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.

Simplifying Soft Masking

Back when I started this blog, one of my most-viewed early posts was about detailing Hasegawa’s Bf 109 K-4, and one of the techniques I explored was soft-masking, cutting card masks for the camouflage and applying them clear of the surface by an eighth of an inch to hopefully create soft-edged demarcations.

I have been putting together Hasegawa’s Bf 109 F-2 in markings for Operation Barbarossa, and when coming to soft-mask the camo this time an interesting twist struck me.

I had not particularly thought about the masking until I got to the relevant stage, then I compared the pattern on the K-4 to the one on Werner Molders’ aircraft to see if the same masks would serve, at least for the wings and tail, but the pattern, being hand-applied on the original aircraft, was different enough to warrant a new set of masks being cut.

Rather than a process of trial and error, holding pieces of card to the model and trimming them until they looked about right, and in the absence of a 1:48th scale reference drawing, I pulled another unbuilt 109 from my stash and laid the wing, tail and fuselage parts onto a sheet of light card, ran a pencil around them and abruptly had my profile plans. From that point it was an easy matter to copy the camouflage from the kit plans onto the sketch and outline the segments to be cut out. It doesn’t even have to be very exact.

The virtue is that you can pre-design cutaways to fit around the wings or to run under the tail surfaces, or long tapers to shield the sides of the fuselage, helping reduce tape usage. And, if you’re careful with the cutting out, you’ll have a negative mask as well, which you can lay over the opposite tonal area to touch up overspray if needed.

On this model I’m using Model Master Acryl paints (well, on three models simultaneously, in fact), so look for a review of these paints in the near future.

My too-full schedule has been cleared somewhat lately, so look for new posts rather more often.

Not Retiring Enamels After All

Real life has been in the way bigtime, it’s been three months, to the day, since I had a chance to post, but finally I have the time and something important to look at.

Last year I posted a speculative point that acrylic paint technology had almost reached the point that it was worth retiring enamels altogether, for their toxicity and stink. How many of us spray outside to keep the fumes from offending the family? And mortgage our health in any case, as unless we can afford a proper industrial respirator, we’re going to breathe in at least something of the atomised hydrocarbons or whatever other noxious fumes our airbrushes emit.

I have spent most of the last year studiously avoiding enamels, my last enamel job is awaiting completion, and that last camo shade will probably go on with acrylic anyway, just like the topcoat. But where metallics are concerned, acrylics are just not up to snuff yet.

Reviews of the original Tamiya range many years ago reported a granular effect from their silver, and though their paints are now better made, more finely ground or whatever, that granularity is still with us. Add in difficult conditions of temperature and humidity and you can have a mess.

I recently set out to do the natural metal parts of a whole line of Phantoms, and Tamiya acrylics only wanted to spatter and dry like pebbledash paving. Next I gave the Talon brand another go, but I don’t think I’ve encountered a more unfriendly and delicate formulation. I ended up with five sets of tail fins to sand clean for the second time, as the ‘gradual build up of mist coats’ technique was gradually building up little more than … pebbledash pavements.

In frustration (and as I had an hour with the family out) I pulled out an ancient bottle of Model Master Chrome Silver. There was a tiny bit of sludge at the bottom and I was about to bin it, but decided to give it a go anyway. Tamiya X-20 enamel thinner reconstituted it perfectly and it went onto the engine areas of five Phantoms without a hitch, and without the spatter effect that has had me convinced lately my airbrush’s #3 needle needs replacing.

I should have just sprayed everything in enamel and given the Talon a miss, then the whole job would be done. After masking I can do the darker shade in acrylic, Tamiya Aluminium and Gunmetal are far less temperamental than their Chrome Silver, but for the bright base it turns out there really was no alternative. I’m not saying the Talon paints aren’t excellent, but they’re a technique that takes practice, and a patient hand, and I hope one day to have the chance to find my feet with it.

For now, I find myself thinking again about that fumehood setup and respirator for the hobby workshop ("mancave," is a common term for it, but that's sexist, there are plenty of great female talents in the hobby) that's out there on the horizon. Enamels really do flow on so beautifully… It’s a pity they’re poison.

Balancing Time

How often do you hear the phrase “real life got in the way?” The plastic modelling hobby can be a time consuming one, you’ll usually read in FSM’s Workbench Reviews how many hours building a particular kit consumed, and those numbers are sometimes quite high. Then there are competition builders who are known to invest thousands of hours in a single project.

