Monogram P-39

To paraphrase The Most Interesting Man In The World, "I don't often build 1/48th scale airplanes - but when I do, I often build old Monogram 1/48th scale airplanes."  This is, of course, the rather elderly but still quite nice Monogram 1/48th scale P-39 Airacobra, which has a reasonable amount of interior detail, pretty nice fit, and raised panel lines.  It even has flattened main tires, but to me they don't just look flattened, they look flat.  

This was supposed to be a P-39D, with the four .30-caliber machine guns in the wings.  Which, after I'd assembled the wing, I realized that I'd forgotten to install.  DOH!  I read somewhere that the Soviets generally removed the wing armament from their P-39s to improve their roll rate, and maybe certain USAAF pilots did the same.  I couldn't find my airbrush, so I brush-painted the model with Model Master acrylic olive drab, and used some old Humbrol paint for the interior green.  How does one "not find" their airbrush? I store it in a little box, and I think I accidentally threw the box away during one of my intermittent declutterings of the workshop.  Well, since my airbrush was a pre-Aztek Model Master job, maybe that's for the best...

I think there's a goof in the instructions.  This same kit can be built as a P-39D or a P-39Q.  The P-39D markings are for a USAAF unit in North Africa, and the instructions say it should be painted olive drab.  The P-39Q is marked for a unit in the Pacific, and the instructions say to paint it sand.  I think that's backwards.  But since I had olive drab but didn't have sand, I rolled with it.

There are a couple of problems with the kit.  One is that you can't install the nose landing gear after the fuselage is assembled.  Another is that I just couldn't get the car-door windows to fit properly, and in the process of trimming and carving, I dropped the left-side window.  I have a hard enough time seeing dropped model parts on the floor, but a clear part?  Fuggeddaboudit.  I'll find it the next time I sweep the concrete - or not, I'm good either way.

It's not going to win any awards, but it was fun.  And I can't ask for more than that.

Finished Black Widow

Done.  More or less.  I'm not too excited about the kit-supplied base, because it makes it seem like she's off to visit the doctor.  And I swear I put the right boots on the right legs, but they still look like they're on backwards.

The paint is mostly Testors flat black, Testors metallic grey metalizer, and some anonymous dark grey acrylic (the label fell off the bottle, so I don't know what it is).  For the flesh, I generally prime with white spray paint of some sort, then apply a base coat of Delta "AC Flesh", and then apply selective washes of Testors rust.  For the hair, I applied base coat of very dark brown (Testors rubber) and then did a whole lot of drybrushing with various shades of craft paint.  The boots and eyes got a coat of Future floor wax (yes, I know, in the magazines they call it something like "Pledge with Future Shine", but to me, it's Future floor wax.  Period).

In the movie, Black Widow has hair so red it's almost orange, which I personally am not a big fan of, so I gave her a darker reddish-auburn hair color.  Hey, it's my universe.

The FAMAS rifle didn't come with the kit.  Years ago my brother and I went to Home Depot to get some boards for his patio cover, and as we were walking across the parking lot, I saw a plastic rifle on the ground.  It turned out to be the FAMAS, made out of some kind of stiff vinyl-like material, and surprisingly well detailed.  It was probably a weapon for an action figure, perhaps a French commando, and some kid dropped it.  Sorry, kid, but it will comfort you to know I still have the FAMAS and used it to give Black Widow a little more punch in the automatic weapons department.  And I happen to like the FAMAS.  I have no idea if it's any good as a rifle, since I'm not really a firearms expert, but I think it has a groovy shape.

If I were to do this kit again (and I will; I have a second one in the pile o'kits) I'll modify the boots because I think they look pretty awkward, and I'll make a different base.  And I already have a weapon for the second version, an M203 from an old Glencoe paratrooper model.  (I read a Black Widow comic some years ago where the KGB sent a new blonde Black Widow to find and kill the old red-haired Black Widow.  Why not?)

Moebius Black Widow

Does this picture make my head look huge?

This is my not-quite-completed take on the Moebius "Black Widow" model, which unlike a lot of figures is an actual glue-together thing in styrene and not solid resin or metal.  Styrene figures get a bad rap for not having particularly crisp detailing or sculpting, and the assembly process causes gaps and seams that (some) metal and resin figures don't have.

