Claymore

I decided to add a bit of litter to the cobblestone base of my model tank, so I created tiny, tiny coke cans and wine bottles.

 



And here's the result:

Finished, the Airfix 1/48 kit of the Hawker Siddeley Buccaneer S.2B. This one is Longmorn, one of the Buccaneers sent by the RAF to the Gulf War in 1991, painted with a sandy camouflage called "desert pink". They typically carried a slipper fuel tank, laser designator pod to designate targets for Tornados, an ECM pod, and a Sidewinder for self-defence. The paint wore off fast, so there was quite a bit of weathering on the aircraft, and the colour ranged from pinkish to yellowish. I used pink mottling under Mr Color’s "Flesh" paint, and I think it’s a pretty decent match; I used an entire bottle of paint. The kit itself had some poor fit issues (especially the air brake!), but detail is not too bad.

Album of display pics here (16 pics)

Full build album

With my winnings from the Model of the Year, and at the last club meeting of the year, I bought a few cheap but interesting model kits. Should be fun. 

Finished. The Heller 1/72 kit of the Bloch MB.152 fighter from early WW2. An ancient kit - I built one as a kid. Not too bad though, and I completely scratchbuilt a cockpit for it. It was quite a struggle researching the colours; it seems there was very little consistency at the time. The decals were old and yellowed, so I carefully trimmed them first. The Bloch engine was slightly pointed to the left to counter torque.









Full build album here

I'm busy with two model kits at the moment.

The first is an ancient Heller kit of a Bloch MB.152, a French WW2 fighter plane that did really badly in the early part of the war. I scratchbuilt an entire cockpit for it, and I'm busy doing the camouflage painting at the moment. One peculiarity is that the nose points left by a couple of degrees in order to counter torque. Finding accurate colours is a challenge; the French at the time were not good with documentation or consistency.





The other kit is an old Airfix Westland Whirlwind, a little twin-engined British WW2 fighter. Like the Bloch, I built one of these back in the early 80s. It's a simple kit, and I'm not doing anything fancy at all, just building it as is.

Finished, the Lindberg 1/48 XFY-1 "Pogo" VTOL aircraft. The Pogo was a weird beast, and only one pilot ever managed to successfully repeatedly fly it. The model kit was barebones, so I scratchbuilt the entire cockpit. I'm especially pleased with the bare metal and aluminum finish; I used Mr Color "Gun Chrome" for the bare metal, and it gives an excellent finish. The contra-rotating prop is geared - they actually move opposite directions.



















Full album of pictures

I'm busy with two model kits at the moment, hoping to have them done by the model club meeting on Saturday.

One is the Revell 1/72 BAe Hawk, a little trainer aircraft. The kit was actually a birthday gift to one of the guys at the club, and he asked me to build it for him. The tricky bit is that it's all-black, which leaves limited scope for weathering and highlighting. Still, neat kit.

The other is a Lindberg 1/48 XFY-1 "Pogo". It's an old kit, with very little detail, but a super interesting subject: a weird aircraft with giant contra-rotating propellers, designed to take off vertically from a tail-sitting position. Only one pilot ever managed to take off and land with any regular success. I scratch-built the entire cockpit, and so far it's coming along nicely - lots of bare metal paint.

Along the way I tried a new substance: Gauzy Glass Coat. For years I have used Future/Pledge floor polish to dip the aircraft canopies in; it forms a clear, glossy protective coating that looks good. Gauzy supposedly replaces that, since Future/Pledge is hard to get hold of. I tried it on the Hawk canopy, and it was a mess - it left bubbles and bumps, and looked horrible. I was able to strip it off, luckily, by soaking the canopy in rubbing alcohol for a few minutes, and the canopy wasn't damaged. Back to Pledge, which works just fine. You can see the Pledge-coated canopy here:



At the last club meeting, I bought a few really old model kits, of interesting aircraft. I seem to make a habit of building ancient, rubbish kits, and making them look nice. Maybe my next one up will be the old Heller model of a French WW2 fighter, the Bloch MB.152.

