crazypoet

This is gorgeous! I’m thoroughly enjoying your approach to adding detail

Puttering along with the front of the engine. holes drilled for the spark plugs, oil crossovers in place and getting ready to attach the rocker arm covers. for the record, I *love* the ANYZ spark plugs!!! They seem overly fiddly until you actually work with them. They have a pretty robust stub that sits neatly into a .33” hole. So far everything is fitting nicely, though I found an interesting hitch on the rocker arm covers, reinforcing the old adage to test fit many before gluing once... to align properly with the pushrods, you need to force a slight bend in the oil crossovers. So I’ve temporarily connected the pushrods with rubber frisket so I can get everything properly aligned...

Times like this require...time you have a ton of “stuff” to process. Grief. Anger. Ennui. Loss. it takes time, my friend. Stay close to the people you have. Talk - don’t hold things in. Listen - those around you may also need an ear and a shoulder. Lean in with each other and you’ll emerge - there will be a point where you can again turn to the things you enjoy with anticipation rather than “what’s the point” indifference it will come. meanwhile, hang here - we are a community and we’re here to listen and to care

Wow... great question! For me, it's about the story - what is a mission/moment/person/situation that made that particular [fill in the blank] interesting? The Picket Boat got my attention because it was a trifecta of historic inflection points: Linear ancestor of the Torpedo Boat, commanded by the linear ancestor of the Navy SEAL, in the first mission where a large ironclad vessel was sunk by a much smaller surface combatant. The P-47 build I'm doing now is based on the mission flown by "Shorty" Rankin on May 12, 1944 - he shot down 5 German fighters, air-to-air, on a single mission, on my birthday (May 12) - what's not to love? Besides which, I've always had a soft spot for the razorback Jugs... The B-17 build I'm planning is based on B-17 44-6573, N7-K in the 603rd Sqdn, 398th Bomber Group. It was piloted by Donald Christensen, who was the Grandfather of a good friend of mine. It was shot down on March 2, 1945, with the loss of 10 out of 11 crew (the Tail Gunner survived) The B-25 build will go one of two ways - I'd been planning a Southwest Pacific suite of builds with the B-25 strafer as a centerpiece. Then, I found out that one of my Great-uncles had flown the B-25 as a Canadian in the RAF... If I can get sufficient detail on his assignment(s) and aircraft, I'll build *his* plane and gift it to his family All good stories! At least to me. Perhaps not the most interesting topics in terms of design, color, camouflage, etc. - but certainly *good* stories - stories that resonate in this crowded, fevered brain of mine...!

This points out the good and sufficient reasons why I don't do more than occasional lurking over at that other site...

I prefer larger scales, mostly because I don’t have the digital finesse to bring out some of the details I like at smaller scales On the other hand, there are some subjects that either won’t ever appear in 1/32 (B-52? B-36? Pan Am Clipper?) or are prohibitively expensive (the HpH 1/32 PBY comes to mind here) and then there are the 1/200 ships and 1/35 gunboats... So as much as I’d prefer to stay with 1/32, I can’t ...

Tubular parts are maddening to clean up when not well-cast i feel yer pain! And also admire your alternative approach...! I could learn from that!

Happy Birthday - now go do something newsworthy...!

And... just in time to start building the engine, this arrived today from ANYZ... .05mm in black, gray, red and copper .08mm in black spark plugs and line connectors sufficient to see me through at least the P-47, B-25 and B-17 builds

I have some serious catching up to do! my paltry stash sits at 19 kits, including what I’m building now - and even those are enough to take me through to retirement at my current snail’s pace!

That's a great approach! For myself, I've made a deal with the universe that I can't die until I've had a nice romp with [her name redacted, in the name of keeping lawyers at bay!]. this means that I am effectively immortal.

The ignition wiring I've seen in both restored and original engines *appears* to be rubber-coated braided lines, emerging from the pressurized ignition ring. Does this jive with your own references?

No, this isn’t a bag of rock-salt... Carl was beyond generous and sent me a pair of Brit Mk-II gunsights and reflectors from his collection of Spitfire kits, for me to use in the P-47 build i had a resin upgrade set For the Spitfire, which contained the sight, but it specified kit parts for the glass. sooooo.... Carl stepped up...! i know have a pair of Mk-II sights and reflectors, in case I fumble-finger yet another itty bitty part... thank you, Sir!

