Order of Priority

You’ve seen those photos, brilliantly finished tank models with L&L treads that are assembled before painting, clad perfectly around the wheels at the structural stage. When queried, the builder casually remarks that he “always” completes the model structurally before starting the painting process, and those perfect rubber rims on the roadwheels of said tank he “just paints where they are.” I’m not saying there aren’t masters who can do just that, but for myself I find it impossible, and the very idea reawakens long-subsided memories of childhood disasters with large paintbrushes and small parts.

So, how do you prefer to do it?

When I was a young styrene cadet, I had a strict order of priority in my mind, that building came before painting, and I took poorly to the suggestion in model instructions that small parts should be painted before assembly. It just would not compute at that age, and it took until I was a little older to start to see the sense of it. And older again before I realised that leaving the parts on their trees created the perfect handling system for items that were way too small to manipulate reliably. This means that today, I can have many parts for a model, say aircraft interior parts, landing gear, prop blades and so forth (that’s an Airfix Spitfire XIX happening in the header pic), airbrushed before they ever come off the tree. A little cleanup with file and knife as necessary, use masking solution to protect mating surfaces, and on with the paint – it works like a charm.

It’s probably all too easy to think that the method that works for us is the “only” one, and an eye-opener when we realise how differently other people do the same things. Approaches to L&L tracks is a case in point, with the shaping to the running gear being part of assembly, and the completed track being so fragile that it takes poorly to being removed and painted separately from the rest of the model. This inherent difficulty is one of the factors that has kept me from giving them a genuine go so far; I can get my head around fully articulated tracks (if not afford them) and vinyls I do not find repugnant, but plastic L&Ls do not, as yet, “compute” for me. If I can’t paint the tracks, wheels and hull in separate condition, my technique fails and I visualise paint splattered everywhere as my sausage-fingers, iffy dexterity and failing eyesight try to obtain decent coverage from paints applied with tiny brushes to difficult-to-reach crannies. The very idea of it is enough to make me say no … just no.

But those L&Ls do assemble so well on many models. I’m currently looking at Alan’s Flampanzer II and trying to imagine doing the L&Ls. Can I get them to assemble solidly enough in top and bottom runs to be separated off vertically so that everything can be painted individually, then bring it all together again and close up the tracks seamlessly? The great Tony Greenland would say no, plastic shrinks subtly on contact with cement and if removed they will never fit exactly the same way a second time. So … how?

I always paint and assemble aircraft landing gear off the model and getting a plane up on her feet is one of the last jobs I do during final assembly. I know others who like to get the gear on during painting so she’ll stand up for herself. There is no right or wrong, it’s all about what works for the individual, but surely there are limits to that – elements that are dictated by practicality in miniature engineering as surely as in the full size original?

At the other end of the scale there are also modellers who have found a way to paint the exterior finish before assembly. This I find fully as difficult to get my head around as painting roadwheels after assembly… Surely the penalty of dressing joint lines and then repairing the paintjob over the seams doubles the work? It doubles the number of paint load-ups, at least? Again, techniques are infinite and whatever “computes” for us is the right one.

Maybe it comes down to how creative we are with our engineering – how fiddly we can be, our mental tolerance for whatver the manufacturer thought was a good idea, and our dexterity and ability to think ahead, all very personal attributes that conspire to give us rather different ways of tackling the same problems. To paraphrase Taoism, “there are many different paths to the top of the mountain – but they all lead to a finished model.”

Taking a New Technique for a Spin

It’s been a busy year of work and home commitments and this blog has been sadly neglected since February, but better late than never, so here’s something fresh from the workbench.

Okay, it’s not a new technique as such, but the first time I’ve given it a go. I’ve built about thirty armour kits to date and the art of weathering is one that offers endless variation and endless possibility, but I have always belonged to the “less is more” school, in which subtlety is the charm. One day I’ll have the skills to stipple mud onto my tanks and make it look good, but not just yet, so an intermediary stage was to try for a patina of dirt on the underside and running gear that suggested either heavy road grime or worn and dried mud in a fairly even finish over, well, everything.

The trick was to spray the dirt, of course. I have seen many photos of excellent models in which the running gear is the colour of the environment rather than of its materials or paintjob, and I was eager to give it a go, so when cranking out a Tamiya Pz. IIIL recently I decided the time had come. The markings are for a unit in Russia in ’43, end of the good weather, so summer camo with rust, dirt and wear.

The logic of the thing was simple enough – complete a normal paintjob as it would have been laid down by factory and field workshops, and then paint the dirt over it. Working in my usual Tamiya Acrylics, I started with dunkelgelb (XF-60) and lightened it with 25% XF-2 White for a scale-modified base overall. Next I added the green (XF-61) lightened to the same degree with XF-60, and performed the “squiggle” pattern. I did not bother changing down to the fine tip and need this time, I simply pushed the thinning ratio out a bit and cranked the pressure up some, and it flowed quite happily at this resolution.

