scheme comes along to compete with the same-old same-old. I think I'll stagger things, do a 1:72 and the 1:48 together, tackle the 1:32 on its own due to sheer volume, and the last 1:72 separately by default as it has a slightly different scheme. It'll take months to work through them, but I have every expectation that each finished plane will more than inspire me to press on with the next.

I suppose the three Phantoms I have underway also count as a fascination with type. Look for posts in future picking up the theme of the great Hasegawa/Fujimi Phantom Showdown, as both these brands are on the bench and will be reviewed together.

PS: I'm now using Picassa for my image loads, click them and you'll get a larger version from now on.

Now That’s What I Call Shelf-Life

 I have rarely had cause to need gold paint. I have always fancied doing that gold-painted F-16, Sioux City Special I believe she was called, I even have a kit and decals lined up for the day I have the time... The chance... Somewhere to put it... But the odd gold detail might call for having gold in stock. I have a tinlet of Humbrol #16, Gold. I recently needed to open it for a few dabs of gold to visually blend in some gold foil I was applying, and sure enough, there it was, in the box at the back of the drawer. I really don’t remember if it was ever opened to do a job, but I am sure it was bought to do the gold detail work (engine accents, IIRC) on a small kit of the Honda CB 1100R motorcycle, by a firm called Crown. I bought that kit around Christmas 1982, it may be the oldest single article in my stash (still unbuilt). And by default, that means the paint is now around 27 years old. (The pic above is a new tin, I can’t seem to lay my hands on the old classic…) It wasn’t even thick in the tin. I gave it a shake, opened it and stirred it for thirty seconds, and it was good to go. When that paint was manufactured, that expression wasn’t even in use, nor were in the pipeline, 24/7, on track or my bad. That’s what you call shelf-life! Maybe the pigments weren’t as finely ground in those days, and the available ranges were smaller, but the chemical balance of the paint in the tin makes for a virtual time-capsule: so long as the balance remains within certain margins the mixture should remain viable forever. Of course, there are other tins that go hard while you look at them, and I had a bottle of MM enamel whose contents turned into a strange, rubbery substance without ever being opened, or maybe only for a tinting dab, but this is where chemistry meets philosophy. The same thing happened recently to another bottle, much newer, something to do with failure of the foiled card seal in the cap, I think. Folks have been complaining on other forums about this and other shortcomings of the Model Master range, lately, which is a pity as it’s really good paint, just let down at times by packaging issues (and accuracy issues, like the identification numbers of the RLM 82 and RLM 83 shades somehow getting reversed when the labels were printed… Or their Dunkelgelb being a bit on the dark side…) For the moment, I’m very impressed with Humbrol. Of course, the delicate balance of chemistry in the tin has been disturbed now, and the next time I look at it, it may have congealed, disintegrating like a vampyre whose coffin was opened before dusk. I guess we’ll see when it comes time to build that F-16 (unless I’ve graduated to Talon Acrylics by then...)

Product Review: Alliance Model Works Painting Masks

 Now here is a truly good idea! The template painting method for wheels has been around for quite a while and it makes a slow, tedious, “iffy” job into a quick, accurate one, but one painful truth is that models are a scale depiction of reality and as such it’s always a lottery as to whether artists’ circle templates, which are produced on whole millimetre increments (they don’t seem to make half-mil sizes) ever match closely the size of the wheels. After you’re done spraying you always need to take a fine brush and clean up those edges by hand, hoping the ridge of the rim will guide the brush adequately to fool the eye. For a Panzer IV, with 36 wheels (counting the spares), all of which should correctly be rimmed both sides because you can see the hub area of the rearmost of each wheel pair from oblique angles, that’s a formidable task. But Alliance Model Works have come to the rescue with photoetched painting masks, circle templates designed to fit the rims of specific kits from specific manufacturers.  

 I ordered their set for WWII Wermacht tanks and other vehicles on eBay. #Lw3574, “German Vehicle Wheel Mask Set” comes attractively packaged in a conventional plastic and card sleeve, containing a sheet of instructions on the use of the product and no less than three frets of etched stainless steel, plus one ‘loose’ mask for a total of 54 templates for roadwheels, return rollers, and the steering wheels of halftracks, plus even the wheels of some towed fieldguns. These are precision-made items designed to fit exactly over the rims of kits by Tamiya, Dragon and others, which means no more touch-ups: once spraying is done, you should be finished the job. As soon as I saw these gleaming, individually-plastic wrapped frets I smiled and said to myself, “if these work as advertised, a hard job just became easy.”  