I’ve been happily playing around with the innards of this thing, and it’s getting towards the point where I have to put the toys and powders away and actually pull it together so I can get on to stuff that people can see without a flashlight and dental mirror... I’ve played with a couple different approaches to the bare aluminum and steel plumbing, and found an approach that works well for me. Using Mr Surfacer and Tamiya Flat aluminum as the base for the cold side of things, I differentiated panel materials with Uschi iron and steel powders, then dirtied things up with Tamiya weathering powders. I like the way they came out. The hot side of the plumbing I did with Uschi iron and steel powders over a gloss black base. It looked gorgeous, but also flat wrong - a gloss coat was exactly what I should *not* have used for this. I should have used a dark gray flat base coat instead. The Tamiya powders helped to mute things a bit but if this was on the outside I’d be stripping it down and re-painting from scratch. Now on to the nuts and bolts. I think I understand why the good folk at Trumpeter decided to include all of this stuff. First, parts of it will be visible, even more so with the Eduard exterior PE set - it opens things up quite a bit at the Oil Cooler and Intercooler discharge vents. second, I’ve seen some very interesting maintenance and damage pics of the P-47 and they would be all but impossible to replicate without at least some of the plumbing present. I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason for them to take this approach, but I can at least see their reasoning And... all that said... I do wish that, having gone to all the trouble to engineer the plumbing, that they had gotten it right, dammit! There are some glaring errors and messes in areas that are potentially visible. The exhaust, hot side of the supercharger and the piping from the compressor to the intercoolers are all just... wrong. Like head-scratching, whatinthehellweretheysmoking wrong. Ejector pin marks with in the middle of visible panels... bad overall fit (including areas where two designers were obviously not comparing notes and left mismatched pins and holes here and there...) And you can actually *see* some of this stuff. the longitudinal fit of the completed assembly is also a bit iffy, so I’ll use canopy glue for flexibility on some of the joints along with some judicious trimming and sanding to ensure it all goes together cleanly. whats worse is that they had available some amazing references out there, including the whole naked guts up on display - with signs and airflow arrows, no less! Instead it seems that one of the Trumpy engineers used an old Army Air Corps air-flow schematic as gospel. such is life! I’ve had some fun with this and it’s getting on time to put all the bits together, fill the gaps and shoehorn it all together...

That's a really good question! Simple scale math means that this will, of necessity, be on two different bases. My original thought was to re-create the positions and dynamics from a gun-camera scene of an F-86 downing a MiG-15 that I found online. That said, with two bases (mounted? suspended? dunno yet), I can swap things up a bit and let them play, so to speak. In practice, when we were flying against Russian pilots, the two were *very* well-matched and it was not ever a foregone conclusion as to who would be stalking whom... Thanks for asking this - it just shifted my whole context!

600 O-Rings... I will never, ever, EVER complain again about the parts count in any single component of any model... I am made humble And this is seriously beautiful work!

HA! - I get that about you! I kind of split the difference. I love the short-run, finicky kits, but I also like to take a more mainstream kit and dress it up. I'm not quite to the point where I'm ready to take on a scratch conversion, but I'm quite happy to fiddle around and fine tune when needed. I tend to go a bit cross-eyed when trying to verify panel and rivet details, and I've neither the eyesight nor the dexterity to get to the level of finesse I see displayed here on a regular basis... But Ima keep tryin'!

Nice work - and timely, as I’m just looking to pick up one of these to slip into the queue... watching happily over your shoulder

Thanks to all - this is truly valuable, and you’re saving me a ton of headaches by allowing me to peek over your shoulders - I appreciate that more than ya know!

So one of my long-term goals is to do a Korean War F-86F vs Mig-15 in-flight dio What I don't have is a good feel for available kits. The only current/new tooling F-86 variant I've seen in 1/32 is the -D SaberDog, which is not what I want to build. Trumpeter and HpH both have Mig-15 kits, but all I'm seeing for the F-86F is the older Hasegawa kit on eBay. Any others out there that I'm missing? Recommendations and ideas welcome!

They published that? Oh dear lord

14 injuries, including one on the ground. Assuming that all of the injured were treated at the hospital, could be up to 8 fatalities as they say that they treated six. I'm hoping that it's "only" five and that the other three injured didn't require treatment beyond on-site first-aid...

13 on board - 10 passengers and three crew one person on the ground was injured as well still no word on specific injuries. There were fatalities and as of a few minutes ago, word that five people had been transported to hospitals (6 were reported earlier, now they’re saying five) my heart goes out to each and all of them

I just saw the pics - this is a devastating loss, and my heart goes out to the entire aviation community at this loss, above and beyond whatever injuries may have been sustained. I have had the privilege of two flights on board the EAA's Aluminum Overcast - those memories are pure magic. Losing 909 feels like a gut-punch, not least because of the number of people who will no longer have an opportunity to with the experiences of our parents and grandparents in this elegant, powerful, but also vulnerable aircraft

This is sad news! I hope first for those on board that their injuries are minor, and second that there's noting that isn't repairable on 909 herself!