The next step was to fade the camo, for which I thinned XF-57 Buff  at 20:1, creating a mist-coat which I built up gradually on the top surfaces until I felt it looked right, just enough to suggest faded paint. In the same timeframe I got the running gear ready, with the tyres prepped with XF069 NATO Black, then both sides of the wheels stencil-panted with dunkelgelb and the outer faces of the outer wheels treated with green to continue the effect. Microscale Flat was used to enliven the finish at this point with its low lustre. After that point, the fun really began, because it was time for the dirt.

I mixed equal parts XF-10 Brown, XF-60 Dark Yellow and XF-64 Red Brown and took it out to a 20:1 ratio once again, then slowly built up the mist effect on the belly plates, swing arms and behind the roadwheels, under the bow and stern (overlapping the camo), and then misted over the roadwheels, drives and idlers (the latter two less so as they are higher up). It took considerable courage to hose dirt onto the finished camo, but I quickly saw that it was following the general logic of the shade-and-fade philosophy, just taking it a step further, so I ran with it and in the end was happy. Maybe the red component should not have been there, there was too much warmth in the colour for Russian earth, and in future I’ll keep it strictly to the brown range, but the principle seems to have proven out.

After that it was a standard oil wash, drybrush and pigment process, with decals sandwiched between layers of flat. I got silvering all the same and even though the decals otherwise behaved very well, I might restrict myself to rubdown decals in future.

The end result is a good one, I think, I’m certainly pleased with the visual effect, and eager to try the technique again. I have Zvezda’s (ex-Dragon) Pz. IIIF on order, which should be an excellent subject to give a panzer grey finish a whirl, and I’ll come back to the “sprayed grime” technique for that one too.

I’ll hopefully evolve the full suite of skills over time. I now have ten models finished toward my “History of the Panzercorps” display, with easily over a hundred to go, so I have every opportunity to experiment ahead of me.

Why Do We Persist?

I have written on a fair few occasions about what constitutes a good kit or a poor one, and speculated on where the line falls between reasonable expectations of the tooling company on the part of the modeller, and vice versa – reasonable expectation on the part of the firm of the skills and competence of the hobbyist.

I was recently inspired to build an early Bf 109, and Hobbycraft’s -D model was the affordable choice, as the Classic Airframes kit is off the Beaufort Scale when it comes to prices (you’ll easily see $80, even $90 US, on eBay, these days). I knew Hobbycraft would call for some ingenuity and extra elbowgrease, and I accepted this as the price of building on the cheap (not that you can’t be suckered into spending as much on one of these as for a Tamegawa -E or later, if you are simply unaware of what’s worth what.) I was not surprised when starting this one to be promptly drilling out, grinding back, chocking up and so forth. What I did not expect was that it would be at literally every step and involve virtually every part.

Hobbycraft has often been called a mixed bag – some kits are good and some are not, almost as if different engineers worked to fill their boxes at different times. While the Avia S-199 I built a few years back was good enough to bring me back to the brand, I would have to say their Bf 109 D is not one of their better outings. In fact the expression “an exercise in polishing a turd” probably sums up this build.

Maybe I’m being ungracious, but is it too much to expect that when a detail part is meant to fit a curved surface that it should be correspondingly curved, instead of flat? That the elevator trim wheels in the cockpit should have a hole into which their peg goes, instead of another peg? Or that the angle braces under the tail plane should be the right length, or that their locater holes should be in the right place so that they support the planes at zero degrees dihedral, instead of about ten degrees up? Or, for that matter, that there should be some way to tell which way round they go, given that they are subtly different from end to end? Or that the canopy should be the same width as the fuselage? Or the exhausts be more than triangular lumps of plastic? Or that the forward engine cowling actually be the same length and width as the aperture it fills?

Then there’s the cockpit, which apes Hasegawa’s assembly sequence, but the alignment of later parts depends on the accuracy of earlier ones, and the side walls do not even match the angle of the floor to rear wall part. The end result is a structure all over the shop in terms of geometry, and a great deal of filing and scraping to make the cockpit somehow fit into the fuselage. In the cockpit, it’s worth noting that the gunsight was attached to the sprue by the optical glass itself, which is a formula for disaster right out of the box. I’ll let the reader imagine what sort of hi-jinx that occasioned…

The radiator under the engine has no detail whatever, it is left to the modeller to scratch something to go into it, or buy the Airwaves detail set. Indeed some modellers buy an AM –E cockpit and drop it in, along with replacing the wheels with True Details substitutes. Decals are of course replaced with AMs, as “white box era” Hobbycraft decals are well known to be another heartache waiting to happen.