 I tested them on the Tamiya StuG IV crossing my bench at the time. I had delayed doing the wheels til last, and I was very glad I had. The first step was to paint all the tyres black, for which I mixed Tamiya XF-63 Panzer Grey with X-18 Satin Black for a low-lustre tyre black (1:1) and sprayed the wheels on the sprue for ease of handling, with their mating faces masked with Humbrol Maskol and some wet tissue. So far so good. Then I cut the protective plastic over the appropriate PE sheet and test fit a wheel hub into the “Tamiya Panzer IV” template. Well, I certainly hope it fits the new-tool Tamiya IVs, because it sure doesn’t fit the old ones! Why can’t anything ever be easy? Would it have been too difficult to have the new and old-tool kits (which are still widely available under more than one label) catered to, side by side? I had a choice: use the specified template, biased to slip around the rim on one side only, then come back for a second pass to get the other side of the rim with the template biased the opposite way, or find another template which was large enough and fit close enough to do. Compromise is not what you expect from a precision product, and not what was advertised, but I guess the company is playing to the high end of the market, and nobody said anything about the vintage of the kits catered to by this specific set: there may be another set with the older Tamiya Panzer IVs among it’s many template sizes. I don’t know, I haven’t checked – yet. The good news is the template for Dragon’s Panzer III is quite close enough to do. I stripped the protective plastic away and test fit a hub, finding the clearance quite snug enough for my purposes. The rear wheel of the old Tamiya IV seems to be a smaller rim diameter, but the backs of the wheels are not going to be seen much, so some overspray won’t make any difference. I could have taken the template from the PE sheet but for ease of handling and storage I decided to leave them all of a piece. This is how I’m used to handling plastic circle templates to do the job in the past. I masked close round the hole with tape to keep the product clean overall, then trimmed the wheels from the sprue, leaving the attachment points to be dabbed into the mixed black at a later point (before weathering).  

 I mixed Tamiya XF-60 at 1:0.5 and shot at my usual pressure for the Paasche #3 tip and needle, and did two mixings, one for the fronts, one for the backs, and had enough to double coat a fair few hubs in each batch. The metal sure collects overspray, moreso perhaps than plastic templates seemed to, I had to keep wiping the paint away with a moistened tissue, but that’s to be expected and no problem to deal with. The best news is they work great. Any remaining degree of “wiggle room” is due to the fact I’m using them on a kit they were not designed for, but they’re a lot closer to right than standard template sizes, so the job was right in the end. I know how well they’ll perform when I build a Dragon IV, or III, or whatever else actually on the sheets comes up for building. They were on special but not cheap: still, as a precision tool that will serve me for many years, I consider it one of my better investments. Now when I build German armour, I will reach for these masks as a reflex, and the prospect of the running gear will not be a detraction from the fun of the project. Look at the finished job (mains and spare wheels, prior to fitting the stand-off skirts) and there was no hair-tearing involved in getting there:  

Very highly recommended – I suddenly find myself considering collecting any other mask sets they offer, American armour, Russian armour, they all have rims to paint! Check out the product at http://alliancemodelworks.com/ There’s a retrospective look at the old Tamiya Sturmgeschutz coming next time, watch this space…

I Feel Like Building A Model… NOT Painting It!

 Have you ever had the feeling that one part of your artistic creativity is in conflict with another? There have been occasions when I had a spare hour or two and found myself staring at the projects underway and realising that every single one was at some point which obliged me to set up my airbrush and start pushing various colours through to spot-paint detail parts, which means far more cleaning of the airbrush and its jars, and far more mixing of paint, than actual painting. There are times when you just want to build. One problem with aircraft, much as I love them, is that you’re pretty much obliged to paint that wretched cockpit first. Struggle with tiny details, drybrush the controls, put on decals perhaps, create instrument lenses with blobs of Clear Parts Cement, and suchlike. And frankly, there are times you don’t want to be bothered with all that, but just get to the engineering of the piece, tidying up the parts and bringing them together just so, then perhaps doctoring the joint lines with whatever technique you prefer. Perhaps that’s one of the drawcards of armour modelling. Unless you have a perverse desire to open hatches all the time, the inside of a tank is a mystery to the viewer and can be conveniently ignored, which means most of a tank can be built before you need to start painting, and that’s attractive. Building the barrel and turret, mounting suspension swing arms and other lower hull details, dressing the upper hull with hatches, grills, any number of parts that can go on before you need to paint anything… Then join the hull, do some joint work if needed, and you’re into masking the locators for tools and such, masking the mating ring of the turret and all the axles. Oh yes, there’s lots to do before you need put down the first colour. The Academy M981 above falls into this category: I just wanted to enjoy building, and a relatively complex, multi-part armoured vehicle fit the bill to a T. I put it together months ago, and when a slot comes up in my painting schedule it'll finally see it's three-colour camouflage.  