Finished, the CMC Leopard model kit, a 1/72 scale Amodel kit. It's tiny! The CMC Leopard was a British 4-seater passenger jet with two engines, and was significantly smaller than a Me-109 or Cessna 172. It first flew in1988. A nice simple kit, though it didn't fit together well. I tried a new clearcoat, Mr Color GX110. Very nice indeed, better than even the normal clearcoat.














Full album here.

I finished my Arado Ar-234 C-2 model kit last week, in time for the model club meeting. It's an ancient Revell kit, with poor fit and detail, and raised panel lines. I scratchbuilt the entire cockpit, did some post-shading on the panel lines, and used a spare set of Luftwaffe decals to get the Tesla logo for the tail. The C-2 model was designed to launch the V-1 flying bomb, and only one was ever made.





















Link to full album

Here are the models I finished in 2024:

I finished painting this resin figurine a couple of months ago. It's the South Huntress, a dark elf night hunter.





Right after I took pics, the wind caught the card I was using as a backdrop, and blew the figure off the wall. I have managed to superglue it together.

Finished, my Italeri 1/48 Saab AJ-37 Viggen. It was a rubbish kit, and the masking was a nightmare (and my paintwork could have been better), but it came out looking pretty decent. The "fields and meadows" camouflage is iconic. Bonus pic of my 35 or 40 year old Matchbox kit. I took the Viggen to the scale modellers' club on Saturday, and it got lots of attention and interest.

The Saab Viggen was a Cold War interceptor/fighter-bomber. The AJ-37 version I did is the fighter bomber, and it could carry a whole collection of rockets, fuel tanks, air to ground missiles, and air to air missiles, and more. The Viggen is the only aircraft ever to get a missile lock on the legendary SR-71 Blackbird
.

Full link to progress pics album here.





















Alongside the 1/72 scale Matchbox Viggen I built probably in the late 80s. Back then I thought gloss varnish looked great, and of course it was rather amateurish. I had painted the camouflage by hand with a paintbrush, no masks.

This month's model is an Italeri 1/48 scale Saab Viggen jet. I'm going to be doing it in the classic and stunning splinter camouflage; it's going to be a challenge! The kit itself is not great; poor fit, raised panel lines, and other annoyances.

Here's the cockpit. the seatbelts and instruments are all decals:


Here's where I am with the plane itself. Lots more filling and sanding to be done, but most of the assembly is complete.

To go with the amazing Airfix Gannet, I did the worst Gannet kit in the world at the same time, the decades-old Frog 1/72 Gannet in Kriegsmarine markings. No cockpits, just heads (I painted the pilot heads), and no wheel wells, I just painted them. All of 27 parts. It came out quite well though.

Here's a link to the full photo album for both Gannets.

I did a demo of the black-basing technique at the monthly model club meeting on Saturday. I'm sure there are others there who can do it better, but I volunteered and took all my equipment in.

The technique is pretty simple. The idea behind it is (especially with military aircraft and equipment) to make the surfaces look less perfect and even. You want to provide a slightly weathered or used look, with some irregularity in the paint surface. Many modellers use a method called "pre-shading" where they spray darker paint on the areas where there are panel borders, followed by the main colour, but to my eye it often looks too emphasised and unrealistic.

So what I do is paint the entire surface with a black paint (I use Mr Surfacer Black 1500, which is a bit of a primer). The in the areas between the panel lines, I use Tan paint in mottled patterns, so that it looks irregular. Then I use the final colour, laying it down in thin coats till most of the black and tan are gone. How thick it's laid down will determine how worn it looks. If it's a thin coat, it looks more worn, and thicker will look cleaner, smoother, and newer.

For camouflage, I do the whole area (like the wing), then mask off the areas I want to keep in the original colour (like brown), and re-do the black-basing process with the next colour (like green). 

Here was the final result of the demo. I did the lower wing in a blue-grey; the right hand side had a thicker coat, while the left hand side looks rougher. Same with the camouflaged top wings.



The demo was pretty well received, I think, and it came out better than many of my actual models do.

The second of my three German aircraft is this one: A Messerschmitt Me-109G-6 in service with the Swiss air force. The Swiss bought or acquired a bunch from Nazi Germany.

