HubertB

Vallejo is TOTALLY incompatible with Mr Levelling Thinner. The only viable thinner with Vallejo is ... water. Ask me how I know ( cleaning black goo in an airbrush for a few hours is not fun, believe me ) Hubert

Excellent ! Hubert

I was rather thinking that with such a concentration of handsome men, why don’t we have more ladies on this site than Tinder ? (Well, OK Ernie, maybe not for you, old chap ) Hubert

Beautiful build ! Hubert

Whilst not a graphic designer by trade, I only got rid of my Staedtler drawing table in the last house move ... Still has the Rotrings however. I am still an old school thinker when it comes to computer graphics, though. Which is why I am utterly lost with softwares like Blender ... WOT ? You do not start with dimensions and tolerances ? Hubert

Absolutely gorgeous build and finish ! ! Hubert

Thank you for the interest and following along. Much appreciated. Well, progress. I have sprayed some primer on the parts that will be silver later. Having read so many positive comments about them, I ordered and received last mont some MRP paints. So this was the opportunity to try the black primer I had ordered. Let me summarize my feelings about these paints after this session : wow ! I am sold ! Everything you have read is true, and even more ! They spray beautifully, directly out of the pot, without thinning, and the result is incredibly fine and smooth. Me a VERY happy camper ! Some pics to show the results. Everything is black, so the contrast is not that great (now, THAT is an understatement), but you will get an idea (and my pics suck anyway ) And the last bit, the cockpit frame : By the way, on the first pic, don't do as I did. Read the instructions first, and do not glue the visit panels BEFORE the guns have been put in place. They are inserted from the outside, through the openings ! Hubert

+1 for Uschi. he has a "Special ships' rigging" elastic thread that is 0.03 mm. You just need tweezers that can really grasp such tiny thread, good magnification, a steady hand (avoid coffee or other stuff like that) and tons of patience. It can really stretch a lot. And it takes CA very well, even for minute contact points. I used the "fine" (bigger than the ship's rigging sruff) version on the venerable 1/72 Matchbox Boeing P-12E. (And, btw, I will NEVER again do a 1/72 biplane !). EZ line, although flat, is just to big for the scale. HTH Hubert

Made some small progress last week: The cockpit has been assembled, adding details like the throttle pushrods, the bomb release cables, the oxygen hose that will connect to the regulator panel on the right side, the brakes cables, a hose that goes from the pump on the left propbably to the fuel tank, and a cable from the long handle on the left. The pushrods are a bit on the heavy side, but will look the part when everything is closed. Ditto for the oxygen hose, probably. At least it will be visible . It is "free-floating" now, but, when the cockpit frame is inserted in-situ, it will come to butt on the bottom of the oxygen regulator auxiliary panel. Now for some comparison shots. I bought the Bitskrieg AM, including the oil radiator, the engine cover and propeller, a new cowling, machines guns, etc. On the pics, the dark grey parts are the kit's ones (on the left), and the light grey ones the Bitskrieg ones. The oil radiator is a real plus, the machine guns are also finer. The engine is finer in resin,but may actually be too close to scale fidelity on the lower cylinder fins. It certainly calls for delicate painting and enhancing. The propeller boss is a better, as is the propeller which has lost the sharp edges of the kit's parts near their root. The cowling is finer as well. All in all, in total fairness, apart from the oil radiator, the gains with the resin parts are real but mostly only to a trained eye,for additions that are almost as costly as the original kit. So it's up to you to decide whether you want them. On this last pic, with the Bitskrieg MG and cowling, you can also see the kit's IP and radio. The IBG kit offers you two choices for the IP decals: preprinted with instrument faces, or just the white lettering, in which case you have to paint the dials yourself. The white lettering looks slightly finer (for as far as I can judge on the - white - decal paper background, so I decided to try them, especially as the P-11c had characteristic dials, three with a burgundy red face, and one with a bright red background. I will probably end up using a bit of both on the decal sheet. To ensure an optimum contrast, I have prepainted the IP and radio in Tamiya rattle-can white primer. The dial faces have been covered with kabuki mask paper punched with my old (trusty and rusty) Punch n' Die set, before spraying everything in almost-black dark grey. Btw, Yahu offers a much improved compass but it is also unbelievably fiddly. The jury is still out whether I will use it. On the other hand, I will most certainly use the paper belts, as opposed to the kits's PE ones. And a last pic to loop back to the first post : the assembled Cooper State Models step ladder, that will allow peering eyes to look at the pilot's office . With safety rails added, of course . That's all for now. I will probably splash some paint on all these parts during the course of next week. Hubert