So I guess the question is, why do we do it to ourselves? Is it just a case of swapping economy for frustration? You get what you pay for, but if that is the sole deciding factor it must be noted that these frankly poor kits are out there on many a shelf at comparable prices to ones far better. There’s the challenge factor, certainly, the element of satisfaction that comes from actually succeeding in making a decent showing out of it; that should, ostensibly, be the object for every “engineer in miniature,” though frustration tends to make us not care so much about that factor when the company doesn’t meet us half way.

Meet us half way? I don’t think Hobbycraft even showed up on this one, from their poorly hand-drawn plans to their box art which does not match the painting instructions. It’s great to have a pre-war –D in my Messerschmitt lineup, but my next one will be a Hasegawa -G, not because of any specific predilection for the later models so much as simply in the name of mental health.

Quantity or Quality?

Quantity or quality – there’s something to be said for both, but the goal of many, I would venture to say most, serious modellers is to increase their skill level, to build quality, so does this conflict with the notion of quantity?

I find myself musing on this as 2014 becomes 2015 (Happy New Year all!). 2014 closed out with 13 completions for me, six of which you see above (yes, the last couple were officially done a few days into the new year, but I’ll not count the last smidgeon of work on them toward this year’s tally). I had meant to total 16 for last year, with two more armour kits in a high state of completion and a Mustang at the pre-painting stage, but there’s only so much you can do between work, family and other commitments, and hobbies always go on the back burner when there’s a buck to be made.

How ambitious am I this year? Including the three pending from last year plus a few that have not yet arrived from overseas, I’m looking at twenty, and I’m the first to say that may not be realistic. Still, to answer my own question more objectively, can I see any significant compromises in the past baker’s dozen that would suggest the tally got in the way of the art?

Well… not really. I explored new techniques, tried new and resurrected brands, finished some shelf queens, tackled difficult propositions like extensive use of etch (I’ve not blogged that project yet, so stay tuned…), completed a second “Tony Greenland tribute build,” worked in four scales… I felt crowded by the work at times, but at others was acutely aware that I was too laid back if I was serious about making inroads on my stash.

Making inroads on the stash is an important point. As I’ve discussed before, do we buy our collections to look at or to build? At last year’s building rate, my stash will not be exhausted in a hundred years, so there’s a clear impetus to build faster. But if that speed is won at the cost of either the quality we strive for or the pleasure, the satisfaction that comes from a well-done project, (or both!), then one is justified in asking quite what the point of it all might be.

We invest inordinate amounts of both time and money in this hobby, so we want the best return possible, and my instinct tells me we’re looking for a balance between quality and quantity. Yes, we want to work through that collection, we want them processed by the action of hand and eye, and proudly displayed, converting that wall of kit boxes to a wall of historic replicas, but those replicas must be of a standard we are happy to display, by the same token. Different modellers have different capacities, some are veritable production lines who crank out quality at remarkable rates, while others focus on one project at a time, savour the experience of building and painting, then reflect on it a while before selecting their next delectation. There is no right or wrong way to do it, only our personal calling and inspiration – and indeed aspiration.

So how many projects did you complete last year? And, even if they were not all your finest work ever, were you happy with some aspect of each and every one? Enjoyment is where the hobby lives, and we each find it in our own way.

“All Kit Decals Suck”

That’s not me speaking, but a comment from a fellow modeller on a message board. While there is obviously some truth in the sentiment, it set me thinking – do all kit decals suck?

Hmmm. Good question, really, and everyone’s experience is going to be unique. I have probably over 500 sheets of aftermarket decals in my collection, so you would think my answer would have been wholehearted agreement, but the fact is I have not used all that many of them. The Hobby Boss Fw 190 D-9 which I completed recently in Hans Ulrich Rudel’s markings constitutes my first AM scheme in a long while, and my Airfix Mustang continues the trend.

Kit decals recently almost hung me out to dry, to be sure. I built Hasegawa’s excellent 1:32^nd scale Fw 190 A-8 in Hans Dortenmann’s markings for the D-Day period, and as with all German aircraft, with their infinitely variable lack of standard, once you have committed to a paint scheme you really need to follow through with the right markings, and in this instance the kit decals, despite looking fine, refused to separate from the backing, and encouragement caused them to break up. They were somewhat out of register also. Obtaining insignia, stencil data and individual markings from AM sheets would have cost me around $60, which is more than I gave for the kit, and I was ready to put the model back on the shelf until a fellow modeller came to the rescue, having the same kit and planning to use AM for it. I shall forever be in his debt! More about that build later when I do a retrospective review, but the anecdote has more or less established that even the biggest firms can have crappy decals at times.