The model is a Fujimi 1/48 kit. I bought it second-hand for R200, and it came two (mostly) two sets of decals. Unfortunately, one set was welded to the decal paper, and wouldn't come off. The other set were old and yellow, and also pretty fragile. I figured they wouldn't look good, so I masked and airbrushed the Swiss markings, and I found aircraft numbers (the 706) in my collection of spare decals, and I made the J - out of an O and an I. The mottling on the side, like the other two planes, was done by hand with my airbrush, and this Me-109 has four different colours of mottling.

Here's a link to the full album for all three models













The instrument panel is on the left, and the cockpit is the one on the left:

Another one I finished was the Heller 1/125 Concorde. A reasonable kit for the time, it did need a lot of filling at the wing roots. I finished it in what-if Lufthansa colours, and it looks very smart like that. The Concorde was actually one of the most extraordinary aircraft ever made; I think one may hold a round-the-world record of 27 hours, and could not be intercepted even by jet fighters. It was also a big plane - it's something like 20 or 25% longer than a B-52, longer than a 747, and a bit shorter than the A380. One little quirk I discovered when I was doing decals is that the plane is not quite symmetrical: when I was putting the Lufthansa decals on the tail, I discovered there are runner strakes at different heights, so the Lufthansa logo is high on one side, and low on the other.

Full build album for the Concorde

Last week, before the monthly model club meeting, I finished my Fairey Fulmar model kit, an MPM 1/48 Fairey Fulmar Mk.1. The Fulmar was a two-seat long-range naval fighter used by the Fleet air Arm in world War 2, and it was the highest-scoring FAA fighter of the war. It was a so-so model kit - fit was reasonable, but it wasn't always clear where parts fitted. Detail wasn't bad at all. The cockpit detail was pretty awesome - there was an entire sprue for cockpit parts.

I screwed up right at the end, when I was gluing the last few pieces on. I managed to open the superglue bottle too sharply, and several superglue drops splattered across the top. Not much that could be done about it apart from matt-coating them so they don't stand out too much.

Here's a link to the album with start to finish pictures







I thought the weathering and black-basing effects came out really well on the bottom.









Kat found me some fine threat for the aerials, and I actually used a tiny drill bit to drill the holes that I glued the aerials into at several points.



This is a pic of all the interior parts before I put it together.





The pilot's instrument panel.

On Friday I finished up my Airfix 1/48 scale Hawker Sea Fury FB.11 model kit.  The Sea Fury was perhaps the pinnacle of piston-engined fighter aircraft, and was used as a fighter-bomber by the Royal Navy during the Korean War. This particular aircraft was flown off the Royal Navy carrier HMS Glory in 1950.  

Here's a link to the album if you want to see a start to finish of this and my other model, the Wyvern.

The Airfix kit was amazing. Perfect fit, the instructions were a work of art, and generally good design.

For the paints, I used Mr Color lacquers for all the airbrushing (the main colours are Dark Sea Grey and Sky, with a black finishing primer and mottled Deck Tan to give the surfaces a slightly uneven look). Brush painting was done with Humbrol enamels; that's mostly things like the seatbelts, instruments and dials, wheels, and little touch-ups. The Mr Color lacquer paints go on beautifully, dry very quickly (I can do four coats in the same airbrushing session), and are extremely durable; they don't leave marks when masking tape is used. Once everything is mostly assembled and painted, I use a Mr Color gloss clearcoat and apply decals, using decal softening solution which gets the decals to shape around panel lines properly. Then more clear coat, and then I do weathering; that's stuff like the panel lines (which I do with a black enamel panel line paint), exhaust and gun marks (I use Tamiya weathering powder, which is like eye shadow) after studying pics of the real aircraft to see when the exhaust leaves soot. After than, I use a clear matt coat which finishes it all off.

Here are some pics of this Bristol Centaurus-powered beast.