Where do they get them? We all have “real” lives (as if the hobby that brings us satisfaction and bolsters us against the trials and pitfalls of “real” life is any less real) and we need to share our time among our commitments. So much for work, so much for family (plus commuting, eating, sleeping…) All of these come before the hobby. I strongly suspect many of us use hobby hours as “get your head straight” time -- way to shut out the clamour and put things back in perspective.

But there’s a balance at work there as well. You can become so involved in a particular train of thought or endeavour that it’s hard to switch tracks to the hobby more, so when you find you have some time available you can’t mentally make the switch and use it productively. I currently have a grand total of 29 models in various stages of completion, some of which have been shelf-queens for many years, but can I find the ability to jump tracks, now Australia’s five-day long weekend has arrived? It isn’t easy. My brain is stuck on my PhD, and while that’s a good thing, I would really like to complete one or maybe two models over this national holiday, as well as re-tally field data and tabulate results. It goes a way to explaining why it’s been three weeks since I posted here…

I was once chatting with a friend about the long list of scratchbuild subjects I would like to do, and he asked “how long do you plan on living?” Meaning, it can take years to finish a single ambitious project, as I well know. My answer was “several hundred years,” which fits my cosmological outlook, certainly at this point in life, and tends to validate still collecting kits when the stash is on its way toward 1100. This year will see my largest completion output ever … but it’s not easy getting my head out of professional space and back into hobby-land.

Maybe you just have to have priorities!

I’m Stunned

I could say I’m disgusted, bemused or distressed, just the same. Even naïve… I read on a net forum last night that there was never a business agreement between Tamiya and Academy…

I flipped through an Academy catalogue in the early 90s and nodded with a certain boredom at the time as I recognised item after item as being Tamiya, 1:350 battleships, tanks I’d already built… I assumed, and of course that’s always a bad thing. It may be something to do with the Western mindset that can’t comprehend thieving on this scale, that twenty years later it comes as an amazement.

The discrepancy I noticed and wrote up last time but one is symptomatic, perhaps. Was it a change instituted to get around some aspect of copyright? Or some mysterious feature added in? Who knows, the only thing for certain is that copyright in Asia, certainly in the late 1980s, was so nebulous a thing that one major company could establish itself by stealing the product line from another. That’s cut-throat…

My respect for Academy just went down a notch, but hopefully their business practice had more integrity once they were up and running. Mr Tamiya must have had some deep discussions with his legal team at the time, but I doubt he ever stooped to stealing back from Academy. (Personally I’m amazed he ever reboxed Italeri and Monogram, the Tamiya name is associated with another class of product.)

The knock-off product certainly was not pantographed, there is none of the characteristic softness. My guess is that laser inferometery was up to the job, and Tamiya sprues were scanned into a 3D model and output through a CAD/CAM process to cut new moulds. This process was in use in the early 90s in film-making, to translate a sculpted miniature into a 3D model, so in industrial terms it might have been around as early as ’87… Switching out the part numbers and rearranging the plan drawings might have instituted just enough difference for them to call it a new kit.

I guess the collector can only shrug and accept a good deal when it comes along. The Academy knock-offs were not much cheaper than their identical cousins, but you can pick them up on eBay for a decent price these days, a fair few dollars less than originals. That StuG is ready for paint, but it will always carry a mental tang, for me, that the Tamiya original does not, and it’s all about the notion of legitimacy.

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.

Kits That Build Themselves (Almost)

Late in 2009 I built Tamiya’s old StuG IV kit (35087) and was delighted with the easy-build characteristics of the 1970s approach to kit engineering. Dragon sophistication had not come into the world, but Dragon over-complexity had also yet to appear, and notions like slide moulding were a technical phantasm. As I’ve mentioned on occasion, while the armour kits of the 70s leave a lot to be desired by modern standards, they also had the virtue of buildability, and before the advent of Dragon, Tamiya’s only real competitiors were Esci/ERTL and odd offerings from Heller, plus the 1:32nd scale range from Monogram and the 1:40th scale series from Revell.

I recently found the urge to build another Tamiya StuG IV, this time the Academy issue of 1987 (from the period when a batch of older Tamiya kits fleshed out their range for market impact before their own product really got rolling). The factory example photographed for the box shows a very attractive fall ’44 ‘Ambush’ scheme complete with blowing leaves, but the markings (for what appears to be the Grossdeutschland Division, going by the helmet motif) are not included. Academy scanned Tamiya’s plans, rearranged the drawings and renumbered the parts, rather a pointless exercise if it was meant to disguise the origins of the kit, all of which rendered the plans confusing in places. I built from Tamiya plans, and referred to the Academy plans merely for part numbers on the rare occasions I couldn’t recognise them instantly.