Many folks have very little good to say about Tamiya’s decals, though for myself I have yet to have a seriously negative experience with them. Indeed, I have been lucky enough to pick up both Tamiya and Hasegawa editions containing Cartograf-printed decals, and you can’t ask for better than that. Sometimes AM is not the be-all and end-all, though. I have Eagle Strike’s RAF Roundels set and while they function fine, they grip so tight to the surface they display every imperfection so they look like pebble-dash paving. When I did my Spitfire at the beginning of this year, I used Hasegawa’s decals preferentially – they were that bit thicker and came up with a smooth finish. Likewise, I used Aztek’s Hinomarus on an Arii Raiden I built about two years ago, and though they went down nicely they did not snug into all the surface detail, so my hopes of accenting all the rivets and lines crossing the insignia was thwarted, no matter how much solution I used. And again, on my recent Mustang, I used EagleStrike’s markings, and this time they refused to draw into the surface at all – where the upper wing insignia crossed an aileron jack I had to cut the decal to get it to settle.

I remember a Spitfre from an Eastern European firm I built as a kid, I had never seen decals disintegrate when wetted before – there was no carrier film! Recently I expected Zvezda’s decals to be a real fight on their T-72, but they were actually a breeze. I remember Airfix decals from the 70s that might have been thickish and the wrong colours but they never failed to free off from the paper and could be guided into place with a junior modeller’s forefinger, then actually stick down to a matt surface. That sounds like decals created with a specific marketplace and skill-level in mind!

Twenty, twenty-five, years ago, Monogram still made some of the best-loved kits on the market and I remember mentioning to a hobby shop proprietor that while I loved the mouldings, the decals were probably the poorest I had ever seen and would always replace them with AMs. His reply has always stuck in my mind: ‘That’s what all serious modellers do.”

What about Academy and Hobbycraft? Grey-box edition for the latter, forget it, black-box edition, they raised their game. I guess they took criticisms onboard! The Korean guys? Well, I’ve had kits where the decals simply did not work, end of story, and others where they worked, but grudgingly. The memory of that has kept me from being anything but wary ever since, and when I compare it to the faultless application and cooperative nature of the Superscales I used on Rudel’s bird not long ago, I can see why that chap on the forum would have said what he said. Do we really need the kind of heartache we get from substandard decals?

We can certainly do without it, but the fact remains, not every kit decal sheet is that bad. Of the kits in my display case, those with AMs or other combinations of decals to get the subject and effect I wanted are in fact outnumbered by those featuring kit-supplied markings by several to one. So I guess you could say that it’s all about the individual experience as to how down you are on what you get right out of the box. There is no denying that sometimes they are very poor indeed, but, at least in my own experience, this has been more the exception than the rule. That said, as this was written I was laying the decals onto a Tamiya Corsair (see a few posts back) and they almost made a liar of me, with their shatter-prone nature. They were very thin and featured true whites, and reacted to solvents well enough, but that did not make them usable. I switched to an old Aeromaster sheet, which behaved very well and allowed me to finish the project with some minimal reworking, so hey, what do I know? Maybe enough kit decals really do suck to make the header line a truism after all!

New Tool Airfix: Rebirth of a Classic Brand

The last Airfix kit I built was four or five years ago, their 1:72^nd scale Lunar Module, a classic tool from about 1969, tying in with the Moon program when it was happening. The quality was not great by today’s standards and I struggled manfully with fiddly bits, trying to apply a reasonable generic paintjob (the exact details were different on every LM) and to wrap the legs and lower stage in gold foil for a realistic effect. The end result was not bad but it was not an experience I’d want to repeat.

But since the 2008 collapse of Britain’s one-time flag-carrier in the hobby, the company has been reincarnated under a new, ambitious and highly competent management and technical team, and in many ways Airfix has been reborn as a competitive company in the 21^st century. The firm is on its own 60^th anniversary this year, and for those of us who grew up with Airfix as far back as the 60s, it is nothing short of a delight to see the brand resurge. They went through some teething troubles, to be sure, but even before the crash they had shown they could deliver competitive detail and fit, with their Spitfire Mk. 24 and Seafire FR. 47 kits in 48^th scale.

I have not really had a chance to build any of the new era kits so far, though I have stockpiled over a dozen in my stash. So, just recently, I took the opportunity to try my hand at one of the best-reviewed of their new-tool 72s, their P-51 Mustang (#A01004), and I am more than a little impressed. The level of detail I feel is pretty comparable to the big guys out there, and while there is always going to be divided opinion over their engraved panel lines, I feel they have reached a point of restraint at which the effect is entirely acceptable. They could go a bit finer again, sure, but they have come a long way. (About two years ago I was tempted to try their Sea Harrier kit, and the yawning chasms put me off, I sold the kit on without really getting started. Oddly, when I was younger, I did not really mind the infamous engraved detail of the old Matchbox kits, but when it raises its head in other contexts you can see how extreme it really is.)

The Mustang features cockpit detail, wheelwell detail, convincing tread on the tires, choice of canopies (Inglewood or Dallas hoods), gunsight glass, droptanks… There is little more you could ask for in this scale. It’s not all roses, however, the instrument panel is a decal, not a terribly convincing one, and the control stick is one of those tiny parts attached by two sprue gates, which, though it may be necessary for moulding reasons (even so, Hobby Boss can do it with one gate), is the kiss of death for removing the part. Cut one gate, the part snaps due to torsion against the other anchor point. I built the plane without a joystick – and the radio mast went the same way for the same reason but I was able to scratch a new one from stripstock.

