SPA Modeler

Mark, is this Saturday’s progress in studio? What a great update! Go, Maddog, Go! I feel your pain with the cutting out of delicate parts. I nearly always use a pair of clippers to do this, and I usually cut farther away from the piece, leaving small stumps. It is only after the piece is free of its styrene prison that I will clip closer to the piece itself. After I wrote that, I have to quickly add that I am experiencing all the joy and the pain of working in 1/72—where a little paint goes a long way and a piece of flash will take far longer to clean up due to the size of the part. So, yes. I feel ya.



Are you going to make a diorama...

Thanks for the great comments guys! I love seeing all your great posts here.

Blacksheep, senior moment indeed! Re-paint already done. Hopefully I'll be able to get it as smooth as the rest of the turret. Then there will be some rust and rain streaking off those rivets. That should be interesting to do.

Bruce, the work in that update all happened in my overcrowded hobby room while I was sitting directly under two B-52's and a KC-135 tanker. As for that delicate part, I tried to cut it at a distance from the part intending to clean it up afterward, but the tension or something was too much; the part just snapped. I figured all four of those other attachments would cause it to break as well. Thus the scratch-built addition. Yeah, cleaning up 1/72 scale parts is indeed a challenge sometimes!

Nice pic by the way. I can't help wondering if that is Paul Bunyon's picnic table in the background! LOL! It sure doesn't look in scale with that turret. And yeah, I'm thinking I need to do a base for this and the two AA guns that go with it. It won't be a diorama per se, but it will look similar enough to your pic, sans Paul Bunyon's table....


Now that I got all the armor done that I finished, I'm going to try and focus on some of the ships, aircraft, helicopters and real space models that I've got in progress now. Stay tuned, more to come.

And the machine continues! Looks great Duke!

Thanks Medic! I'm trying to keep things going.

Well, it's been awhile thanks to being back to work on several home repair projects. Despite that, I did manage to get some progress done because of some time on the bench and Hobby Day.

I'll start with some aircraft.

This first on is the Grumman Duck I had started. I got the interior painted and the windows installed in the sides of the fuselage so it was time to close this bird up:



This next one is an ancient USAirfix kit of the Widgeon floatplane. I got it for free, and since I started it at Hobby Day now I know why: No clear parts. Oh well, I started it anyway; adding the pilot to the interior:



Adding the side windows won't be an issue; doing the canopy is going to be interesting...

I went ahead and assembled the wing:



Followed by the engines:



I let them dry for a bit and while that was happening, I assembled the outrigger floats:



Later on I added the engines to the wing. There's gonna be a ton of sanding to do on that:



Moving on to my Big Bird, I painted the cockpit and pilots on the Shinmeiwa:



Then I decided to move in and assemble the propellers. I had thought that I just needed to add the cones to the centers of the propellers, but no! Hasegawa had to do this to me:



Here's the first one assembled:



Finally, I got them all done and they are all hopefully the same direction:



I then went through the kit and assembled everything that was molded in two halves, starting with the wheels which I also painted:



I them realized on the instruction sheet that there were two version options on this plane in the kit. Using Google Translate on my phone, which told me to "paint [certain part} the color of the woman"(?!) I managed to somehow decipher enough "code" to determine which step was for which version. I had to cross certain steps out and edit the sheet to insure I don't mess this up too badly:



Moving on, I then assembled some more parts:





That's as far as I got with that.

I then pulled out my Redstone rocket and masked off the base where it needs to stay black:





I spent some time trying to polish this as well. Speaking of trying to polish, I spent quite a bit of time sanding the Mr. Surfacer and smoothing out the seams on my Atlas rocket:



I took some time to make sure the lines were still scribed out:



This part was the toughest:



I made some progress in smoothing this out quite a bit, but I still have a long way to go to make this smooth enough for a metal finish:



My last little aircraft is an unusual kit I found of a Russian Troop carrying glider. I never knew they had them! I started with the interior. The two upright squares were for holding the benches, but since the benches wouldn't be seen, I decided to leave them off:



I then added the small windows and side doors to the fuselage halves. Here's a shot of them and the rest of the sprues:



I then assembled the wings. This plastic is interesting; fusing almost instantly with Tamiya Extra Thin. I don't really know why they used two different types of plastic:



I finally painted the interior of the fuselage and then assembled the fuselage together and added the tail feathers:



I found that the fuselage halves were molded differently and didn't match the line of the canopy so I sanded it to form:





That's all my aircraft progress, now to show my armor. But first, here's some buildings/structures I was working on first. The base of the turret was primed with a grey primer to see how well I covered that seam. I'm not that happy with it:



I then pulled out the church and started to seal up the seams along the walls and the base and all the corners with acrylic putty:







After all of that, I shot a grey primer all over the church too:





I did notice the roof of the belfry is propped up. That's the let the bats out.

I also ordered a brand new cross for this from my church's bookstore/gift shop. I expect to have it in sometime two weeks from now.

Finally, I decided to make some extensive progress on my George Creed commemorative build. I assembled the cab, adding the photo etch to it too:





Next I added the photo etch to the chassis and finished with a few more final detail parts:



Here's a shot of the cabin dry-fit to the chassis:



I moved on to assemble the crane for this and later on I added that and other parts to the chassis and cab, dryfitting everything together:





Finally I finished the assembly of most of the trailer; adding the side platforms and other detail parts:



After that I decided to dry fit the Pershing to the trailer to see how it looks:



That's all I had for this week. I don't know if I'll be able to get anything done the next few weeks with all the work I have and the very high temps coming our way.

Thanks for looking in, comments are welcome.

Very nice stuff Duke!

Wow! Quite the varied works.

Hi Mark - wow! A great collection of wip.

Is that Grumman Duck the old Airfix kit? It's supposed to be quite good although it's one I've never got to.

What aircraft is the Big Bird? The cockpit looks great.

Nice work so far Mark... and look what is coming out soon....




for your wishlist...