This is a very simple kit, but its 217 components would have been an impressive total in the 70s. What strikes me about it is how easy the build is. This example fell together in about four sittings, even wasting time I doubt I spent more than five hours from go before I was encountering the need for paint. The moulds were showing their age, some parts needed extra filing and fiddling to get them to line up, some separation lines were pretty heavy, especially in the suspension, but these issues were par for the course in the 70s anyway, and compared to the Dragon StuG III F/8 I’ve had underway since last year, this one built in a blink. The indie-link Ostketten on that one put me off every time I think about them.

One unusual thing, there is a gap about .060” wide between the idler axle components. The rooting of the parts, moulded onto the transom, is supposed to fit against the outer axle parts which are cast with the main tub, but the parts sit back, with a pronounced cutaway. This element does not appear on the original Tamiya kit, I just checked the one in my display case and it’s not there. So did Academy retool and introduce this change for some bizarre reason? The parts do not look soft and ‘blobby’ as they would if they had been three-dimensionally traced with a pantograph. I have Academy’s issue of the Panzer IV H with stand-off armour, originally Tamiya 35057, and this difference does not appear in the transom plate of this essentially identical kit (identical as far as these components are concerned, certainly). Whatever, that left me with gaps where none should be and axle roots that don’t look convincing.



Given that it’s not the easiest part of the vehicle to see, I decided a perfect fix was not required, and sufficed to shim the gap with a sliver of 4.8mm tubing to create a mechanical illusion of completeness. A proper fix would have been to shim it with sheet plastic and carve the plastic to match the structures adjoining, and this would have been possible before assembly, but that much knife and file work when there are finished structures in close proximity seemed like asking for trouble. This is a simple build, I want it finished, not living on my bench. Filling in the slots behind the axle mounts with strip plastic was also a simple enough process, and created the impression once again of mechanical detail, barely-seen.

Modelling is meant to be about fun, and the simplicity of the engineering lends itself to prompt assembly while the age of the moulds inescapably exercises the skill muscles to compensate. In that much, it’s a good mix. The artistic muscles come next: I’ve never done an ‘Ambush’ scheme before, and have not dialled the airbrush down for tight soft-edge freehand spraying in two or three years. Maybe it’s time to give that technique a whirl again.

Lust for Lustre

I’ve had Hasegawa’s 1:72 N1K1 Kyofu “Rex” fighter seaplane (AP 35/#51335) in my stash for over ten years, and looked at it many times, thinking how great it would be to do something clever with that two-tone finish. The last time I ever finished anything in hinomarus, it was an Airfix Zero and I was a kid, so this is functionally the first Japanese aircraft for my collection. It certainly won’t be the last. But what convinced me to have a go at it at this time (I began it back in January) was the chance to try out the Microscale Satin clear topcoat again.

This is my third build with it and my technique seems to be holding good. The photo on the side of the box shows a very clean, glossy finish, which compliments Koike Shigeo’s always-superb box art, if contradicting it in a few places, and I felt it was a great candidate for a satin finish. The paints used by the Imperial Japanese forces weathered very fast, Japanese subjects are the holy grail of aircraft weathering techniques for many, but this one was going to be clean and tidy. I just wanted to see how the whole clear coating business worked one more time.



The kit has only 37 parts (nine more build the handling trolley and there’s an optional boarding ladder), the fit is great, there were very few fiddles. Eduard make a canopy mask set for this subject in 1:48th scale, for Tamiya’s kit, but not for this one, so I masked the one-piece canopy with multiple tiny strips of tape, the old-fashioned way. There are several thin struts in the canopy and I masked these out completely, to be done with strips of painted decal, another technique I’ve not used in probably 15 or 20 years. (It worked so-so, I wasn’t terribly impressed with the willingness of the painted strips to part from their backing, or adhere to the plastic…)



Hasegawa paint callouts use the Gunze range, so I pulled out the plans for the Tamiya version and used their paint recommendations instead, a mixed green for the cockpit plus XF-11 JN Green and XF-12 JN Grey for the overall scheme. The box side pic shows a soft demarcation but at 1:72 that might be pushing things, and I hard-masked with tape. It’s worth noting, the red warning band on the float was supplied as a decal but I sprayed it in XF-7, slightly warmed with XF-3, as before coming to the decals I was sure the result would be much better that way. Would it? On reflection I’m not sure, but I am glad I didn’t fight with a decal that large, all the same. The paints went on smoothly, with no arguments, but very dull indeed, and I was really looking forward to how the lustre would bring the paints alive.



