BradG

40 more days of lockdown.....ugh

I've had this kit in the stash for about 20 years and never really gave it much attention. Recently though I had a second look at it and despite a few parts suffering some sink marks, it didn't look too bad. Construction is actually pretty good, I used little in the way of filler, the turret required the most clean up but it is not beyond the most basic modelling skills. The driving lights suffered badly with sink marks, thus I pinched one from my spares box and re positioned it from the front armour to the top of the hull. I also left off the top bar securing the spare track links to the front of the hull, I guess crews left this off as it's 6 less bolts to remove when you need to change some track out quickly. I did like the separate track links in the kit as they supplied the flat straight pieces for top and bottom as a single bit, making building the track easier. One issue I did encounter is Italeri have left out the bottom pieces of the spare track mounts around the turret, thus I just left the top mounts on without any track mounted. Decals came from the spares box along with the two figures and the flag. Camouflage represents a generic Tiger sometime around Operation Zitadelle.

No one uses the good old coke nail anymore.

Oh, well yeh, you know matt/flat, same thing to me I guess, maybe not to everyone but first time I've heard someone say equate matt to semi gloss.

I worry about how much of our civil liberties we will actually get back in Australia. Police seem to have gone mad with the power, fining people for sitting on park benches, or in one case, a woman was fined for sitting in her car having a coke or harassing people just out doing the shopping. Fishing being banned is ridiculous and this is the problem, the more stupid restrictions you make, the less likely people are to follow them and the less respect authority will get. We all know, once a civil liberty is lost, very seldom do you get it back.

?? I used XF 86, that's not semi gloss.

Thanks mate. Yeh I know it does look like the figures are glossy, but I think the light is just picking up some of the pigment dry brushing, everything was hit with Tamiya matt. Looks better to the naked eye.

Private gatherings are banned in Australia, you could be fined 10 grand or be put in jail. This might be a big controversial, but I'm starting to think that the cure might be worse than the disease now. Our economy is collapsing, Australia will be in 1 trillion dollars of debt with millions unemployed, there have already been many suicides of shop and business owners that the media is not reporting. My friend who works in the industry tells me the suicide hot line is ringing off the hook. This is a disaster.

Boating and hunting banned too, there was just a new break that announced it from the government minister, so I'd say camping is soon to follow. Hell we already have the police out there stopping random people to ask why they are out and about. Several people have been fined for sitting on park benches by themselves. I really don't like this police state nonsense.

I really don't know what you're trying to say Clunkmeister, but it seems to be a popular thread due to being a popular and wanted model and there's a lot more forum members there than here so you'd expect more discussion pages on topics.

Fishing is now banned here. These restrictions on our movements are now getting ridiculous. I can go for a walk down to the local river, but if I stand there by myself with my rod, I could get a $1600 fine. How am I going to catch anything by just doing that? I really feel that the government are going to get a backlash from people soon.

I don't see much whinging, I do see people pointing out the shortcomings of the kit that they can see and that's a good thing. I mean when a company can't even spell it's own name correctly on the decal sheet, you have to ask some questions regarding their attention to detail. I want to hear this type of thing, it might have saved me buying their MiG 17 if I had seen a thread on it before I bought it. Note also that people pointing out the errors most also say they will be buying one.

Haha yeh, although I got a few frowns when she asked what I was putting in the microwave. Doing that kills off any rubbish in the dirt.

Needs a cut down canopy, enlarged fin and rudder with an R 4360 up front...but you know that's just me.

Got kicked out of the grocery store for wearing my anti corona virus protection suit...can't figure out why.

We're going to stage 3 lockdown at midnight, so no groups of 3 or more, you should only go out for supplies when you need to. Being an introvert is somewhat an advantage at the moment.

Half my cricket club lost their jobs last week, some with no job to go back to. I'm fairly ok, but have no work coming in. I expect most of my tradie mates will be unemployed within a week or so. I really do hope world leaders hold China responsible for their incompetence and lying over this, if not for their bungling, this wouldn't have been a global pandemic.

My first real crack at a diorama. This is the old Tamiya 75mm Pak 40 and crew, along with spares box weapons, ammo and extra crew member with binoculars. The grass is from Mininatur, the lighter roadway is tile grout, the darker dirt is just that from mums garden and the fence was made out of balsa wood. I'm not the best at figure painting but I'll get there. 1/35 is the scale.

Cheers. I'm getting in some practise on AFV's as I bought the Dragon Stug IV with all the bells and whistles that I want to do a great job on, sometime this year.

Another model I rescued off my shelf of doom, one of Dragon's older models, the Hetzer. It started life as a flame thrower but I bought it second hand from someone who had used that part for something else and included a resin conversion and metal barrel for a conventionally armed machine. I initially put this on the shelf of doom as it was before magic tracks, so I had to cut out and clean up about 200 track pieces. I guess I burned out on the model after doing that and it sat in the stash for years until I pulled it out again a week ago. Other than the tedious track link clean up, the kit is pretty good. The colours and markings represent no machine in particular. I kept the weathering fairly light, a grubby wash and some dirt here and there, enough to make it look used.

This is the very nice Dragon Smart kit in 1/35. Despite it being a nice kit it has sat on my shelf of doom for a couple of years, but I decided to finish it off before starting anything else. The kit goes together really well, the magic tracks in it are already cut off the sprue so that's a good thing, but assembling them took more than a few hours and what initially contributed to it's shelf of doom residence. Looking for something different I stumbled upon the Bulgarian Army. When the Bulgarians switched sides due to the Russian advance into the country, many units simply painted their vehicles Soviet green, slapped some red stars on them and turned around. The Russians also re-enforced them with captured equipment. Many surviving vehicles were still in front line service into the immediate post war world until the Russians resupplied them with soviet equipment.

Mach 2 aluminium death trap. lol

This is the Encore kit and it needs a good amount of TLC to get it into shape. There's a good amount of sink marks and flash that need attention, but after some elbow grease and some serious clamping, it turned out alright. It's in a nice clean condition as I built it for dad and he's not a fan of weathering. It now sits in his study.

I was tinkering away with this one in between other builds. It's a straight from the box 1/35 Tamiya kit and although a little long in the tooth now, stands up pretty well, except for the figures, they aren't the best when compared to Dragon.