Luft46's Blog

Regular readers ( if there are any ) will remember my first post was of the Cupboard of Doom. Indiana Jones like I decided to finally assault this Cupboard. Over the last year or so various expeditions had been made to rescue the odd kit and do some work on it but none of these expeditions had  resulted in a finished kit so last week I decided to get serious. I have so far hauled out about half of them so here is a quick list with photos

IL2 – Academy, ok this one suffered from some major problems in the air filter which is crap and a couple of other areas, additionally it is the single seater and I love the 2 seater in memory of doing the Airfix one as a kid. The final thing that killed this kit off was the announcement that Tamiya will do a 1/72 two seater this year and I would much rather that one. End result – airbrush practice bed.

Tornado – Mando Models – a resin boat powered by a V-1 engine that has given me no end of grief, especially the pylons and strakes on the rear of the boat constantly falling off. Compound that with trying to use Lifecolor paints through an airbrush and having no end of problems with that and this kit has struggled for a long while. I have now settled on a paint scheme of Tamiya undercoat for the bottom and Xtracrylics RLM 66 for the top, not necessarily correct but as it is K46 who can argue. This makes this kit doable now.

262 Schnellbomber – a combo of the Hase kit and the ARBA Schnellbomber conversion. This is a relatively easy conversion and there is no real good reason this kit hasnt been finished apart from my usual reluctance to airbrush which can be a deal breaker. Anyway this kit should get finished now.

Germanified Shinden – no reason not to finish, just needs painting

E

Entwurf 3 from Planet – This just required a little work around the engine and the cockpit and it is now ready for primer after I fit the canopy.

Ar E 377 and He 162D – this is the Dragon kit with the addition of the  ? Cooper Details conversion for the Forward Swept Wing and HeS011 engine. This is all ready to paint also though somhow the trolley has gone missing but not the wheels, I suspect it will turn up in another box soon. I will paint the rest anyway.

Panzer Draisine from Planet, yet another resin kit. This was mostly ready except for the gun and brass details. I had to replace the gun from my spares box as the other one was claimed by the carpet monster. Also I will add in some machine guns to better represent it in a ready to go position rather than a resting one.

Anyway time for a break so back soon with Part 2

As mentioned in Part 1 this is the reviews for the pocket mags app.

Usually I buy around one or two magazines a month, this month it was three, two of which are unusal for me.

Military Illustrated Modeller is Brett Greens and Marcus Nicholls  effort that deals alternately each month with Aviation and Armour Subjects. Its now up to Issue Twenty and this is the first that I have purchased, generally I have struggled to find even one article of interest in each edition. This issue was a winner  with two articles on the Biber being a build and a diorama article, with the bonus being sixteen photos that were new to me . Many of the other articles except the Euro Militaire photos were of minor interest to me and I suspect it may be another twenty issues before my next purchase. Unusually this magazine is perfect bound with thicker than average paper and cover. I am not a great fan of either editor but having eighteen pages on the Biber was always going to suck me in.

Speaking of Marcus I picked up a copy of Tamiya Model Magazine mostly for the review of the Meng Kayaba kit. This magazine is one of the last generalist titles out there with the demise of Military in Scale which got quite schizophrenic in how it was treating Aviation subjects with adding this then splitting it off to a seperate magazine then reincorporating it again. The only other major generalist magazine is of course  Fine Scale Modeller which is a mere shadow of its former glory and so much more dumbed down. I picked up a copy of that in Thailand when there last month as it was the only modelling magazine available.
With Tamiya magazine you can always guarrantee a car or motor bike at the front to start the fun which I usually skip over. Seven pages were devoted to the Meng review and this seems quite thorough. The new releases section while not big does cover a reasonable range and the final item of interest was Spencer Pollard the former editor of Military in Scale joining this magazine. Reading the back section I noticed that Brett Green would be doing a build of the Simca 5 by Tamiya in Model Military International, funnily enough the same kit done by Marcus Nicholls in the Tamiya Magazine, Tamiya sem to be getting their moneys worth from this publishing group or is that me being cynical. Also Spencer gets an interview in that same magazine, cross promoting in the Great Channel Nine tradition.