Alive is the word! I know the sheen may be a bit bright for authenticity, assuming the box photo was also way too bright, but the model has depth and dimension instead of a dull green that almost soaks up light. Perhaps that was the point of camouflage, but a model must also be decorative, and the lustre creates visual interest.

It’s also a wonderful base for decaling, Hasegawa’s decals went down very well indeed, the Microscale system pulled them tightly into the engraved lines with only a single application of setting solution, I don’t think I could have asked for better. The white-rimmed insignia for the fuselage were supplied in two forms, a single image or a nested white and red disc, and I used the latter as the single-image type were out of register. Even two nested decals still pulled into the detail with enough room for panel wash to partially catch. The whites were cream yellow on the sheet, though, which translated over dark green to a shade closely matching the JN Grey, but against the JN Green they “look” white enough to do. The decals cured overnight and were then gently washed in plain water to lift away the residue of decal adhesive.



I used Promodeller Dark Dirt weathering wash to accent the panel lines on grey areas only, as it became invisible against the green, and the panel lines, once the lustre comes up, are very distinct on the dark surface without augmentation anyway. With the panel wash done, I applied another coat of satin to seal it all, and was at liberty to unmask the engine and canopy, pending prop and struts.

A little rust on the handling trolley, paint and mount the exhausts, add some carbon staining with MiG pigments and an antenna wire from EZ-Line, paint the pitot in metallic silver, and I could call this one done. It doesn’t sit up square in the ‘dockwagen,’ it might take a shim or two, and although a solid plastic counterweight is supplied to nest inside the front part of the float the centre of gravity is still far enough back for the model to be unstable if the vertical guide marks of the float are aligned with the structural guides of the trolley.



This was a quick, fun build with which to get a bit more experience with the suite of techniques I’m using on aircraft these days, especially clearcoating, something I have only recently been feeling my way with. I’m reasonably happy with the result, it’s not perfect but then I’ve not often worked in this scale in many years either, and look forward very much to building it’s bigger brother from Tamiya: perhaps my weathering techniques will be up to making her look worn and weary by then!

Doing It (Not So) Tough

I had thought that I would be calling this “Doing It Tough,” but in the end it wasn’t that hard. I bought Italeri’s M110 SP Howitzer (#291) on sale from Squadron probably 12 years ago, certainly not less than ten, and had a go at a few parts many years ago. It ended up back in the stash because I had nowhere to store a finished model at that time.

I seem to be enjoying a run of completions on old projects lately, and there are a few more to come. This one took a fair bit of effort but nothing out of the ordinary, and a few concessions to the kit’s failings as well as acknowledging my own skills and where they were either not adequate or where I was unwilling to invest the time, eyesight and elbow-grease to achieve that extra standard of realism that is the grail of the hobby.

Italeri comes in for some flak, and not without reason, but that doesn’t mean all their kits can be pigeonholed easily. In recent years their packaging and breadth of subject matter have been impressive, as have their claims to realism and accuracy. Older kits suffer the same maladies no matter what company one considers, and, as with Hobbycraft and early Dragon, Italeri’s kits are best assessed on a one by one basis. Verlinden produced a conversion set (#423) to build the early (short barrel) A1 or late (long barrel) A2, plus stowage boxes, to be mounted on the recoil spade, that Italeri did not include.



The M110 is dated 1996, but the molds may perhaps be older. Certainly the chassis is in common with the M107 which appeared in a couple of editions from the same firm in the 90s. The parts breakdown is fairly normal, though the large number of small parts can be off-putting for some. Here and there were structures that were never going to work, such as the shell trays on the recoil spade bearers: there is insufficient room between their swivel points and the rear of the hull to fit them in their standard orientation.



Construction was generally straight forward, the dark green plastic reacted well to glue and worked well when I dressed the long seams of the barrel with adzed superglue and filler. There were many small, fiddly parts around the gun cradle and tail end, and the instructions were not terribly clear, the illustrations drawn rather small and difficult to see, so that things that should have been obvious were mysteries almost to the finish.

