Whats Lying on your Workbench MK IV

[MechTech]

That's cool! I do a lot of printing so I thought I recognized the roll end caps Thanks! I may try their metalics out. - MT

[electric indigo]

MT, I got something for you...

The last weeks were swamped with work, so I did not do much modeling. Today I picked up the Fitter again and worked on the natural metal section on the aft of the fuselage. Base paint is Vallejo Dull Aluminium, aka the fastest way to clog your airbrush. Selected panels were masked and buffed up with metalizer powder for a shinier finish, then stains were added with Tamiya's weathering pigments.

I discovered Vallejo metallics two years ago and can highly recommend them for finish, range, and general convenience of use, except that the dull aluminium gives you two seconds to work before your airbrush stops working until you clean the needle with a solvent-soaked brush or q-tip. I'll add even more thinner next time.

[Thom]

Great work with the colors on that Fitter. Sweet.

[wm cheng]

Gorgeous and sooo smooth @electric indigo  Do you primer first?  If so what do you use?

[MechTech]

Thanks Electric Indigo! I've heard the same thing with Vallejo clogging air brushes. I don't do much metallic work, but I need to complete an old VC-27 Tunny model. I wanted to do the inlets with a chrome-like finish that many other turbofan nacelles have (not counting the blades). Which brand of metalizer powders are you referencing? - MT

[arbit]

27 minutes ago, MechTech said:

Thanks Electric Indigo! I've heard the same thing with Vallejo clogging air brushes. I don't do much metallic work, but I need to complete an old VC-27 Tunny model. I wanted to do the inlets with a chrome-like finish that many other turbofan nacelles have (not counting the blades). Which brand of metalizer powders are you referencing? - MT

Which Vallejo metallics are you refering to? The old ones i their airbrush line, or the newere ones with bigger bottles?

I have not tried the newer ones. I have their Airbrush line of metallics, and they are very inconsistent. The Steel and Silver seem to spray the smoothest, while gold and gun metal have very thick particles that don't thin down at all.

[electric indigo]

I still have a jar of Kosutte metalizer powder that seems to last forever. It has disappeared from the market; from the looks of it I might contain an unhealthy amount of lead. For purely weathering purposes, plain graphite powder (just grind it from a pencil) does pretty good effects.

The Vallejo paints are from their Metal Color airbrush line. I tested duraluminium (a slightly less shiny silver), gun metal, and dull aluminium. The dull aluminium is the only one where I had the clogging issue. It also needs a good stirring to make the flat effect work, so I put a metal ball into the bottle. The drying time is also significantly longer. The other two paints are a dream. You can use them right from the bottle, no need for special primer, no odors or tricky solvents, and they are dry to the touch after minutes. Excellent leveling behavior, and no flakes. You can also mix them to get varying shades of metal, and you can easily apply them with a brush for detail work.

This pic shows dull aluminium and gun metal on the exhausts:

[pengbuzz]

39 minutes ago, electric indigo said:

I still have a jar of Kosutte metalizer powder that seems to last forever. It has disappeared from the market; from the looks of it I might contain an unhealthy amount of lead. For purely weathering purposes, plain graphite powder (just grind it from a pencil) does pretty good effects.

The Vallejo paints are from their Metal Color airbrush line. I tested duraluminium (a slightly less shiny silver), gun metal, and dull aluminium. The dull aluminium is the only one where I had the clogging issue. It also needs a good stirring to make the flat effect work, so I put a metal ball into the bottle. The drying time is also significantly longer. The other two paints are a dream. You can use them right from the bottle, no need for special primer, no odors or tricky solvents, and they are dry to the touch after minutes. Excellent leveling behavior, and no flakes. You can also mix them to get varying shades of metal, and you can easily apply them with a brush for detail work.

This pic shows dull aluminium and gun metal on the exhausts:

I'll have to try the pencil elad trick sometime; i have some very soft drawing pencils. I also do the "oil dot filter" effect with oil pastels, and I even use colored pencils for some effects on my models (just did some mods on the Prometheus on my 1/5000 SDF-1 model kit (fixing some inaccurate details and putting in the hull doors for the carrier's flight deck to load the valks onto the elevators!)

[arbit]

2 hours ago, electric indigo said:

The Vallejo paints are from their Metal Color airbrush line

Ok that makes sense. The new Metal Color (32 ml) line has better reviews.

But I would not recommend for airbrushing most of the Vallejo Air metalics (17 ml).