 Right now I have 20 models in progress, at some stage or other. I could be mottling the camo of that Tamiya Me 262, or I could be prepping for the natural metal finish of that F-84 Thunderjet. But over the last week or so I’ve been wash-and-drybrush detailing three armour kits. The time comes when you have to paint what you’ve built and production line modelling is a way of getting through them. Base colour, camo pattern, fade coat, oil filter weathering, pinwash, drybrush profiling, decals, dust coat… I’ll get back to aircraft shortly, I have at least seven to finish in the next two months or so, but you know, when the fiddly details have got me at my wits’ end, I’ll take a break from being an artist, and be an engineer again for a few relaxing sessions. One thing I’m certain of: whatever I build on that day, the odds are it’ll have tracks under it! Hoping you all had a wonderful festive season and that the New Year brings everything you could hope for! Cheers, Mike/Thunderbolt379

Acrylics or Enamels?

 

 It has to be the biggest question in model painting today, beyond choice of brushes or airbrushes, beyond colour selection: which type of paint is best for your project? There are modellers who have switched entirely to water-based acrylics for all spray work, for the health benefits: nontoxic paints are a major factor and not to be taken lightly. When you’re used to the light, sweet smell of acrylics and their water cleanup, to start spraying solvent-based paints and their spirit cleanup is a rude reminder of just how frequently and casually we poison ourselves with the things we invite into our environment. Got a spray booth with a ducted exhaust fan? Good for you, but most of us make do with an open window and sometimes it’s just not enough.

Like many modellers, I have both types of paint in stock. I first bought acrylics when tackling vinyl subjects in the early 90s, and I must say the Tamiya paints I bought have been extraordinarily long-lived. They’re still good over 15 years later, all they need is a stir. They haven’t made the old, large bottles in many years, possibly because people discovered the paint lasted remarkably well, and for the rate of usage a smaller quantity was just fine. I have scores of Tamiya shades, plenty of useful colours, and my collection grows gradually. But I also have hundreds of enamels, the ubiquitous Humbrol range and Testor Model Master (which despite being superb quality, with an easy-stir jar and an enormous selection of specialty-matched shades, is getting hard to find in Australia, as Humbrol and Tamiya have grabbed the popularity).

I have not brush painted a model in 30 years, but today when I spray enamels I do so outside, which is a nuisance. Acrylics I can use indoors with simple ventilation, which makes them easy and convenient. But what about detail painting by brush? This is where the real applicability of the paints comes to the fore. Acrylics spray superbly but they don’t brush worth a damn--at least the Taniya variety. You can thin them a little and that helps, but the drying rate is like lightning and in one minute a brush is unusable -- clean it and start over. This seems a characteristic of the Tamiya range in particular, they are by far the most available here and I have sampled no others at this time (but I’ve heard others dry even faster…)

By comparison, dipping a fine brush in enamel paint provides familiar flow and control, and one can concentrate on the finesse of the task rather than fighting the characteristics of the medium. The same thing applies when airbrushing, though on a longer timescale. When used to the tip-drying characteristics of enamel, acrylics can bite you: you must keep the job moving when you’re working with the nontoxic paints, and when it’s done be sure you’re finished and clean the AB at once. This tends to lead to wasted paint, as when forgotten bits are noticed you need to mix more, and if using a syphon-bottle AB there is a minimum amount the airbrush will actually pick up from the jar. If working in enamels you have the extra working time to consider the job from all angles, turn the thing around again, look at it in different light, go 30 seconds or more and be sure the paint will still flow normally when you press the trigger.

My impression is that enamels and acrylics will continue to share the marketplace. Enamels flow on so smoothly they are a joy to use, they are a ‘friendlier’ medium than acrylics, you can polish their finish just like automotive paints (which ironically have all been acrylics for the last 25 years at least), and the range of precision-matched shades is enormous. The major manufacturers must have churned out over a billion bottles and tinlets in the last 40 years, in fact probably far more, Humbrol alone used to produce 25 million tinlets a year in the 1980s, if I remember correctly, and that’s an awful lot of paint in collections out there. I personally have tins that date from that era and the contents still slosh. But if acrylics were friendlier, dried slower, brushed better, and were available in hundreds more shades, precision-matched to historic sources, I would be using them more often. I have no wish to poison myself, and while the chemistry involved with acrylics is almost certainly not 100% harmless, it’s a significant improvement.