Scale Military Modeller International rounds out the collection. This is by far my favourite magazine for non aircraft modelling, whilst Gary Hatcher is the News editor he hasnt been allowed to mess around too much with the contents and screw it up. SAMI is also a magazine that has gone downhill recently. Whilst no great fan of Richard Franks and his obsession with Hasegawa releases the more “commercial” model that SAMI uses has seen the virtual demise of short reviews and the few given are shall we say sanitised in their wording, I used to know what to expect after reading a SAMI review, now I dont bother.
What is pleasing is how much content in the marketplace is shown under various areas and that the reviews are not too self serving.

Just a last word, you will notice the pocketmags.com logo in the bottom left of this cover, this is an app that allows (allegedly) you to be able to purchase the magazine on your tablet device. Having been in existence over a year it still is very flaky,  have tried it both on an iPad and a Samsung Galaxy and it works on neither, for a clue just check the apps ratings and comments, unfortunately both the publishers and pocket mags are in fervent denial of its present lack of usefulness, I really hope this changes in the future if only to be able to read what I have already paid for.

This is my old Czechmaster ME P1110, one of my first Luft46 kits,  its been languishing in the cupboard for a fair while after an accident, its been there so long i have lost an undercarriage door and other parts. As I am at a bit of a loss as to what to do next I will be fiddling around for at least today. Looking at I can see lots of things I would do different but this kit was finished at least 15 years ago.

This blog attempts to be reasonably honest and the muse has left the building. I managed to get one of the floats on the Okha eventually after a fair bit of maneouvring and only a few swear words. At this point the float was being held on by the forward strut only. I then offered up the rear strut for which holes were already drilled. This showed the rear strut as being a bit short so I looked at the plans. This quickly showed that the front strut would have to be shortened which kinda makes sense as the Okha is much smaller than the Jake that the floats come from, also the longer strut length just brings in more potential movement and need for strengthening. The end result is that more cutting and shunting is needed complicated by the fact that the struts at either end are enlarged to ensure better mating and strength of the joint. So its back in the box after some progress. I think the next project needs to be more doable!

The last floatplane I did was a 1/48 Rufe from Hase about 15 years ago, a very nice kit. I am not a big fan of floatplanes as they tend to be hard to get everything lined up and sturdy enough, older modellers will remember the Airfix™©® Arado 196 in 1/72 with not so good nostalgia. This project is certainly a degree harder with the need to do all the alignment myself. I am using small pins made from a hypodermic needle to do this along with a Lego™ box to help with alignment. The great adventure of putting this all together starts today now that I have the pins in. The front strut can be left on and mated to the wing but the rear strut must be cut off, pinned then reattached at a 45 odd degree angle to meet the fuselage.

Evidently in the coming year Thailands government intends to install thousands of routers for tourists and locals. I am not surprised by this at all.

After nearly three weeks in Thailand  the workbench is back in action. Project of the moment is the Okha floatplane. This is a supposed Okha mounted on a set of A13E1 “Jake” floats according to a book by Justo Miranda. Not really sure how realistic this is but am doing my best guess. The Okha is from the Hase Betty and Okha kit I bought back in 2011ish off eBay ™ ( on my lawyers advice I must include this 🙂  ), great to pay 40 odd bucks and discard 90% of the kit contents as there are no other plastic Okha’s out there. AV did do one in resin but that is harder to find than even the Hase version which is as rare as rocking horse shit.

The Betty went elsewhere for someone intending to mount other engines on it but I think that project is as dormant as this one was till yesterday. The rocket engines are from the MAC V-1 kits and three are needed. These were about the only rockets I could find in my stash that vaguely suit though they appear slightly small compared to the plans but I am not going to sweat over that one.

Due to mounting the dirty great big floats on such as small plane the rear supports have to be bent at about 45 degrees and my first earlier attempt at this was a failure causing the rear strut to break. This was actually why this project was stopped. On further consideration bending was never going to work so the other strut will be chopped of and remounted. Making this vaguely symmetrical on both sides looks like being a bitch but first I need to get the canopy test fitted.

Wifi – in Thailand this was available freely in more places than I could believe, to the point that one hotel we stayed at which was barely 3 star didnt even have a password as protection and many places had almost joke passwords such as the shop name 1234.
Many shops offered free wifi as an inducement to shop there obviously targeted at foreigners or farung. The only time we almost paid was at our last hotel in Bangkok which had obviously not caught up with the times and wanted 20 times what a local internet cafe was charging which we passed on.

I am off to thailand tomorrow for 18 days so very little will be posted in the intervening time. An indication is my mothballed workbench!