Parts fit is excellent, with only a minor lick of filler needed in a few places. The plastic reacts well with solvents, and accepts paint beautifully.

I’ve had a yen to do a camouflaged Mustang for a long while, so used AM decals (I’ve had a run of bad luck with kit decals this year and feel drawn to AMs in general). I used Eagle Strike IP7204, 357^th Fighter Group Pt. 3, and did G4-C, mount of Captain Leonard Carson in November, 1944. The aircraft features RAF Dark Green over US Neutral Gray, one of those planes painted not from US paint stocks but British supplies. I used Tamiya XF-81 and MM Acryl 4757. The white ID bands were sprayed in XF-2 and masked, then the airframe was pre-shaded in XF-69 and the main colours applied. Microscale Satin was the clear coat used to seal the paint, then Florey washes accented the engraved detail and were sealed with another coat of satin.

The decals were of mixed quality – they freed readily from their backing and were beautifully printed, but had no intention of setting into surface detail and Micro Sol was essentially ineffective. This was bad news re the red and yellow checkers of the 357^th’s nose band, and I ended up cutting away the parts of the decals meant to wrap around the chin intake and completing the pattern in paint. This is curious, as the sheet instructions recommend and endorse Microscale chemistry, even reprinting the well-known Microscale directions to the letter.

Final assembly and detail painting went smoothly enough, though the landing gear was a problem. The scale-thickness of the landing legs meant they were very fragile, and though the legs slot into keyed receivers the outer bay doors did not slot equally into the wing lower surface, the net result of which was a toed-in look. The gear units as a whole are acceptable, but when you know a Mustang’s legs are vertical it does grate a bit. I know what to look out for next time.  After my usual round of finishing techniques were applied, the model looked very nice on the shelf; it was not a difficult build, indeed most of the issues I had were with the decals, not the kit. In future I would do my best to paint the spinner cone rather than wrap on a decal, though other brands may lie down more tightly – this is also my first time using Eagle Strike decals, incidentally, and they may call for a stronger setting solution. (Odd, once again, as Aeromaster, which is the sister line and presumably shares identical manufacture specifics, reacts well to Microscale chemistry…)

Will I repeat this process? Well, I ordered up two more Airfix Mustangs before I was finished this one, and I can see me adding one or two to each year’s build list. (I used Eduard etched harness on this one but I might skip that in future, or at least I'll need to be mentally ready to tackle that aspect, as working with etch at 1:72nd scale, and having it come out looking decent, is no mean feat!)

At last, an inexpensive but well-detailed kit (if not quite an A+ on its report card), nicely accurate and easy to build, that will serve as the basis for so many of those decals that have been filed away for years! I can see a large part of my 1:72^nd scale Mustang fleet being Airfix in origin, something I would not have expected in years gone by. Highly recommended!

An Oldie but a Goodie

We live in a pre-packaged age, an age of immediacy. Labour-saving devices are expected, we whine if we don’t get them. The hobby is no different, speed and ease are virtues – I have certainly grumbled enough about kits that presented more of a challenge than I had the stomach for at any particular moment.

The painting mask is one of those modern conveniences, a go-to product that cuts the elbow grease (well, wear on eyesight, patience and dexterity) that old-fashioned masking called for. I posted not too far back on the thought that traditional masking was a dying art; I still do it from time to time, but if a pre-cut set is available for a model I’ll probably buy it, just to streamline the procedure.

But, and this is the big but, what if that process goes wrong?

I recently found myself in that situation, the mask set went on fine but the paint had so little adhesion to the canopy that it simply flaked off as the masks were removed. Much grumbling and cussing ensued, of course, and scratching of head and thinking back. Did I want to remove the paint, clean the transparencies and completely re-mask by hand, then paint again? A Stuka? You’d have to be joking! So… what?

I remembered a technique I read about when I was a kid and had in fact used in the ‘80s, experimentally. Frustrated with daggy-looking canopy struts and realising my dexterity with a brush was not going to improve, I had tried the “decal method.”

The theory is simple enough, paint a piece of decal paper with the inside colour, then the outside colour, cut with a razor knife to the required width and apply as per normal… this was before the day of mask sets or commercial clear film (well, Microscale was doing it, but that hallowed firm had not yet quite become the daily resource for me it would later).

It worked sort of okay at the time, I guess (I remember decal adhesion being a big issue), but I never did it extensively, my most ambitious use of it being the gridded canopy supports of the Revell 1:32^nd scale Bell X-1, about twenty years ago, which I finished with pre-printed black decal strips from a Queensland firm call PJ’s, if memory serves. The need for the technique receded into the dusty attic of my memory with the coming of dye-cut masks and I never thought about it again. But faced with the failure of the modern method (I’m unsure why, maybe finger grease got on the canopy as it was being masked and resulted in a barrier to paint adhesion), the old trick resurfaced in my memory.