But with that said, I quite enjoyed the Moebius "Black Widow" kit.  Reasonably easy to assemble, though  you'll need a couple of pretty serious clamps to hold the body halves together, and don't even bother trying to figure out how to salvage the pin on the right-side hair piece - the pin is pointed in the wrong direction and all you can do is cut it off.

I'll post more pictures later, when I'm fully done with the figure, but this'll do for now.

Revell's 1/40th scale (or thereabouts) Corporal missile carrier and launch stuff.  I built this model more or less on a dare.  Every now and then I go into these strange modeling phases where I buy as many kits as ever, but I don't actually build anything.  I buy kits, books, magazines, paint, and tools.  I lie in bed and think about building something.  But I never actually do build anything, and meantime the collection of unbuilt kits stored on the upper shelves of my closet grows and grows and grows...

Eventually the collection of kits started to slump.  I'd go in the closet to get fresh clothes for work, and the disturbance would cause a kit avalanche.  At one point I conceived the idea of building MiG-21MFs in every scale from 1/144 to 1/32nd, and one day all my MiG-21s rained down.  Another time the Renwal Atomic Cannon slid off the top of the pile, and it's a sufficiently husky kit it actually hurt when it landed on my foot.

I decided after that the next kit to slide off would be built, come Hell or high water.  And it just so happened that it was this kit, the Revell Corporal and launcher, that slid off.

The kit comes with the Corporal missile, the weird four-wheel-steering carrier, a launch table a la the V-2, and a selection of crewmen, including this guy, who appears to be gesticulating in disgust because the launch controller isn't working right.  The only significant molding flaw I found in the kit was massive sinkage on the figures; practically every one of them had hollow backs.

It's actually a pleasant kit to build.  It isn't going to stagger those used to modern Dragon kits with its detail or engineering, but it was actually a lot more fun than I thought it would be.  There were some tense moments getting the elevating missile cradle to mate with the chassis, because you have to get a set of gears to mesh, and the ladders on the missile cradle were somewhat troublesome.  But on the whole, it was surprisingly easy and fun to build.

I'm sort of used to the idea of the decals in old kits being horrid, but these were quite nice - thin and crisp and amenable to Micro-Sol.  The US Army stuff on the cab settled down over the access hatches quite nicely, and the Corporal itself comes with a reasonable quantity of stenciling.

I experimented with the paint.  I often use spray cans to paint monochromatic kits, especially armor models.  But most of the olive drab spray paints I've used seem very dark to me (or maybe it's just my eyesight going south; that's also possible).  So for this kit, I used a vaguely olive-drabbish color from Krylon called "Oregano".  It's a little lighter than I expected, and more like khaki than olive drab, but overall, I'm not displeased with it.  Or at least not displeased enough to repaint the whole thing.

Not bad for a dare, and now that I've actually finished something, I'm starting to have more ideas.  Why, even now, I already have two more kits in work - the old Lindberg "Yuri Gagarin" spaceship (the one with the opening hangar bay on the top) and the Moebius "Iron Man" version of Black Widow.

And there are always those MiG-21s, lurking, lurking, ever lurking...

Sob Story

Italeri 1/72nd V-22 Osprey

Now I need a 1/200th scale Storey Musgrave

I'm not dead yet! I haven't even been sick. I just took a break from modeling for a couple of months, mostly because I seemed to be spending every waking moment involved with work. "Yeah, yeah," you say. "We all have our problems and we all have to work, so cry me a river..." But I wasn't complaining, really. Too much work is infinitely better than not enough work. But it does tend to leave one (meaning me) without much time to do any modeling.

To make this state of affairs seem even worse, I confess that over the last six months or so, I've become slightly intimidated by some of the new kit releases. A few times over the last few months I went into my friendly local hobby shop hoping to find something new and fun that would give me incentive to blow the dust off my workbench and start working again, but man, everything looked so hard. Armor kits with a THOUSAND pieces? Oh my God. 1/32nd scale airplane kits of surpassing detail and accuracy that would take me six weeks to finish? Oh my God. It all seemed so... well, intense is the word I'm looking for, I think.

I actually had a good cry with the proprietor over this. Remember back in the 1970s and 1980s, when Tamiya kits were the last word in detail, fidelity, and fiddlesomeness in armor kits? Tamiya was the top of the line, the sort of thing attempted by masters, not the kind of thing that rewarded the efforts of duffers and hacks. And now, those old Tamiya kits are actually considered vacations! After tackling a thousand-piece modern armor kit, we go back to those Tamiya kits and say "Wow, less than 120 parts? This is EASY!"