That said, the model went together in an entirely normal fashion. The gun swivel dropped in the same way as a tank turret but the tolerances were very close, even with the surfaces masked to preserve plastic-to-plastic sliding contact they needed filing a bit to get them to seat properly after painting. The small parts, handles and projections, were quite fragile, one had to be repaired twice.



The installation of the drive wheels was not engineered in a foolproof way and I ended up with one frozen in position. That’s no biggie, it’s not as if the tracks are ever going to roll, but having them mobile during track installation eases things. The tracks themselves were well-detailed both sides and took paint well. Italeri tracks are often criticised for lacking detail and being too stiff, but these were quite acceptable, though of course, like any vinyls, are never going to lie down along the top of the roadwheels like the tracks on the real thing. Perhaps someone makes a replacement set for this chassis, but buying tracks that cost more than the kit tends to stick in my craw.



The paintjob was all acrylic, Tamiya XF-62 Olive Drab, with shade and fade coats as per standard, then black and brown oil pinwash and enamel drybrushing in lightened olive and bare metal silver. Orange enamel was pinwashed here and there for bright rust, and MiG Europe Dust pigment was liberally applied last of all.

Italeri made a number of concessions to simplicity, such as molding in the hydraulic and electrical cables around the gun cradle as solid, raised detail, and not all of them are there either. I had considered using fine wire to replace the kit details, but after reviewing every reference picture I could find on the web, as well as some taken for me at a US exhibit, I decided not to. I either would not know where to begin, or where to stop, and in the absence of a Dremmel the idea of carving away all that raised detail added up to (probably) just sore fingers and a mess.



Decals are another area of contention. The Italeri decals are quite matt, and provide markings for four countries, all over standard Olive Drab, but the stern plate of the vehicle is a very cramped place to put markings. Either the model crowds the details too much or the decals are too big, because there was no way the German markings would ever fit into the space available. I used the US marking option and even they barely fitted.



But on the whole, the model had few surprises and was well within my capabilities to produce a decent, if simplified here and there, rendition of this important piece of Western allied artillery from the Cold War to recent times. Examples change hands on eBay for sometimes steeper prices these days, less perhaps because it’s a particularly great kit than because it may be the only kit. I would love to see Tamiya, Dragon or Trumpeter tackle this subject matter!

It’s Good To Finish

The Italeri Corsair is done, which unless I am mistaken constitutes my first finished Italeri kit ever. In some ways it was excellent, in some ways a PITA. The wing alignment defeated me long ago, but now it was nothing to break a sweat about. All the same, this kit had a way of fighting me right to the finish.

Such as… Why are the holes for the drop tank pegs too small, so you have to file them out after the paintjob has been so carefully applied? The pitot tube was moulded with the wing, and there was no way it was going to survive the years. .020” microrod to the rescue, and a little superglue. Same with that row of antennas around the fuselage, it might make sense to fit them before painting but the handling that comes from that point onward is still enough to do for them. They were finagled back into place with CA at the finish, and one which disintegrated before it could even be installed with replaced with 7mm of .020” rod. The original was a blade antenna, this one is rod. Tough.

The canopy masked nicely, but I could have wished it unmasked a bit cleaner. What is it with clear plastic and its ability to gather scratches?



The gear bays were masked after main painting and sprayed with a homebrew interior green (Tamiya XF3 and XF5 at 3:2, works every time), then overspray was touched up on the hull (yes, there was overspray no matter how much masking I used… Like this: )



The tires were brush painted in NATO black, the rim is moulded high enough to guide the brush and inconsistencies are invisible against Dark Sea Blue. Another problem, the main gear seemed to want to sit a bit knock-kneed, so I cut a 50mm spacer bar from styrene strip and braced them apart while the gel CA set up overnight. Now they stand straight...

The gear bays were given a quick black oil wash, then I added a little MiG dust in them, and did the exhaust streaking with their Black Smoke and Vietnam Earth pigments; only the red earth shows up, as you might expect. Hmph – and why is it that you discover when you’re finished that you could use MiG pigments to take fingerprints, because they certainly only show up on the model as you’re putting the finishing touches to it!



One day I might get around to chipping paint with silver but for now I’m just happy to have the project somewhere I’m willing to call the finish line. It’s great to call a completion, file the unused decals and plans, bin the empty sprues and bags, and wipe down the bench ready for the next kit, it brings a sense of progress which few other moments do. This is my first completed Corsair in many years, but I’m sure it won’t be the last, the bent-wing bird is way too much fun to leave alone for long!