After moving house I could not find my clear decal film, so mail ordered some from interstate, Microscale’s TF-0 Clear Trimfilm. This is the good stuff, from the big brand. I sprayed RLM 02 for the interior and RLM 70 for the exterior (Model Master Acryls), then brushed Liquid Decal Film overall (it levels perfectly, brush strokes are virtually nonexistent), and used my Chopper II plastic guillotine to cut super-fine strips. Then, with an air of experimentation, I went through the decal process.

Well, blow me down if it didn’t actually work!

Okay, the strips were perhaps a fraction wider than they should have been, but we are talking about fractions of a millimetre, translating into maybe a scale centimetre, and it would take a near-terminal rivet counter to complain about that. I did a test strip on a piece of plastic and it went on fine, then fell off with zero-adhesion, which caused some anxious moments, but MicroSol solution got it to lie down properly and it stuck thereafter. So, emboldened, I tackled the job and in a relatively short time had a completed section.

The strips are absolutely clean and sharp, and create the necessary pattern in a way that is pleasing to the eye. Certainly where straight lines are concerned, the technique seems to be a winner, to the extent that I would consider going with it from scratch, depending on the subject.

Of course, sealing the strips is another matter – spraying my usual satin would diminish the transparency of the canopy, and dipping in Future would create a gloss on the struts that did not match the rest of the aircraft. If they are not sealed it may well be a case of them drying out and simply flaking off in time, so there is a compromise of some sort to be made. I’ll observe them over time and see how they behave: certainly unsealed Trimfilm strips used on another model about seven years ago are in poor shape now and demanding a rework.

The truth is, some strips grabbed tight, others did not, subsequent handling knocked off one or two which had to be replaced, so the process was not without frustration. Also a number of strips broke up after soaking, so at least two coats of Liquid Decal Film are indicated.

Was it perfect? No, nothing is. Does it pass muster? Yes, and that’s probably the biggest factor.  We have become very particular about the details of our models, competing with ourselves for ever-greater refinement, and we take poorly when anything gets in the way of that; it’s good to know, however, that some of the traditional fixes still work.

Down Goes Another Shelf Queen

I seem to be having a good year for moving along projects that have been hanging around half done. Five or six years ago I started a Tamiya Corsair with the intention of doing a Salvadorean bird from the “100 Hours War” of 1969, and all was looking good when I ran into a snag with the wings. The wing fold mechanism is perfect if you want to build her with the wings up, but building down, the issue of eliminating a highly visible gap is a challenge, and Tamiya’s engineering, while strong, is deceptive, in that you better have that alignment just so when you lock up the main anchoring parts, or you’ll have anchored it in the wrong place.

Guess what? Yup. I got the left wing fine, the right wing had a noticeable gap, and by the time I realised what was happening, the superglue was like a rock. What to do?

Well, I put it back in its box for a few years, isn’t that what you usually do? I took it out and pondered the problem a few times, and the last time I got the wing a bit straighter with much pushing and pulling and clamping and superglue, but it was still not right – no matter how close I got it, the torsion effect meant the glue would never hold and the gap would open up once more.

Could I tolerate a Tamiya kit with a shonky wing joint? Hmm … not really. I even considered punching a hole through the wing at that point and calling it battle-damaged, a nice flak burst through the trouble spot would disguise it fine. I recently decided to have one more fiddle with it and found the right wing to be loose anyway. I wiggled it a bit, developed some play on it and at last just snapped the damned thing away. The left wing snapped off too in the handling, but it glued directly back on fine.

A piece of the inner bulkhead of the wing stub snapped clean away too, and that seemed to fix the alignment problem, as the wing then snugged up to the mating line fine. Certainly on the top of the wing: I made the concession that a less perfect mate-up on the underside was acceptable. I also decided to build fresh for the Salvadorean plane, and go with a standard WWII midnight blue, using the famous VF-84 scheme in the kit, for two reasons – the dark blue scheme requires much less handling and would better obscure the joint, hopefully, than the four tone camo; and it would be far less work to do. The plane had basically been waiting to crest the hill and run to the finish for years, it was even all masked up. So, the quicker the better.

I offered up the errant wing with superglue and it mated acceptably. A small piece of plastic had snapped away from the skin on the top surface, so this was very carefully filled and sanded, then it was on with other prep. For instance, the Salvadorean bird had not carried long range tanks so the model was built clean, to do VF-84 in early 1945 she would need the twin tanks under the inner wings. I located the holes by the minor visible blemishes in the plastic of the outer skin, drilled them through and opened them up with files. Another element of WWII configuration was the radio-fit, which required the mast behind the cockpit, deleted in the 60s with the advent of more powerful radios, and this also was added after the fact.

