Hi all,

I wonder if this may be a useful tip for some of you.

I've recently been tinkering with my airbrush, hoping to make more use of it and have been pondering the best way of mixing and pouring paints for this.  I have some syringes but they're a bit hit and miss and tend to stick after a couple of uses.  By chance, which is the way most of these things tend to happen with me, the tea light in the oil burner had run out and I noticed that the metal holder I was about to throw away wasn't perforated at the bottom.

I now use this as a palate for mixing small amounts of paint for touching up and weathering, and for thinning paint for airbrushing.  It can be pinched into a spout for pouring into the airbrush too which reduces the chance of spillage. 

It's robust enough to be scrubbed clean with a cocktail stick or dental brush and can be used over and over.  When it does wear out, I have plenty more tea lights on standby.
 

As tomorrow is St George's Day, the Government will be suspending the 2 metre social distancing rule for 24 hours;  instead, people will be required to remain 6 feet 6 3/4 inches apart.  Additionally, the advice to "Stay Home" is to be replaced with the rather more English sounding "Stay At Home". HoHoHo (sorry MSea, had to be done).

Happy 23rd of April everyone - enjoy the day and keep well :-)

Evening all.  Quite a few years ago, I completed what was my best model to date - the 1/72 Revell Lavochkin LA5 FN.  I was pretty chuffed with it and displayed it at the Hull Veterans' Support Centre Model Show.  On the way back and due wholly to me being a complete biff in stacking my models very poorly on the front seat of the car, one of my other models, a rather cumbersome Churchill Crocodile diorama, fell on top of it and squashed it.

I put it away and told myself that I would one day repair it and restore it to its' former glory and I eventually got brave enough to try.  Sadly, a couple of bits were beyond repair and the tail wheel had gone astray so I decided that instead I would have to get even braver and damage it deliberately some more and turn it into a crashed aircraft.  I sourced a Soviet pilot from CMK Resins, a Gaz-42 truck from a company called Military Wheels (Hannants list them as Model Wheels) and some ground crew figures from Zvezda and got to work.  I haven't got many pictures but Have included a couple of the original LA5 and some of the diorama to date.

The truck is a real pig with soft plastic, not very snug fitting parts, no locating pins or holes and vague instructions but I have made something of it.  I can always cover any imperfections with mud and rust!  The company actually do a decent range of 1/72 scale kits and I would buy more from them as it's a good test of modelling skills.

Now then,

apologies if you know already - I've been off the scene for a while so maybe be out of touch.

Was in Brid' yesterday and popped into Mighty Lancer and found out they will be moving to bigger premises again soon.  Don't know exactly where yet as the boss man was at a big gaming show in York and the Sunday lad wasn't sure but it's good news for them and the hobby as they have quite a few models in there now as well as being busy with the war-gaming.

See you next Wednesday then. 

Hello, remember me?

I'm back and building again - 1 kit done and 1 well on the way - in a month!  I would like to get active on the site once more but I've inherited a windows 10 machine and the old shrink pic software isn't compatible with it.  Any other '10 users out there and if so, can you recommend FREE compression software so I can get posting once more.

Cheers in advance,

Wizzel

Once again I return after a long absence with yet another project.  I know I have 2 or 3 part done things on here already and I WILL be dealing with them in due course but this one...well it may not strictly be modelling in the IPMS sense but it's still producing a scale depiction of something so I thought I'd share it and as there is a very strict timeframe, it WILL be finished in weeks rather than months.

My son has announced his intention to get married in March has asked DCOS and myself to do their cake.  Baking the thing is no great shakes as I'm a bit of a black belt at that.  Decorating also is something I've done a bit of and so covering and smoothing with icing, producing roses and other flowers and painting leaves etc with food colouring doesn't fill me with the same trepidation as filling and sanding  wing roots HOWEVER, this cake is to have 2 pairs of wellington boots on the top to pay homage to the "happy couple's" love of trudging around the countryside.  One pair would be burgundy and one pair navy.

After 2 weeks of comparing colour match samples from decorating shops and producing an acceptable match of each in sugar paste, DCOS and I had a bit of a friendly competition last weekend to see how easy or hard it would be to produce a welly.  She was keen to get something done immediately and went for the option of moulding one big lump of the pastes in the style of a potter producing a clay jug.  She made an acceptable Ugg boot but nothing resembling a welly at this stage.  I got my modelling head on and injected myself with a hefty dose of patience.  I decided that I would produce mine in more than one piece as I had had experience of some reasonably complex constructions for cakes I had done previously.  I sat, stared into space, drank a cup of tea, stared some more, drank another cup of tea and went to bed.  My thoughts are now gathered and so it's time to put my theory into practice.  Here goes.  The next thing I am going to say will be my theory.  I will produce the soles of the boots (piece number 1) and I will produce the actual boots themself (piece number 2).  I will then allow the pieces to set to a consistence that will allow me to handle them in a reasonably robust manner without them becoming distorted and then stick the boot onto the sole with edible glue, using my wax moulding tools to smooth the joins.

