Time flies

I can't believe 4 weeks went by without any post. It's not that I've done nothing, but certainly not as much as I would've liked.

Where were we?

• The patriot radar truck was being painted.
• The Vipers had been painted and needed a coat of varnish.
• I had finished the photo-etch on the Panzerjäger.
• The Chinook was "finished" late september, but requires some light weathering.
• The castle hasn't been touched since november, when I did some experimenting with oil paints.

Do you feel the disadvantage of not being able to focus on one kit?

So, if I haven't done nothing the past month, what HAVE I been doing?

Patriot Radar

Painting was finished, the entire thing was varnished and decals have been applied. The building instructions only mention where to place 15-20 decals, but many more are provided on the decal sheet. I guess I went a little crazy creative.

Vipers

The Vipers both needed just a coat of varnish, before decaling. Because the Mark II is going to receive many big decals, I sanded the entire body extra smooth (Tamiya sanding paper, 1200-2000 grit) before I started with varnishing.

I've been experiencing issues with spraying the Alclad II varnishes lately, but if I thin it 50/50 with white spirit (or "mineral spirits") it sprays perfectly, more controlled and levels smoother. It does require at least 2 layers however.

The Mark II has been giving me troubles. First the paint lifted after I masked off the side engines. Then when everything was smooth and done (again), I dropped a big blob of glue on it when attaching the nose gear. Some harsh words could have been heard ...

Panzerjäger

With the photo-etch done, I primed it black, added a layer of chipping fluid, then the sand-coloured basecoat. I'm doing both the plastic and PE version to see if all the extra PE- trouble is really worth it in the end.

Chinook

I finally convinced myself to finish the Chinook. I started with a very fine layer of AK dust effects, because I want to make the black and red less "in your face". The dust managed to creep under some of the decals, distorting the intended effect somewhat. I'll add another layer of matte varnish, then do some darkening aft of the exhausts. (and also some dust over the rotor blades)

Also some light dust effects on the Patriot truck, if you can spot it, near the bottom of the side thingies (fuel tanks?).

Photo-etch - Part 3

One of the advantages (or maybe disadvantages?) of having a blog, is that you can retrace your progress, or lack thereof. Turns out I haven't seen the airbrush in at least 2 months. My head is full of ideas on how to proceed on multiple ongoing projects, but somehow I'm stuck in the idea phase and not actually doing anything. I should add procrastination as a major skill.

I attached the last PE parts that required soldering and am now slowly adding all the minute details with CA glue. I clearly have a misconception on how long it takes for CA glue to cure. "Mere seconds" - as is described on the bottle - should be interpreted as "several minutes". I just made it a new habit to browse the web or catch up on mail and Facebook after attaching a part, so I do not mess things up because it's still wet.

Below the as-good-as-final result, next to the plastic version.

If I say tiny, I mean TINY!

There are 20 large rivets and 60 little ones. They are supposed to go over all the indentations in the larger PE-parts, but I think I'll only place the large ones. (The smalle ones are all on the inside of the ring anyway, so much less visible.

Picking up small PE-parts (or plastic ones for that matter) is a hassle. If you dare to use tweezers, they are bound to fly away, never to be seen again. A wet finger seems to be the general way modellers pick up the tiniest parts, but I wanted to try something else.

I've read about these little sticks with low-tack surface for exactly this purpose, but it seems like a waste of money. I tried making one myself by cutting the point of a cocktail stick and dipping it in Humbrol Maskoll (or any other latex-based product). Repeat after 5 minutes and again and again until it looks like a teardrop. It's tacky enough to pick up small PE parts, but not too much, so you can position the picked up part into a small drop of glue on it's intended destination.

Photo-etch soldering - Part 2

Last february, I did my very first attempt at soldering photo-etch parts on some scrap photo-etch. I reported that it was fairly easy and that I would "experiment more later and report my findings".

Well, 9 months definitely counts as "later" as we go into round 2 of the experiment. I decided to up the ante and go from scrap to actual photo-etch parts. Nothing like actual, ruined-of-you-mess-up parts to raise the stress levels a bit.

Finally time to break out the photo-etch bending tool that's been sitting on my desk for over a year. I must say, this tool is fantastic and provides precise and controlled bends. It was a bit pricey, but cheaper alternatives are available, for as low as €15.

The soldering itself is a technique to be practiced a lot, so it should go better the more I do it.
Not all photo-etch parts require this. In fact, more often than not, the photo-etch for your model kit wil be stand-alone pieces, to be bent and attached to the plastic model with CA glue. This kit, however, has an entire photo-etch assembly, consisting of over 50 parts, which stand to benefit greatly from the super-strong bond that soldering provides. It ain't always easy though ...