Here you can see the rockets on the wings. Each of these 12 rockets has 6 decals on it, with a total of 72 decals on the rockets alone. One is a red strip which needs to be wrapped around neatly, and four are little white dots 1mm in size. I spent hours on the decals. If you're interested, on the underside of the wing you're looking at, including the rocket decals, there are 44 decals: two faint light circles, then the British roundel, then some text on the left, two tiny bits of text above the "W", the WJ2 marking, the red dot in the circle, and the 36 decals on the rockets.





While I was building these models, I also made some flight decks. I bought a couple of cheap picture frames, and glued two different grades of fine sandpaper to the hardwood backing in the frame. I airbrushed it with black and grey, used some brownish weathering powder, airbrushed a white runway marking, and used dilute black paint to make oil stains. Came out quite well, I think. 



Here are my last three kits on my picture-frame flight decks: the Seafire, Sea Fury, and the Wyvern.

I have managed to finish two models, and took them along to the GRSM club for display.



First was the B-58 Hustler, which I did in the South East Asian camouflage scheme, basically Vietnam era. The B-58 was never used in Vietnam, but there was a Project Bullseye to evaluate it, and people who claimed to have seen it in the camouflage instead of its usual bare metal.

It was actually an extraordinary aircraft. Not large as bombers go, it was delta-winged, and extraordinary fast. It set many speed and altitude records, some of which still stand today, like the longest supersonic flight: London to Tokyo (12900km) in 8 hours 37 minutes; the last hour was subsonic due to an afterburner problem. Several in-flight refuellings along the way. It could not carry a huge bomb load like the B-52 though; it was designed to drop nuclear bombs. Also, it was maintenance-heavy, and apparently rough for pilots on long flights; they sat in fighter-style seats (so no moving around), it was so noisy they communicated with a pulley system with clip-on notes, and after long flights, they often had to be lifted out of the cockpit.

My build was OK, but I ended up with some rough paint on the top due to paint drying too quickly quile airbrushing. I was very happy with the bottom though.









Next was the Leduc 022. The kit was terrible - lots of flash, poorly fitting parts, lots of gap-filler need, no decals or markings, and it fitted together fairly well. The aircraft was an experimental ramjet with turbojet to get it to speed until the ramjet could take over. For something from 1956, it really looked like something out of sci-fi. The all-glass cockpit was inside the nose cone!





Here are links to the albums with all build pictures:
B-58
Leduc

Next models I'm busy with are a Lear Fan (a propeller-driven business aircraft), and a Concorde, which I'll do in fictional Lufthansa livery.

I managed to re-do my display shelves, and added some LED strip lights so the models are actually visible:

I realised that for some reason I never posted about the other model kit I finished in 2021, in October: an Italeri SEPECAT Jaguar T.2. It's the model kit of the 2-seat trainer version of the Anglo-French attack aircraft of the 1970s. It was a bit of a fiddly kit, with lots of small parts. I did it in the RAF Dark Grey camouflage; in scale, I think I should have made it lighter, as its a bit dark. Here are some pics.

D&D is going very well (with the Monday group, at any rate!). We've been running on Foundry VTT for remote gaming. I downloaded a town for Foundry, complete with various buildings all set up, and I fleshed out the plot suggestions with townsfolk, creatures, plots, etc. It a lot of prep work, but very enjoyable. Foundry is a really amazing system, and getting better all the time. It's only been available for about 8 months.

Here's what my workstation setup looks like when we're gaming: 
My centre screen is running the Foundry server, where I run everything from. I can control lighting, sound effects, movement, etc. etc. The left screen is connected via the web client, logged in as the group's NPC. That way, I can control the NPC separately, and see his point of view for lighting - though a new update in Foundry lets me do that from the server. The NPC is a cleric, nicknamed "Friar Fuck"; he was expelled from the monastery, oops. The right screen has OneNote, where I type up the campaign journals (and I transfer them to the jounals in Foundry too, for players to read). On that screen is also WhatsApp web client, and somewhere in the background is my web browser connected to jitsi, which we use for voice chat.

For my model-building, things are going slowly. I'm busy with a 1/48 scale Focke Wulf Fw-190S trainer. The base kit is poorly moulded, but it comes with resin and photoetched metal parts, which have incredible detail. It's interesting getting to grips with those.

Here's the rear instrument panel: