ScottsGT

Power company is finally getting around to swapping out the power pole in front of my home today. Wife was teasing me because no lights to work by. She forgot about the Milwaukee M18 converter she bought me for Christmas’22.

Went to order paint for the newest build on the bench and of course Sprue was completely out of RLM 02. Scratch that…back to USAGundam for the paint. (Slow to ship, but they have it ). RLM 02 is like the primer, base color coat for everything German. Ugh…either Luftwaffe is very popular right now or someone forgot to stock up!

Well, this is the plan at this point at least.

And side two done!

And it works!!! These are the two piece hubs that lock together during construction. Using my painful twist drill I poked a hole through both. I then cut off the ends that go into the end of the brass legs. This is the hubs held in place how they will be glued after painting. The wheels will still roll freely after it’s built so I can practice my touch and go’s! Music wire glued to one end of the cut off axle. Slightly started. Pushed in a little further, but not all the way. Once painted, I’ll assemble and glue on the other cut off axle into the other side.

Thought more about it after reading your post. I’m going to do a “hybrid” of our ideas. Cannot really drill it out to the actual size axle needed, but I can drill it out for a piece of .030 music wire and still use the ends I cut off. Thanks for the idea!

Oh, well. Excuse me. La-tee-dah.

I honestly have no idea. I bought it because all their stuff has been pretty good for me. 🤣 I think GT Resin has one but their QC has been very spotty over the past few years. I’d rather not chance it. There have been some fitting complaints even for the Rhino online. Something about the cast in lower part of the fuselage you cut out is too narrow. My thought was to grind this area off the resin intake and make it fit inside the fuselage.

Postman dropped this off today. It popped up on LSP last week and I jumped on it. Yea, I think I paid about $10-$15 too much, but Rhino is long gone. So pay the price!

I also fiddled around with the G Factor legs. Short of bending these things wide open and hoping they don’t break or not bend back correctly, I cannot figure out how to use them without just cutting off the wheels axles and gluing them back on down inside the brass. And honestly, I just came up with that idea as I was putting this on paper.

Spent today assembling some of the larger sub assemblies. Probably be a week before I get my paint order in so I want to progress as much as I can. This was four sprue trees cleaned out. .

Yea, very old! Were talking 48 years ago. 😳

Ok. So far this is an interesting experience. As most kits, it starts out with the cockpit build. I’m getting a real steampunk vibe off the cockpit. I’ve gone about as far as I can without painting. Speaking of paint, made up my shopping list and went to my usual place, Sprue Brothers. Of all the colors for them to be out of, RLM 2. That Germany’s “interior green” primer and corrosion control paint color. Back to USAGundam since they’re a retailer of Gunze paint. This little detail caught me off guard with this kit. Bulkhead at cockpit is made up of three parts. What appears to be an outer panel with circuit breakers is to be glued directly to main bulkhead. They even have an outline of where it goes. Problem is, it doesn’t fit the outline. I had to sand it off to get the panel to fit the bulkhead. instructions pic: After I will add, I do like how there are 4 pages of parts call outs for every part in the kit. What I’m finding frustrating is that there is no order or rhyme or reason as to the parts layout on the sprues. I think the cockpit alone was scattered on 5 or 6 different sprues.

Priceless. I honestly have no idea, and really don’t want to know. Gave my wife the phone number to Squadron if I die since he resells collections and is a few hours away in Atlanta. Told her to tell them to just come get it all and send her a check if he feels he can make money after expenses. Otherwise, the county dumpsters are at the end of my street 5 miles down the road and I know that’s where they would end up.

Love the subject. I built that kit when I was an about 13. Always wanted another to do it right.

Wow. That looked like something out of a movie.

Well this is going to be fun! Been looking for the perfect excuse to rip off the shrink wrap and crack open the box. Just look at that huge fuselage! Off to read the instructions and sort through what paints I’ll be needing since I’ve switched over to lacquers since I’ve built anything with a swastika on it.

I built these loft shelves just to hold the stash from the move. Each box is numbered and I have a list I wrote up as I packed them for the move. Moving boxes are two deep on this shelf on the right. Smaller shelf, but holds 4 moving boxes full and then some stacked on top. There’s a lot more stacked on top now for some strange reason. 🤷🏻‍♂️ At the old house I had shelves with the stash on them. The wife thought this was just too much “clutter” to see.

I feel your pain. Our whole house is run off a heat pump winter and summer. Southern thing here since it rarely gets really cold. Are you running an additional heat source up there? We had a new unit installed back in September. When it dropped down below freezing and into the teens I noticed the heat pump was keeping up somewhat with the thermostat setting. Set at 69 degrees, only got down to 67 in the house. Last year it was 58 inside. Kicker was the power bill was $125 higher this year. My last system didn’t have auxiliary electric heat coils in the system, nor does my thermostats have the “emergency” heat setting that turns them on. I called my HVAC guy and asked if these have them and could they possibly be wired to come on with the hear. OOPS! He’s coming out next week to see if his guy wired them to turn on all the time. I’ll probably need a new thermostat for the upstairs where it really gets colder during the winter.

Okay, all kidding aside with a build from my nerd stash…. This is the perfect excuse for me to dig this one out of the stash just now. I’ve been looking for a reason ever since I scored it off Amazon for something like $40 a few years back. Good grief Charlie Brown…I had to shuffle moving boxes full of models around and up and down on the ladder to pull the moving box this was packed away in. Then I had to put them all away. 🤪 I also have the G-Factor brass gear for it as well. No ladder work, but a little digging to get to them in the morning. I bet y’all did nazi that coming, did ya??

You buy it for me and I’m in!

I’ve been sitting on wanting to build this for probably 15 years now. Figured I’m not getting any younger, so I started this on Dec. 1 last year. As usual, the build was a joy. This is Tamiya F4-J #4 for me, one being a B conversion. I still have 2 more in the stash. One is the Marine version I’ll probably build OOB. Other will be the VX-4 Bicentennial Eagle scheme. One of the major hurdles building a Blue Angels aircraft is the BA blue color. All the BAB colors from all the major suppliers is correct for very early builds like way back in the days of flying the Cougars. I bought every brand of paint in BAB I could find or anything close and started this project by patchwork painting an old 1/48 Phantom I used as a paint mule. My closest pick was Tamiya TS-15 blue. Of course Tamiya doesn’t offer a match of TS-15 in their LP lineup. Time to decant the spray bomb, and this is where the difficulty started. I tried airbrushing light coats building up, tried adding clear, tried adding leveling thinner, tried polishing after the paint dried. Nothing worked except hosing it on heavy and wet like it comes out of the spray can. No way I could have done this with my Iwata. Yea, I tried. I used the Grex with a fan attachment tip. Best results were painting heavy and wet, let it sit 48 hours then wet sand with 1200 grit and respray with two more heavy and wet coats. Cant wait to do that F-18 now! Yea, I know. I put the U.S.Navy decals about a 1/4” too low. Didn’t discover this until after the fact looking at the real airplanes on line. This is the second time I burned myself referring to the decal sheet and not looking at photos of the real thing.

This one showed up in the mail yesterday. Picked it up off LSP classifieds. I have the old Revell Stuka but always wanted the “tank buster” with the underwing cannons. Today I got my Hobby Zone building jig from Super Hobby in Poland. With the biplanes in the stash this should make things easier.