Because I want a hollow boot with a reasonable scale thickness, I decided to make a "former" out of balsa wood which will be varnished to seal it, given a smear of TREX to act as a release agent and build the sugar paste boot around that.  When virtually set, I can then take the balsa former out of the boot and do a bit of fine tuning and massage each one into the most realistic shape before fully set.  Now, because wellington boots are thick at one end, much much thinner in the middle and thick again at the far end, the design of the former needed some thought so that I would be able to pull it from the sugar paste boot without wrecking shape of it.  Once the former is built, I will cut in into 2 at the ankle, giving me a foot and a leg, then drill each cut end, glue a pin into the foot end and simply push the leg end onto the pin.  When I am ready to extract the former, I can pull each piece out separately - the leg from the top and the foot from the bottom.  This may mean drilling and gluing additional pins into the other end of each piece but I've a way to go before I get that far.

I'm going to have a go with white sugar paste first to see if my theory is sound before using the very carefully shaded coloured paste.

Tonight I've started work on the balsa former - I intend to make just the one as there is not enough difference in Left and Right welly to make it worth doing two formers.  I'll just shape the almost set boots as I glue them to the two soles which WILL have Left and Right shapes to them.  As my balsa blocks aren't big enough to make a former out of one piece, I've had to cobble it together by sticking blocks together with super glue.  It's coming together well so far....  More to follow in a couple of days.   Sweet! 

Morning all,

I thought I'd share a few pics of the Sturm Tiger in various stages of painting - camouflage on, glossed and oil wash sloshed on, cleaned off and matt varnish applied - I brought in to the last meeting as part of the 1/144 tank trio.  If you recall, it was finished in just the undercoat of dark brown.  I finished it last night after applying a coat of light sand then the brown and green camouflage splodges.  I applied these with my .2mm nozzle no name airbrush (I have a similar .3mm brush for general work and I picked these up quite cheaply just to get the hang of airbrushing.  I used Tamiya acrylics thinned with isopropyl alcohol about 50/50.  I find this covers very well and due to the IPA evaporating quickly, the paint dries in no time.  it was the first time I'd done anything as intricate as this and thought maybe I overdid the camouflage colours at first but the end result looks good enough to me.  I have now decided to invest in a better quality airbrush and compressor.

After that it was a coat or 2 of Johnsons then some weathering with oil paints thinned with white spirit - sloshed on and then the excess removed with a barely damp brush and bit of tissue - working at this scale, it's easy to overdo things and take it ALL off but I was very pleased with the results.

Finally a coat of matt varnish completed it.

I have a few more kits from this range of Dragon Panzer Korps vehicles so there will be more to follow soon.  For the benefit of those not at the meeting last week, they are very well moulded, the kits themselves consist of about 7 parts plus some etched brass for the engine grills.  Assembly is therefore a doddle - just a tiny bit of seam lines to remove - but the real skill is in the painting and finishing.  Again, I'm pleased with what I managed here so things can hopefully only get better.

PS, the choice of background for the pics of the finished article was a pure coincidence so I hope you can see how effective the camouflage is against my kitchen worktop - indeed I hope you can see the model!!!  This is the place to hide if the Russians decide to come over!

Afternoon all,

I have just received the latest IPMS magazine and thought it worth mentioning that the feature on the Boulton Paul Defiants by Neil and Bill was a superb read.  I say this because I also get Scale Aviation Modeller International and one of my biggest gripes on the kit reviews is that more often than not the person who has written the article is big on telling WHAT they have done but not HOW they did it so I am left feeling frustrated that there is something big missing from the article.  It is intensely annoying that many people write their articles and assume that all those who will read it have their knowledge and experience  Not so with this one (not indeed the feature on the Airfix Bofors Gun and Tractor).  In all respects, this reflects the down to earth and helpful nature of our club.  I have commented in the past that the knowledge I have gained from the very informative website entries is second to none and that is the main reason I enjoy coming online, even though I am a very slow contributor!!

Well done Neil and Bill - pity we don't see them on here a bit more often so those who don't get the magazines can share in their work too.