I'll play as well. Here is me, this morning, courtesy of the Mac's Photo booth. Proof that I am a (wannabe) modeller is behinf me, with the bench ... And to prove further that I am a modeller, the same, with the permanently screwed-on Optivisor ... Hubert

For a built model, Tom Probert built a 1/32 ID vac. Probably visible here or on LSP. As for the build and the end result, this is a perfect illustration of the famous sow’s ear and silk purse story Hubert

A,d another stunning build finished in record time ! Hubert

Being worked on by the same guy who also produced a resin 1/32 Buccanneer .... A vey brave move indeed. The Gannet is an incredibly big aircraft. When standing next to (well, « under » is an apter description) it, I felt really dwarfed. And that wing looked so thick ... It has the ungainly charm of the post-WWII British aerospace industry products. I actually quite like it, which means I must be twisted somewhere ... BUT, why go for the ugliest version, the AEW one, when the ASW was more interesting IMHO ? Well you can’t please everyone all the time, I guess. I’ll let the die-hard British contingent support the initiative, and focus my cash on other unloved aircrafts . Hubert

OK, guys, after sifting through the stash and the duplicates, I came up with an idea which may please many even more than a kit ... So ... I will also donate a fully functional Silhouette Cameo cutting plotter with a spare cutting mat and a spare blade. Ideal for cutting masks and many other projects. Ho, Ho, Ho ... Hubert

I remember a heavy snow fall in the early 80’ on Strasbourg, where I was leaving at the time. A number of my then colleagues lived on the countryside, and had to have the local farmer’s tractor to get their out of thick snowdrifts... until the tractor was stuck itself. In came a Niva who got the tractor out of trouble . Hubert

I’m in as well, as a giver and receiver. I’ll donate a Valiant Wings « Airframe Album », #4 on the Westland Whirlwind (the twin-engine WWII fighter, not the monstrosity with a rotating egg-beater on the top) and a Mushroom book of the yellow series on the A5M Claude. i will also most likely add a kit, but let me have a look at the stash first. Hubert

Looking forward to see your build of this one. It is actually a nice kit, that got shadowed at its launch by the simultaneously-released Tamiya kit. It deserves more attention and praise than it got (and I have one in the stash, that has the bonus of different canopies and props, so easier to make a racer out of it). Hubert

