Luft46's Blog

Moving along with this yesterday I now have the underside done along with some light weathering via some dark earth dust from Flory Models. I will probably paint the petrol drums in the dark yellow from xtracrylics soon as well as some oil stains around the engine area. As you can see the steering wheel and front seat have fallen off again but as shown in the photo below i now have the walls on the cabin and am up to stage 11 of 13 so the end is in sight.

No major problems so far , just following the instructions. Minor problem is the back windows which seem too big and need the gap enlarging.

I’ve been working on bits of this kit today. Lots of different steps that will eventually be pulled together. Sometimes with kits there is just not enough to do without approaching a kit in this manner. I find trucks in 7 2nd scale are often quite fiddly to assemble the frame etc and require a lot of messing around to get the wheels to sit properly anyway. I have left the stair treads off until later so I only knock them off a half a dozen times before I finish. 

Finished the first run of painting and now onto assembly. This is most of stage 1 out of 13. No problems encountered so far.

More painting work today. To the right of the picture are the tyres. These have been painted after some sanding with a hand mixed combination of Citadel Adeptus Battlegrey and their Abaddon Black. I have this premixed for painting aircraft tyres and this should go a long way. The seats have had their first coat of a light brown Humbrol acrylic which has no name and is so old you would be unable to find it anyway. The leaf springs have had a quick wash of black and await fitting. The exhaust after being painted black last night has had some Mig rust pigment mixed with Future applied. The only other piece of work was to find some diamond tread for the steps and this will be applied tomorrow. Back tomorrow.

For this kit I decided to do whatever prepainting I could which I find useful when doing trucks along with a little internet research. So far the underside frame parts are mostly in black and the interior is in the exterior color except for some detail parts like the steering wheel and gears and seats which all have an initial coat of black. The tyres all have a slight mould mismatch which is very common so these will need a quick cleanup before painting.  The exhaust will receive some Mig rust pigment and the underside will have some Florymodels.co.uk Dark dirt added also. Paints used are my usual mixture of various brands – xtracrylics dunkelgelb,  citadel abaddon black and skull white.

After rather a long break in which the bench was cleaned and tidied its back to building something. Unfortunately the Helldiver didn’t make it past the tidy up so its now sitting in a box below my bench.
The Hanomag was used on Luftwaffe airfields as well as for hauling V-2’s on Meillerwagens. This is a Special Hobby kit in 1/72 nd scale. Unlike cheaper brands like Ace, the glazing is in clear plastic rather than do it yourself templates. From experience this does make a difference.
I will be starting this tomorrow night hopefully.
A Melbourne show special will follow soon.

Every once in a while ie not very often I feel the need to clean my workspace, such an event is currently happening.  Currently all my workbench crap is residing on a big table – see below

What this means is a bit of a reorganisation of my stuff. This and other personal stuff is why I am behind in posting so there may be a bit of a flood in the next few days. While Iwas absent from the desktop I made it to the Wollongong model Show ( Australia) and photos of that will follow.
Ran into one guy and he said he modelled one hour every day before work, I admired his dedication but my schedule is way more random than that and prey to many external factors not least the mood I am in. He said modelling always relaxed him but i find that unless I am a bit relaxed and in the mood that it is a disaster. If you are starting to get frustrated or making lots of mistakes then it is time to walk away from the modelling bench as bad things inevitably happen otherwise.

Talking of bad things this blog is written on an Asus TF700 tablet and all photos are taken with its camera  – unfortunately 3 weeks ago I dropped it on a tile floor with one corner gaping wide open and the screen cracked in many places. It will  probably be replaced by a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro but as long as it can keep going i will persist with it. There have been a couple of hiccups where it has locked into an endless Restart cycle but rebooting has fixed this so far. And no gaffer tape will not fix it, that was the cause of the restart cycle on one occasion.

No major drama with this so far though the dive brakes etc look like being a challenge.

Somehow I missed uploading this lot of pictures. This was a very quick project done from a random idea. Most of you know of the mythical creature called the ” Carpet Monster ” – he who eats lost model parts. Well the Putty Hog is a cousin. He is the creature that turns model kits into Putty Hogs , of course the Matchbox trench digger helps out too. The total parts list is an old Frog 1/72 FW 190D-9, a hog figure from Disney from that despicable ripoff of the Japanese 70’s cartoon Kimba the White Lion ( and to avoid lawyers I will not name it),  a used Tamiya  putty tube from a friend and putty hog poo  made from Milliput, Tamiya putty and Citadel green stuff. The only real modelling done was to paint an appropriate hole at the rear of the hog on my wife’s suggestion that it didn’t appear real otherwise.