Spare Parts
118
Odds and ends, tips and tricks, miscellaneous musings.
Be my guest!
This
edition of Spare Parts features a
guest columnist, our own Collin Tatusko. Though we've missed him at the meetings lately Collin has been a busy modeler, as you shall see. He describes some of his recent
projects and shares a bit of philosophy along the way.
If
you would like to submit an item for publication on our blog, here is how to
get it done. Send me an email with the text for the article in an attached MS
Word file. If there are pictures to be included, send them a separate jpeg file
attachments. Please do not embed the pictures in the Word file. It’s easy, as
Collin will tell you. With that, I’ll cede the rest of this month’s bandwidth
to Collin.
The
Distracted Driver Modeler
With the excitement of a kid tearing open presents on
Christmas Day or a honey badger taking down a 7-foot king cobra, we dive into a
new model on our bench with zest. Parts
are laid out, instructions are read (well not really), paints are collected and
a search for photos on the Internet and your extensive wall of books has
yielded reference material beyond compare.
Parts are snipped, sanding commences, and the build begins!! Part fit is checked and rechecked and out
comes the glue. The model takes shape
quickly. Cockpit complete, fuselage
assembled and wings attached. It
actually starts to look like a model.
Then comes the speed bump in the road. Sanding seams and rescribing. Well I will get to that, but first let me
look on the Internet and see what’s new.
Wow, look at all the new resin, and these glorious new decals sheets for
kits I don’t even have. Oh wait, lets
spend an evening reading posts that don’t even deal with modeling. Distractions.
Before you know it, you haven’t touched your model in a week. It sits down in your model cave crying like a
puppy for its mother. But you don’t hear
it because look at the sale happening at Sprue Bothers, and the discount you
don’t even understand at Squadron.
Sooner or later you realize you have neglected your “puppy”
for long enough and enter your cave. You
say you are sorry and start to get your “mojo” back and pick up where you left
off. It lasts for a few days and then
“can you pick up XYZ this afternoon?" Or
you have to travel out of town for work, or “I really need to run more because
of my cholesterol”. Life =
Distraction. Once again you leave your
“puppy” on the bench waiting.
Time goes by, and you get your motivation up again and enter
the cave to find your “puppy” still there, wagging it’s tail ready for you to
start where you left off. Maybe you
finish it this time around, maybe not.
The cycle repeats.
There are some good things about all of this, in my humble opinion.
First, the puppy will always be wagging its tail when you return no matter how long you leave it in an
unfinished state in the cave among its friends such as the sanders, the cup of
paintbrushes or half a bottle of Tenex.
Second, being a distracted modeler
has actually helped my modeling skills.
You see, one of my problems with modeling is rushing things, especially
toward the end of a build. This on and
off relationship I have with my hobby actually allows me to take my time and
step away, not rushing important steps like rushing and creating a rain drop
runny coat of Future, or blotching the decals because I just got sick of all
those F-4 Phantom stencils.
“Git-R-Done” is limited. So I
guess this is my way of saying that life distractions can actually help our
appreciation of the hobby, and improve our skill in the process.
So with that said, what has Collin been up to?
I have missed coming down to SOMD meetings, but work and
life make it difficult to get down there.
The beauty of living in DC is that I don’t have to deal with traffic (I’m already
in the city unlike folks driving in and out for work). But what can take an hour and 15 minutes to
drive (no traffic like when I come to Pax in the morning) turns into a 2-3 hour
trek in outgoing traffic (in the evening, 295 South is a parking lot). Work meetings in Pax River on the same day as
SOMD Thursdays have become rare, and Thursday nights are “date night’ with the
Mrs. We all know how we must pay respect to that. So getting down there has been tough. I may be a rough and tough guy, but I will
say without reservation that I miss the meetings.
So what have I been working on?
1/72 Hasegawa KA-3B “Electric” Skywarrior. Great kit.
Good detail, and a very quick build.
You will have the fuselage and wings together before you know it. The
fit is really good. I actually cut off
the front part of the jet pods, and filled in that inside seam. I then reattached and it looked pretty
decent. Some online builds talk about
leaving the engine pods off to facilitate painting. The leading edge merge of the wing and engine
pod isn’t that great, so I went ahead and attached the pod during initial
construction. Careful painting and a
heck of a lot of masking went into the markings (the tail black flash was all
masked). I used some old aftermarket
decals and put together a relatively accurate set of markings. Overall, a fun and out of my comfort zone
build for me.