Well, I'm back at it, after an incredibly long hiatus (during which I got a new house finished, moved and settled into it, reset the workbench, and focused on weathering-out the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on my business ... so I was busy, sort of, but not on the modelling scene). So back at it in earnest . I have to say the kit is beautiful, with a level of detail that suits my super-detailing syndrome ... but, in fairness I find it unbelievably fiddly sometimes, with vague instructions when it comes to where the (small) parts go exactly, tiny - well even tinier than that - gluing points, where faith is sometimes stronger than anything else to ensure a proper gluing, and the use of tiny PE parts to be folded and glued onto plastic, my definite nemesis ... 1) The wheel spats. The key of this build is to convert it the 1934 Paris Air Show prototype, with wheel spats. Until I was sure I could do those, I was going for a reversible procedure to produce the fairing that wraps around the lower LG legs, where they meet the spats themeselves. Problem is this entalied many trails and errors, and cutout in a middle of a laminated plastic pat, which itself needed some reshaping - at least that's how I felt about it, knowing my references are base on some blurry pics of the P-24 spats. So, I took the plunge and went for a permament mod. No turning back !. The legs are set at a 40° angle to the spats. I shaved 1/2 mm of their end at the wing level; checking I kept the angle correct, than glued a 0.5 mm piece of card cut in the wanted shape for the fairing. Once the joint was fully cured, I built up the shape using Milliput, then filed and sanded the rough to obatin a smooth shape. Sorry, I have not documented the whole process, but that's the end result : And with the finished spats : The main hurdle in this conversion is overcome ! 2) The cockpit IBG's rendition is beautiful, but this is also where the "fiddliness" hits home ... For instance the seat is built using some folded PE frames. But there is no indication of the proper angle between the pan and the back rest, no indication of the angle at which the the lower part that sports the trim-wheel whould be glued to the pan, no proper location points of where the PE frame shoudl be glue to the back-rest and the pan ! You have been warned ! FYI, the seat attaches to the cockpit frame at 2 faintly marked locations, by the axle of the trim-wheel at the bottom, and the end of a plastic tubular part at the top of the backrest. After a few unsuccessfull attempts, the light came to my blurred brain : use a template. So, the distance between the two gluing points on the cockpit frame is 12 mm. After I drilled two holes 12 mm apart in a piece of spare plastic card, I could at last assemble the seat in a way that it will later fit the cockpit ! This is how it looks when in place (and just after that it became unglued - which proved to be a blessing for some additional detailing, to see below) : On this pic, you can also see two more details which needed rework : the control column and the rudder pedals. The rudder pedal is one-piece affair that attaches to the cockpit frame by the same tiny, imprecise gluing points. Needless to say it came loose more than once . When the time to pack everything for the house-move came, the rudder pedal part was clipped in the a "third-hand" crocodile-clip, upside down, while I tried to have it stick at the proper angle to the lower transverse frame of the cokpit which I had cut off for an easier gluing of the rudder pedals to it. Last thing I know they are probably still somewhere in the cavernous hold of the moving truck. They are definitely MIA on my bench ! So I had to redo them from scratch using as a reference the drawings from my old "Plany Modlearskie" issue on the P-11. Again, no in-progress pics, but this is how the new rudder bar looks when n place : The control stick attaches to a tiny two-part PE frame that needs to be folded twice at opposite abgles, then attached to small imprecise blobs on the main cockpit frame, whilst in the same time being glued to a bar that passes below the seat. It is an excellent scale representation of the original layout, but it is a bit ... fiddly (did I mention that I find the kit fiddly at times ? ). Anyway, the folded parts did nor resist the numerous fitting manipulations, as, on top of it, I chose to redo the control bar with a brass rod that was rounder and more rigid than the molded plastic part. So I dedid the articulation part using some brass strip cut from the sides of the kit-supplied PE sheet. The four holes are not really regularly drilled-out compared to the original part, but ir will not be visible anyway in the finished cockpit. I decided to position the levators in the "full down" position, and set the control stick full forward in consequence. I have also added a small PE part that I scratched to represent the attachment point for the gun control cables (here are two guns but three cables - I do not know what the use of the third cable was). The control cables themselves are 0.3 mm lead wires, inserted in tiny 0.5 mm tubes, glued together, and attached at the extremity of the scratched brass piece on the control stick. (And this from the same guy who is complaining about the fiddliness of the IBG details !) And attached to the control stick: Whilst we are talking of my contradictions, let's talk about the pump on the right side of the cockpit. I am not sure if this a priming pump or some kind of hydraulic or tank pressurising pump, more likely the latter ? Anyway it is represented by IBG with the hand shaft of the pump in the "down" position, and with a blob supposed to represent what is in reality a hollow handle. My reference pics show the shaft extended in the "up" position which I find more interesting. So I decided to mod the pump with a new shaft and handle , like this (the squares on my mat are 10x10 mm) : Now remind me who was complaining about the kit being a bit fiddly ? And a last detail I added when the seat became unglued once again. The trim wheel drives a chain that turns a screw in the end of the fuselage to move the stabiliser up or down. The chain has not been represented, not even in PE, by IBG. Whilst I was pondering whether to represent the chain I came with an idea that in the end, IMO, produces a satisfactory fac-simile ... I wound together three strands of fine (0.25 mm) copper wire that I get from an old electric motor, then flattened this cable in my bench vise. This is how it looks when flattened : ...then bent in the shape of the chain : ... and finally glued to the trim wheel on the side of the seat . Tha's all for now. I will soon have to end procrastinating, and get the airbrush out to splash some paint on the assembled cockpit. Hubert.

I am not saying there is no resin plug on some parts, but Lukgraph kits are not like HPH ones. They are more in the league of Fisher and Silver Wings, i.e. among the best ones. Hubert

They have a metal rod insert. Hubert

The F-105 (with AM) is - was - one of ultimate fantasy kits. Reason, especially considering my current output, led me to let someone else pick up the challenge . Go for it Fran ! Hubert

As my avatar pic shows, I cannot envision sitting on my bench without my Optivisor screwed on now (and the refracted light draws an elegant mustache on my - handsome, of course - face on top of it ). Go for it, you’ll see a big difference, literally. Hubert

Cool car in 1:1. I always wished I had something like this ( or maybe slightly heavier like a Leclerc, Abrams or Leopard ) to hold at bay those pesky two-wheelers in Paris traffic ... As this would not be allowed ( did I fantasize about the squiiishhh of one or two Vespas under the tracks ! ), I have resolved to plan B, i.e. avoid driving in and around Paris Very nice work on the kit, btw Hubert

Harv, you should also check brengun.cz site. They have some 1/32 Japanese fighters’ wheels. And a reputable name in AM for targets ... Hubert

Yes, Gaz, of course. The Tiger Moth ! Hubert