Then I tackled the paintwork, the orange-yellow cowl ring, interior green over the canopy, and so forth. This is very straightforward, and I tried the kit decals. They were thin and opaque, with true whites, but shatter-prone, which caused some cussing. More than cussing, I aborted after a couple of major decals and sorted through my stash to find the same unit’s markings (VF-84, USS Bunker Hill, February 1945) on an early Aeromaster sheet, and used those. It required some fine tuning, removal of a bad one in a prominent place, respraying and clear coating, indeed more work than I anticipated, but challenge seems to be the spice of the hobby, and it was okay in the end.

The stencil data came from the kit sheet and went on fine, though the wing walks were also absent from the Aeromaster sheet and I omitted them as the kit items shattered immediately and I was right out of patience as far as masking and spraying them was concerned. Maybe one day in the future… Similarly, the pattern of tape sealing the panels around the fuel tank ahead of the cockpit was also not on the AM sheet and suffered the same exclusion for the same reason.

I did some exhaust stains on the underside in ruddy earth tones pigment, and allowed some natural metal chips and scratches to gather around the radiators, then used a graphite pencil to create paint loss at panel lines around the cockpit and access hatches, though I don’t see it showing up in photographs – I may have to be more aggressive with that.

This is my first Corsair in 1:48^th scale, though I did the same subject in 1:72^nd scale back in the 1980s as part of my early romance with the bent-wing bird from Vought. The kit was, in the end, more complicated and challenging than I anticipated, as Tamiya has such a shake’n’bake reputation, and the reviews of this kit were so glowing when it first came out. I’ll build it again, for sure, but be more cautious in a few places.

But is it Art?

Many years ago I had a good friend who was a student of many things, and at the time had aspirations to be an artist (she has ended up a professional photographer, so she knew what she was doing!). I appreciated what she was doing very much but she was quite dismissive of the plastic hobby. To her, kits were not art because the kit company had “done it all” for the builder already. Building from scratch, sure, but kits? No way, she said. Not art.

I tried explaining that if you give the same kit to ten different modellers and ask them to produce it in the same scheme you’ll get ten different results, whether down to skill in building, interpretations of the material, or due to variations in techniques and the modeller’s “eye” for the project – in other words, artistic input – but alas this argument fell on deaf ears.

I have often wondered where the line falls on this question. Where does it start, or stop, being art? To me, a model is a three-dimensional canvas, a primed model is a blank sheet, ready for me to create upon it a structure in paints and pigments which hopefully will convey the impression of the real thing. What about earlier, during construction? Is it artistic to fill and sand seams just so, is it artistic to assemble the parts to a high degree of precision, or is that merely technical competence (as I heard an art lecturer once dismiss the paintings of Canaletto)?

My personal feeling is that we are engineers while we are building, and become artists the moment we pick up the airbrush. There are few who would deny that it is an artistic pursuit when faced with the battery of brushes, paints, mixing trays and so forth entailed in doing a complex job on, say, fully weathered armour. And to deliver a sharp, precise paintjob on an aircraft, weathered or otherwise, is at least as much an art as what the custom car guys do, surely?

Okay, I’m biased, when I see a soft-edge camo job I both respect the skill of the painter and delight in the sense of realism it creates, perhaps as a result of still remembering the frustration of being a junior modeller smearing thick paint onto models by brush and despairing of ever making them look the way they did in magazines. Air painting changed all that, and the skill is one that is never completely learned, there will always be a new trick or technique to explore to refine the appearance of a model, closer and closer to some impossible ideal.

Is this an artistic aspiration? I think it is, not simply a desire to be a better engineer, a better technician, though it is those things also. Unless entering contests, we are rarely in the comparative stakes with our peers, and build thus very much for our selves, our satisfaction is all about our own standards, and they are notoriously difficult to measure up to. This is precisely the same mechanism for an artist working in 2D, so at that level the distinction has blurred completely. One might say that a military paint technician is not an artist because he is “colouring-in” a vehicle to a specification given to him, and though he may do so to a high standard of precision, there is no creativity in the process. We, however, then proceed to paint on the dirt, dust, rust, chips and scratches that the vehicle accumulates in the course of its duty, and these, while varying relatively predictably with the environment, are a much more flexible suite of events than the vehicle’s passage through the spray bay could ever be. Therein lies the art, I think, making a visually pleasing interpretation of a set of physical laws and effects.

Some might still quibble and say the physical laws we are emulating reduce creativity to a negligible level, but consider the results of a beginner and the long road he or she must trek to reach a level which his or her own eye will accept as realistic – this is a process, a learning curve, filled with successes and failures, frustrations and inspirations, highs and lows. If nothing else, the emotional process and fascination with what we do can easily be associated with artistic creativity (though, to be fair, a hot-rodder also goes through most or all of the same phases while developing the skills to turn out a masterpiece of automotive custom-engineering, which begs the question, is that art too? It might be!)