Below are a few pictures of the result of about 3 hours trial and error, swearing and rejoicing. I assembled the plastic counterpart in a few minutes and used it to check positioning and get the curve right for some of the larger parts. Just like any other new technique, there's a learning curve to this. Not burning your fingers, was a quick, easy lesson.
The larger parts are actually rather easy to join. The fact that the bond is strong as soon as you withdraw the iron is almost amazing. The smallest details however really tested the limit of my patience.

In the second picture below, you can see the 4 tiny hinges with which the panels are connected to eachother. Each is about 1 by 3 mm (roughly 3/64" by 1/8" unless my math is off) and a real pain to handle, let alone attach. I must have attached and removed them at least 10 times, before giving up and resorting to CA glue. When that ALSO failed to succesfully bond the parts, I considered leaving them off, but I pushed through with a last attempt to solder them and in the end settled for a mediocre result.

I punched 2 holes through the front part (with a hammer and a small nail), which should line up with the larger damage on the turret. It's basically 2 places where the paint chipping got out of hand because I used too much chipping fluid and too much water (another technique I'm just starting to get the hang of). I'm hoping the holes in the armour will create the illusion of several hard hits and look realistic.
Another advantage of photo-etch thus seems to be it's easier to make it look like damage metal, because it IS metal.

The thing I'm really looking forward to is getting both the plastic and photo-etch parts primed and painted. The paint should hide all the discoloration and scratches (from filing away excess tin). The whole idea of this longer-than-intended experiment is to see if all that trouble is worth it in the end. Will that photo-etch assembly look better than the plastic one or only marginally so?

Next time I will attach both pieces together. Again this requires 4 hinges, so wish me (and my fickle nerves) a lot of luck.

Free-hand airbrushing - hit and miss

Ever since I started airbrushing (a year and a half ago), my ambition was to try free-hand camouflage. My first airbrush (Revell) was not suitable for this, so I kept masking with silly putty and getting good results. It kept nagging at me though. Now that I have an Aztec, airbrush control has greatly improved, so I really wanted to try it again.

The trick to free-hand airbrushing is to set the pressure really low, get the tip of the airbrush really close to the model and go very slow. This has proven rather easy for post-shading panel centers in a lighter colour, but that's always with slightly lighter paint than the base coat, so overspray is invisible and you keep adding until the result is satisfying.


Camouflage colours tend to contrast highly with the base coat, and the overspray is very visible. I already demonstrated this last time, when I did the turret.

This time, I tried to go even slower and though I'd best achieve that by thinning the heck out of the paint. Basically I filled the airbrush with thinner and added 1 drop of brown paint. I experimented with thinner (both the old and new Vallejo thinner) but ended up settling for the matt varnish, which seemed less likely to make the paint too runny and create those beautiful spiders we all hate to see on our models.

Initial results where promising : because the paint is so thin, overspray is far less visible. You have to go over the same spot a dozen times, but it does feel more "in control".

The difficult part now is to find the sweet spot between "thin enough" and "not too thin". The airbrush is finicky and will occasionally stop spraying. The instinct to pull the trigger back further is hard to resist, because when you do and the paint starts flowing again, it will be too much and then you get the aforementioned spiders.

I ended up respraying the entire thing again with the base coat. I'll try again ... later.

Purely as an experiment, I have succeeded and made some clear progress, but again I find myself struggling to find the balance between all those different variables that make airbrushing not always as easy as you'd like.

Panzerjäger - Major SNAFU

The idea was to paint the entire model in "German grey", then use the "hairspray technique" with AK's chipping fluid (as I did earlier with the M48's scissor bridge), go over with the sand-coloured base and green/brown camouflage, then start (gently) chipping away.

HOWEVER ....

1. The chipping fluid was spraying iffy today. It sprayed on very weird, widely known as "orange peel"-effect.
2. Free-hand airbrushing, even with the finest nozzle my Aztec has, still gives an insane amount of overspray.

Let's address this last one first. I used the paint unthinned and dialled the pressure to the absolute minimum of around 7-8 psi. With the finest nozzle, I brought the airbrush in really close (about 1-2 cm). I could draw a relatively fine line on a piece of paper, but on the actual model it was rather difficult to 1) keep the paint flowing and 2) draw a line or curve at the same time. 

On the model, there is overspray AND the paint tends to run away. I can only guess that on paper it's easier, because paper absorbs some of the moisture, whereas a hard surface will produce spatters (albeit very small ones). This close up, the pressure seems still too high, as the paint runs away in tiny little spiders, but I can't get it lower than this. The only thing to do is move the airbrush further away, but can you guess what that does for the overspray? Correct!

Anyway, below is the result of my first free-hand camouflage airbrushing session. I'm not sure which parameter to play with to make it better. The green is okay-ish, but the darker the colour, the more obvious the overspray becomes.