One day I ordered decals for an orange and gray
USN F-4 Phantom, but mistakenly ordered 1/72 instead of 1/48. Bummer.
So what did Collin do? He just “had” to buy the dual boxing of the
Hasegawa F-4B-N/J kit so he could use those decals. What a grand plan! Well I pulled out one of those kits and went
to town. I just wanted something to put
in my new display case at Pax River. It's in the large conference room in Bldg 304. Check it out if
you're in the area. So I didn’t do anything crazy in the cockpit except paint it up
and dress up one ejection seat with thin wine foil seat belts. This particular test bird didn’t have a rear
ejection seat. Kit is good with very
fine detail. I lost some of that
detail around the intake area due to some ham-fisted sanding and rushing
things. I painted her up and pulled out
the international orange. Overall a
quick build for me, I just did some pre-shading on this one with no weathering
wash…Joe is rubbing off on me.
Hurricane
Sandy was a perfect excuse to head to the Man-Cave, and out came an impulse
build of the Tamiya 1/48 P-47D Razorback.
I will be blunt: if you don’t buy
this kit you are missing out on a treat.
An AWESOME kit right out of the box.
Fit was great. Detail was great…I
mean this kit was a dream. I had the kit
built and ready for paint in a week. Out
came the airbrush and I wanted to try my shaky hand at a freestyle/feathered
demarcation. I used my H&S
airbrushed to do this kit, and I think it came out OK. Some guy online gave me grief but Oh
Well. The decals are aftermarket
including the checkerboard cowling. I
was scared about that cowling. I painted
the cowling yellow and gloss coated.
After that was dry I laid out the two halves of the checkerboard and let
them lay still for a few minutes. I then
used an attack plan of Tamiya X-20A thinner and MicroSol to get them to lie down. I coated the checkerboards and then ran out
of the model room praying that when I came in the next day I didn’t have to
“Collin-ize” something. I didn’t have
to worry. The decals laid down perfectly
overnight, what you see in the pictures is what actually happened. I was blown away and very happy. Overall, on of the most fun I have had in a
while building a kit. If anyone hates
Thunderbolts and is looking to get rid of their Tamiya kits, you know my
number!
On the desk now is the ubiquitous Hasegawa 1/48 A-7E Corsair
II. I just love this aircraft. Built for one purpose…to take ordnance and
break the bad guy’s toys. Fighters have
their place, but attack is where it’s at.
This is a very detailed kit with a lot of tricky things. Of course there is the intake that I
painstaking took the time to smooth out.
That came out really well for my first attempt. The wing join area to the fuselage leaves
some sanding and filling to do. This was
my first real attempt at taking time to rescribe panel lines and lost
fasteners. With pre-shading done and the
base colors on, I am very pleased with how it’s turning out. One new item I tried for the first time
painting is Mr. Color Leveling Thinner.
This stuff is the BOMB!!! I mean
pure liquid gold. I mixed up my base
enamel white and commenced my normal fill in the panel and paint over the
pre-shade area, the white turned out smooth and without a blemish. I mean no pebble effect or anything. I was blown away. I used the same technique for the Gull Gray
for the upper surfaces (using my new Badger SOTOR 20/20 airbrush to get the tight
freehand demarcation line). Again, the
gray came out fantastic. This thinner
isn’t cheap, and I am only using it for my base color coats to conserve this
precious resource….so I still went out this week and bought the last two
remaining bottles that Amazon offered.
I’m seriously considering a multi-color camouflage scheme for my next build to
push the airbrush/thinner combo. Loadout
will be 10x MK-82 on outboard TERs, 1 x Shrike, 2 x MK-20 ROCKEYE. I pulled this loadout from the Osprey series
about this aircraft in Vietnam. Here she
is:
I hope to make the meeting the end of the month. I have a ton of books and decals for anyone
to have. Whitey already claimed the U-2R
model I don’t want anymore. And I have
those remaining tubes of Tamiya light curing putty for those who purchased
them.
Cheers
Collin
