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Had an original Belgian high power for years ...an excellent pistol I did not know about the Springfield Armory one..cool addition to their line

I bought a package of 0000 steel wool for modeling use probably 20 years ago. I’ve only used one piece of it. 🤣 But yes, great for weathering effects and surface prep. I did wash it with lacquer thinner because some brands have an oil coating to prevent rust. Here’s another steel wool tip: if you want to “age” new wood, take a quart of vinegar and drop in about half a hunk of steel wool and let it sit a week or two. Shake occasionally. After it has aged, brush or spray using a garden sprayer the vinegar mix (after filtering you the steel that broke down) on the wood. Let it sit out in the sunlight a few days. Now you have new “old” wood. Turns it into an aged gray color. My dock needed a new 2X10 runner installed that would have been very visible and there’s no way I was paying Duke Energy (they own the lake and require permits for any work done) $350 to have them send their guy out to collect a check and see what I was replacing. Now my new board looks exactly like the old boards. Not kidding you, they fly drones around the lake looking for work done without permits.

Mike: I just searched for VMS and found their stuff on the Hobbyworld website. Is this the stuff you are referring to on the tarps? VMS - WFU Modeling Paper I'm sure you found this video on using their Modeling Paper. VMS has a ton of how-to videos. Never found them before... I seem to always learn something new from you!

Me 5 ! (Jumped 2 to 4, given the supply stock ) Hubert

Oh, I do have a *lot* of wine bottle tin foil!

Impressive. Cheers Dennis

I also hope you´ll make it Carl. The paintjob looks great and astonishingly vivid. Cheers Rob

Bummer with the finish, Hubert. I use X22 as a base layer for decaling my WW1 birds with huge Aviattic Lozenge and usually have a perfect glossy finish, when thinned with Mr. Leveling Thinner, no orange peel, no nada. When you add a clear cot on top, you have an even better look, somehow deeper. I love the guy with his aviators and flowery Hawaiian shirt, so cool. Cheers Rob

Great detail work on the engines, Mike. Like Hubert, I mostly drill tiny holes with a hand held pin vise, but when there is a lot of drilling to be done, like with MFH kits, I use my Proxxon micro drill on a stand and with a foot pedal, which works equally well, with both hands free to hold the parts. Until now, I never made larger tarpaulins, but liked the tin foil of wine bottle caps very much. The oil cart will be a very nice addition to the dio. Cheers Rob

Making slow progress on the Quickie. I am struggling to get the prefect finish I am dreaming of. Small blemishes in the white paint have to be touched up, the canard-to-fuselage joint proved troublesome and had to be sanded a few times, but then it means some repaint, and my second (or third ?) coat of Tamiya X-22 showed some orange peel that had to be sanded away . All of this whilst trying not to send the delicate compensators of the canards flaps fly away on their own ! Anyway, this is where I am at this morning : A small paint build-up at the extremity of the left canard sanded away and to be repainted ... See the blemish I scraped off on the canard-to-fuselage root and needs a repaint 😡 ? The airfield is ready for a fly-off ... Uh oh ... Not without wheels and prop ... ... And the pilot is ready to take the Quickie to Florida for the weekend ... But not yet ! In the meantime lookie lookie who is trying a creeping come-back in a corner of the bench ? Whilst the paint and varnish on the Quickie were setting, I designed and printed some new slats for the Cutlass, after the frustrations of the original kit's ones ... Hopefully the Quickie will live up to the thread's title Hubert

Indeed, as well as sponges for cleaning pans. Coarse steel wool can be also used to spry through with the airbrush, to achieve unregular base layers. Cheers Rob

Great work Mike ! I hope you can make it to the deadline. As a general rule, I add 0.1 mm to the diameter of the holes in which a rod or tube is inserted. Albion Alloys are really precise, Evergreen not so much with tolerances in 0.05/0.1 mm area, but you just need a few hundreds of mm to throw you out of whack. Very brave to use a motor drill for bits this small. They induce so much torque, a few vibrations, plus some top weight that make it very difficult to hold the bit straight and not break it. I do all my drillings with small bits with hand-held pin-vises, going slwowly and not forcing the torque when I feel resistance, and even then I break bits regularly ... Your work is really looking good. I am not sure that a 1/32 kit would not have been simpler in the end than two 1/48 ones with accessories, but I am looking forward to see them completed anyway Hubert PS: good to read that, for once, Verlinden AM was the right size, and not oversized - which is the reason why I stopped buying them eons ago. Come ion Aires, if Verlinden can do it, so do you !

Go, Carl, go ! You CAN make it before the deadline (says the man who is a "specialist" in GB deadlines) ! Hubert

just revisited a thread on BritModeller and a Czech member there said it definitely will *not* be 2025 - he quoted Mr Sulc saying as much I think - so we are looking / hoping for 2026 I guess... or that the Zoukei-mura will beat them to it?

Steel wool is very useful for buffing, polishing, light sanding, in its finer grades. A ball of steel wool will last a modeller’s life. Another (cheap) addition to the tool chest Hubert

Thanks. Yes, steel wool. It works very well in place of fine sandpaper, especially for contoured things like cannon barrels. Using the finest grades, it leaves a nice polished finish.

Great progress there Mike. I did something similar with the pushrods on my Seahawk by making them a bit deeper than needed.

Hey Chris, thanks for the kind words. I thought the exact same thing about the fuel bowser lol Looks very strange but I guess it served a purpose! For the pushrods, I ended up using my micromotor to drill 0.4mm holes for the rods in the center section. The idea was that if the holes had a little depth to them, I wouldn't have to cut the rods exactly to length. The concept generally worked, though I was using 0.4mm brass rod for the rods and the holes were too small. I tried going up a size and the holes ended up merging into one bigger hole. That actually worked out just fine. Gave me a little more room to play with, and I just used CA to fill in the gaps. For the tarps, I got a product from VMS when I was placing an order for some of their glues to try them out. I'll let you know how they go. Good Christmas here. Finally a couple of weeks of no work, kids have practically no activities, etc. Almost too quiet! Of course I thought I was going to get these dioramas completed and a host of other things done, but between catching up on sleep, honey-dos, and taking care of stuff on my to-do list, I haven't had as much time as I'd hoped. It's all good though. Hope you had a good Christmas! Happy New Year to you too neighbor!

Pete, If you haven't ordered this yet I can send you my bottle. I keep forgetting I even have it, but I can see where it would be useful over old decals to keep them from fracturing. LMK.

Mike, incredible work on, well, ALL of this! The detail is amazing and I'm amazed at the pushrod work. The fuel bowser to me looks like a baby buggy, every time I see one. Can't help it! Nice work on the cowlings - I'm looking forward to seeing how you do the tarps. Could come in handy sometime! Have a good Christmas? Sounds like it was a quiet one. Happy New Year, neighbor!

One of my favorite planes!

Hope you are feeling better. Is that Steel wool in the background? What do you use that for?

Better! It is amazing how much detail a wash brings out. I bet it looks even better to your eye. I hear you on the markers. I used a Gundam marker on the Earnhardt #3 and had mixed results. I can see some places where they work great, others are a bit of a stretch. BUT, nice to have in the tool kit!

The horizontal tailplanes have small vertical tabs on them. They're red with a yellow stripe. They're supplied as decals but I painted them on as per the Suez stripes. First a base coat of yellow. Then the stripe was masked off. Followed by a coat of red. I did the spinner at the same time. Installed on the tailplanes and then onto the fuselage. Getting closer.