On to issue number two. Compared to last time, the chipping fluid wouldn't spray very well, resulting in it going on the model way too heavily. I used 4 different nozzles, but couldn't find an acceptable way of spraying it. I'm guessing I'll need to do something to the fluid itself, i.e. thinning it.
I only realized how heavy the "hairspray" layer was until I started chipping. As soon as the surface became too wet, the paint started to wrinkle. When poked with a brush, the entire layer of paint came off like a snake shedding it's skin.

That's not chipping, but STRIPPING!

On the basket, it's easy enough to remove all the paint and start over, but on the turret I did not fancy doing that, with all those tiny pieces attached. So, I bit the bullet and very carefully chipped away some of the paint. Less is more, when it comes to the amount of water you're using.

The result is .... meh, good if you want to show how this chipping stuff works, but also illustrates it's easy to go overboard with it. I don't want to redo the turret, so this is how it'll be.

I had already sprayed the entire kit with the chipping fluid, but only painted the turret and basket. Seeing the results, I think I'll just give the entire kit a nice bath to remove the chipping fluid and start over, but more carefully.

Panzerjäger - WIP

Some more progress on the Panzerjäger's turret, which is just a regular Panzer IV turret. The interior colour is a yellowy-creamy colour. Since I try to stick to Vallejo Model Air, I just had to guess what would be appropriate from the online colour chart, which is not really the best way to go about this. I had to choose between Yellow Lazure ("ivory") and broken-white, and went for the first option.
It arrived a few days ago, so off to the workbench we go.

Straight out of the bottle, it's a bit too yellow, so after half the parts were done I added an equal amount of white to tone it down. I ended up going over it again with a misted layer of white. The result is good enough.

The track piece is almost done. Weathering went on a bit too heavy, but a layer of varnish will dull it down a little. Time to assemble the whole piece. The crossbeam part (wood) fits underneath the trackbed (rock) and the rails slide into the metal thingies on every wooden beam. The fit is really tight, especialy with multiple layers of paint, so I wasn't surprised to be scraping off a lot of the metal paint off the rail again.

Once all the rails were in place, a few more pieces (to keep the rails together) are needed. Out come the trusty clamps.

Now all the turret pieces are painted, and slightly weathered by dry-brushing with "German grey", I can continue it's assembly. I seem to have forgotten to paint and place part B56, so it'll take a day longer to close it all up.

If you want to gun to move up and down, it's best to NOT place part B40. On the REAL tank, skipping this piece will result in the gun not elevating, but in the scale model this small gear provides enough friction to hinder fluent movement of the gun.

The rail is completely done, the scratched off paint is touched up, so at least this piece is finished. While writing this post, I notice I forgot to touch up the outside border, but that'll be a quick fix.

Next step : closing the turret, masking off the interior and 3 layers of AK "Worn effects". After that I can start the sand-yellow base coat and green/brown camouflage. I'll be attempting to airbrush this camo free-hand. Wish me luck!

Panzerjäger - closing the hull

I have attached the wheel wells to the inside of the lower hull, but had to do it in 2 steps. I glued the left ones in place, clamped up and reinforced with tape. A day later I did the right side. Its not that the fit is bad per se, but the parts need some persuasion to keep in their proper place.

It gives the model a very sturdy structure, which translates again into issues when joining the lower and upper halves. I would have needed a bench vice to get the parts to sit flush, but had to make do with what I could find.

The result is as good as it's gonna get. Some obvious gaping seams were filled with putty and are now left to dry.

Panzerjäger - Further construction

A motor tool again comes in handy, as we need to drill holes in the rear buffers, to attach the lights. I'm looking for references to see if electrical conduits are neede for these. I'm trying to go a step further in detail finishing my models.

The front "blade" fits near perfectly, with very little persuasion.

The amount of detail is very nice. There's little to no flash, and if there is, it's easily removed. Go sparingly on the glue. Once again, I recommend Tamiya extra thin. You require very little of it and with the brush applicator provided in the lid, the glue goes only where you want it.

I sprayed the wheels with Natural Steel, then several shades of reddish brown - which I may have slightly overdone - except on the running surface. Then a layer of Dark Earth pigment to make it look more convincingly used.

The turret has a nice amount of fiddly bits. I really like fiddly bits. There's something soothing about attaching a lot of little pieces.

The gun is very nicely detailed. The entire turret will be removable, so some care needs to be taken to the inside looks. I'm trying to get my head wrapped around how far I can assemble before needing to paint. I'd also really like to keep the movable parts movable THIS time. (The gun is supposed to elevate)
Overall fit of all pieces so far is excellent, ejector marks are cleverly located in invisible places.

Here are the wheel wells and wheels, fully painted, weathered and assembled, ready to be placed inside the chassis. Invisible when the train is standing on the rails, but it will be nice when you pick it up for a look inside.

 22 wooden beams times 2 metal braces each to hold the rails equals a whole lot of masking fun.

The base is sprayed Dark Sea Green (my favourite "rock" colour).

My new soldering iron should arrive any day now. I'm anxious to get started on the photo-etch. Stay tuned!