And unfortunately, my pile of unbuilt kits wasn't much help, because I'd pretty much cleaned it out of easy, cheap, borderline-throwaway kits like my much-beloved Airfix WWI fighters. Practically everything in my unbuilt collection was something I wanted to do well, and I was pretty sure my skills had deteriorated over the last few months and the last thing I wanted to do was ruin my Atomic Cannon because I had devolved to being a sixth-rate modeler (as opposed to a third-rate modeler, which I normally am, and am perfectly comfortable with). I have many lovely models in my pile of unbuilt kits, but not many that would serve as introductory fodder.

So as the demands of work let up and I felt the desire to inhale methyl ethyl ketone fumes grew, I went to the hobby shop hoping to find something cheap and easy and fun, like a Hobby Boss P-39, or the "Tijuana Taxi", one of those dreadful-but-fun "theme rods" that I had such fun with as a boy. Alas, I could find neither one. (Really, I was hoping to find two Airfix kits: the HP-42A and the Handley-Page 0/400, but I knew better than to even dream of finding them there.)

But I did find a Hasegawa Shuttle and Hubble combination which I didn't even know existed, and that was enough to push me over the top and get me building again. But build WHAT? The Shuttle and Hubble? No way - I wasn't going to start it, for the same reason I wasn't going to start the Atomic Cannon: I felt I needed to build a few junk kits first, just to regain some basic competency with brush and knife. So that's where the Italeri V-22 Osprey comes in: it was the least interesting, most expendable kit in my collection, and that's what I started with (I haven't finished it yet, and I may not either, but I have to start somewhere, right?).

So now I'm learning how to build models all over again, and have made a few interesting discoveries along the way.

1. Knives that were dull when put them down months ago don't get any sharper in the meantime.

2. Paint that was thick and gooey when you last opened it turns to shoe leather in the meantime.

3. That odd fluffy mass behind a paint jar may not be dust; it may in fact be a spider's reproductive effort and prodding it may release a horde of tiny white spiders the size of grains of sand.

4. MEK can magically evaporate right out of sealed glass jars.

5. Skills that you thought were long dead actually come back pretty quickly. I started the weekend as a sixth-rate modeler, and I feel that I'm already up to a fifth-rate one, and by the time I put the decals on the Osprey, I might actually be fourth-rate again.

And then? Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of the Atomic Cannon, most likely. Unless rumors of the Airfix reissue of the Handley-Page 0/400 are true, in which case all bets are off.

Klingon Bird of Prey

Klingon Bird of Prey, painted almost entirely with craft store acrylic paint except for an overall coat of Krylon "Army Green". This model felt like more of an armor kit than a spaceship to me, which is good, because I haven't built any armor in a while and was getting out of practice.

Revell Junkers G.38

These are pictures of Revell's 1/144th scale Junkers G.38 airliner. I enjoyed this model considerably. The G.38 is decidedly unusual, with a combination of an elegantly swept wing, a square-section fuselage that is about as graceful as a box girder bridge, and landing gear that somehow reminds me of a steam locomotive. But it has an odd appeal for me. Maybe its greatest appeal is that it isn't a Panther or an F-16.

The kit itself is very nicely done and fun to build. The corrugations are particularly well-done, and the kit even has a modest interior, though I question the accuracy of the control yokes on the flight deck, which look more like something you'd see on the Cutty Sark than an airplane. I didn't use the clear plastic parts for the fuselage windows and used Micro Klear instead, but the other transparencies worked pretty well, and didn't even need glue (the "skylights" over the engines simply pressed in, while the glass in the wing roots, nose and flight deck needed only a little Future to hold them in place).

The corrugations make it hard to clean up the seam at the leading edge of the wing, but at the same time, they made it easier to paint the black stripes on the wings. The parts layout of the fuselage leave one with no seams to clean up at all.

On the whole, I very much enjoyed this kit, and I personally think it would be a riot to get a seat inside the wings of a G.38 - the view forward must have been quite striking indeed, though the roar of the inboard engines might make it hard to enjoy the airline version of "603 Squadron".

PS: Something drastic has happened to the Blogger editor. Either they changed something, or I changed something, but either way, I am NOT impressed with how it's working right now.