I doubt a question like this actually has an answer, a bottom line, but it’s certainly fodder for conjecture. I’ve seen models finished to the standard of fine art, but also “art” which is an insult to the wall it’s daubed on, so who knows? I just know that to me, the plastic kit hobby is an art form, and a very rewarding one

Laying the Shelf Queen

We all have projects which we start with enthusiasm and then, for one reason or another, go cold on. Maybe we’ve done the subject matter too often, or we’re getting a bit jaded with the scale, or perhaps the kit turns out to be more of a challenge than we wanted to tackle, there are many reasons why a kit is put back in its box half-completed, and then languishes, perhaps for many years.

There must be very few modellers who completely finish one project before starting another. I can say that at this point in time, I have some 35 projects at one stage or another, and some have been lingering in hobby limbo for a long time. Grandest of these “shelf queens” would have to be the Zvezda (ex-Dragon) T-72B with ERA, which I bought on special from Squadron Mailorder in the 1990s.

Early Dragon is over-complex, with too many fiddly parts, this is a theme I have visited on a number of occasions, and while the hobby community has squared up to the Dragon challenge over the last 25 years or more, these kits can sometimes be made that extra bit more complicated for reasons that have nothing to do with the original moulds.

I remember an article in FineScale Modeler many years ago by master modeller Cookie Sewell, describing building a Dragon T-72, and it seemed to go together without undue difficulty. Perhaps it was because the moulds were newer in those days, but I think a key factor in the difficulty of building the Zvezda edition is the plastic used.

This Russian firm acquired the moulds for the Russian/Soviet subjects tooled by Dragon in its early days and rereleased them under its own branding, sometimes with a few additions, new markings and packaging, but the plastic used to mould the contents leaves a lot to be desired. This is a plastic that does not really react with superglue, and is not all that enthusiastic with liquid cements either. It’ll stick in the end but when it comes to the sort of small parts Dragon excelled at, with minimal positive location devices in the engineering, you find yourself in a situation where the baseline of “superglue and prayer,” as I call it, has decidedly fallen on deaf ears.

I started the kit in the late 90s (around 2000 at the very latest) and it progressed through various stages of completion until I encountered the issue of the tracks. They are Dragon’s link and length, but the question of how to assemble them when the brittle black plastic reacts so poorly to glue that the slightest stress causes failure, essentially reboxed the project for a long, long time. I eventually decided to transplant the vinyls from a Tamiya T-72 and replace them from a parts stockist later, and while the Tamiya track does not exactly fit the Dragon sprockets, it’s close enough to do.

I finally finished the model with Tamiya Acrylics in Russian “woodland” camouflage, using XF-81 RAF Green (2) for the dark green component, XF-59 Desert Yellow, lightened with 10% white, for the tan, and XF-69 NATO Black for the black. I faded it with a 5% solution of XF-57 Buff and did a standard fade/shade/wash/drybrush/pigments job. The spare track links were airbrushed the same mixed grey-brown as the tracks, but were vigorously scrubbed with pencil graphite powder to create a dull metal sheen.

The decals I was very unsure of, but those in Zvezda’s edition of the Dragon BTR-70, which I blogged about some years ago, had behaved well, so I tested an unnecessary decal and found it to be fine. The sheet is four sets of white stencil-style numbers, two each in two sizes, so you can compose your own three-digit operational numbers. That means applying every digit separately, but the white is fully opaque, the decals separate from the backing in less than thirty seconds in cold water, and with three applications of Micro Sol they pull down over the corrugations of the stowage bins well enough. I’ll keep the rest of the sheet, you never know when these numbers may come in handy.

The tow cables I’m not at all sure about, they look highly “iffy” for matching up with the rear hull, and there are of course no positive location devices (what a surprise.) I might see what Eurekea XXL have available for Russian armour. Maybe that’s a cop-out on the very last chore, but this grand old shelf queen has succumbed at last and it’s time to move on.

The model looks pretty good on the shelf, but an expert eye would notice it’s missing various bits. Some of its lights are absent, for instance. That is because no amount of glue will make them stick, certainly not strongly enough to survive painting and handling. The snorkel unit mounted behind the rearmost stowage bin has no positive location devices and I lost count of the number of times it simply fell off during handling. Both of the fuel drums fell off the same way.

In the end, can I say the model was worth all the effort? It’s one of the most detailed tanks I’ve ever built, and the contemporary Russian camo looks good, but it’s one of those models you daren’t breathe on in case something falls off again. It’s a challenge and I’m glad to say that although it slowed me down for about 16 years, it didn’t beat me in the end – in fact I don’t think I have ever “binned” a project. But would I do it again? A Dragon original, in a cooperative plastic, perhaps, but Zvezda I would have to think carefully about.

My next oldest shelf queen is probably a Hobbycraft F-86E to be converted to an FJ-2 Fury prototype. It would be nice to see that box disappear from my shelves as well!