Luft46's Blog

Well there has been some progress recently. The Ar 234 has been through another PSR cycle and it looks like another small bit of work will at least show the main sub components are fixed. I will be throwing some more silver paint on shortly to check progress. I have also managed to resurrect my Natter kit and will be painting the etched brass exhaust components tonight in Model Master Exhaust. Tomorrow I hope to finish the windscreen area.
Also in the mail was an order from the UK. I got some slide fit metal tube from Albion Alloys as recommended by Nigel at Britmodeller on his Arado E555 build. These are quite amazing being tubes as small as 0.3mm that can fit inside a 0.5mm tube and going up to a 0.7 tube. This should make great gun cannons and pitot tubes. They are very fine and I look forward to trying them out soon. Also in this was 2 Dapol kits. The first is some people in OO/HO that may make it onto my Munchen48 diorama. Second is a OO/HO rail petrol tanker. This was bought as a just for fun model to practice a little weathering on, maybe some grafitti from that German firm whose name escapes me now, Utti Roschen or similar.

As a break from serious kits I have started this old clunker rescued from the crap pile at the Wollongong show last year. I passed on attending this year as it was somewhat lacklustre. Hopefully I will get there next year and it will be back to its usual variety.
I built this kit way back in my youth around 12 to 16 years old so in honour of that I am going mostly old school. I am not going to do much cleanup and finessing as it would be more like lipstick on a pig. I will probably airbrush and I’m using Milliput but tarting up will be kept to a minimum. I remember using the old technique of glue plus sprue as a filler then , back then this was a new technique, though I do recall it smelled and sometimes worked too well.
Attached below are some quick progress shots ending with where I am up to now, sanding off the first layer of Milliput. As it is all raised panel lines many of these will disappear but I am not going to try and fix this. The wheels are painted matt black tyres and gloss black inners as I did back in the day. I will be mostly following the instructions even down to colour choice. It is a pity I can’t use some of the horrendous Duck Egg blue shades from Airfix from those days but i switched from enamels years ago. I expect that my splinter camo won’t be quite authentic as in those days of brush painting the demarcation lines would be quite raised as the paint came up against the lovely thick masking tape I would have used.