[MechTech]

I'll have to remember the 32ml Vallejo paints. Some of the guys in our club have used some of the lacquers which are just like metal, but the whole lacquer solvent thing is a pain! - MT

[Chronocidal]

Continuing my little 1/1000 Trek kit spree (I've got two of the Bird of Prey/Oberth kits, a Romulan TOS, a Reliant, and Defiant waiting in the wings), I'm putting the final touches on the D7 before I prep it for painting.  Main thing I wanted to mod on this kit was to reinforce the neck joint, and also make it removable so the kit is easier to store.  I found a couple of tightly fitting lengths of square styrene tube, and made a long friction-fit mount, so now the front just plugs in seamlessly to the back half of the ship.

Next up, I'm starting work on both the TOS and Refit Enterprises.  Where the TOS kit feels rock solid when just snapped together, the Refit is somehow a wobbly mess that's going to need a lot of glue.  The saucer especially rocks around a lot.

First order of business though was making sure the nacelles will be straight, because that's just the curse of the Refit.

The default snap system was actually pretty sturdy, with the nacelle pylons locking deeply into the secondary hull.  Unfortunately, after snapping the whole thing together, I realized that the mounts were actually putting forward pressure at the base of the pylons, and that pressure was translating to pulling the rears of the nacelles outward, and down.

After some messing with fitting the various parts, and a gamble with some CA glue, I instead mounted the pylons on the upper spinal panel for the hull, which gave me a level mounting (so long as I didn't attach it to the rest of the ship).  If anyone is familiar with the kit, I cut away the lower tabs on the pylon supports, so I can slip the parts in from the top, instead of sideways before the hull is put together.

The second mod I found I needed was that the tabs meant to go into the slots in those supports were still putting forward pressure on the pylons when I snapped everything together.  So, I needed to shift those tabs to the rear.  This was all rough guesswork that I was shaping on the fly, but it worked out that I needed to shift the tabs rearward about half their thickness.  So, I glued thin sheet styrene about half the thickness of the tabs to the back of each tab, and then filed the front of them down until they fit in the slots.

The stair-stepped shift turned out about as well as I could have hoped.  The saucer will still need to be glued and probably reinforced, but the nacelles are looking good enough for my tastes.

Next on the mod list is going to involve sawing into a pair of the 1/1000 Bird of Prey kits to fix a boneheaded mistake they made with the wing mechanism.  Not going to attempt a working hinge at this scale, but I'm going to make one in each position, and sacrifice one of the spare sets of wing mounts to build one that fixes.. well, this.

In looking over my old mid-90s BoP kit, I noticed that it doesn't do this.  The wing mounts look the same, and the large flat area at the root is covered by both the cruise and attack position parts.  The wings are also completely flat in cruise mode, which I don't honestly care for.

Then I started watching build-ups of newer issues of that AMT kit, and this is what I start seeing.

Yes, they raised the wings to a higher angle, more like what was seen in the shot from Star Trek IV where they're hovering over the whaling vessel.  But in the process, they took a shortcut with the new parts, and made them by just cutting off the longer ends of the attack mode mounts, leaving the wing hinges the wrong shape.

So, since I bought two of the little kits with the BoP and Oberth, I'm going to be building one in attack mode, and the other I'm going to be frankensteining myself a set of properly-shaped hinges, by slicing up the spare wing hinges until I get a set that's shaped properly.

Don't know what I'll do with the two Oberth-class ships yet, but I have half a mind (hah) to slice one up and mount it to a rock for a USS Pegasus display.  

[MechTech]

Great mods Chronocidal. It's too bad you even have to make so many just to get it right. - MT

[Chronocidal]

Eh, I grew up making the old MPC Star Wars kits, modding for accuracy is just a way of life.  

[NZEOD]

Earthworks on the golf course done, time to sow the greens, plant some trees and finish wrecking the place

[Chronocidal]

Looking good, will be fun to see how you detail up the ground around him. 

The moddening continues, and I've started chopping up the wing mounts on this tiny Bird of Prey.  I think I wound up filing away a bit more of the insert than I intended, so I'll either mount the wings slightly higher than the stock mounts, or I can probably just fill in the gap, since it's all so small.

I went back and forth a couple of times on whether it would be easier to make the parts from scratch, but in the end I decided that I wanted to at least use the stock ridged sections, to avoid having to re-create the curvature and ribbing of that part.  In the end, the whole thing still snaps together using the original tabs, so I'm pretty happy with the result.

[Thom]

13 hours ago, NZEOD said:

Earthworks on the golf course done, time to sow the greens, plant some trees and finish wrecking the place

 

 

We chose a bad day to go golfing Bob... You should add some tiny figures holding golf clubs maybe stuck in the sand trap.

 

10 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Looking good, will be fun to see how you detail up the ground around him. 

The moddening continues, and I've started chopping up the wing mounts on this tiny Bird of Prey.  I think I wound up filing away a bit more of the insert than I intended, so I'll either mount the wings slightly higher than the stock mounts, or I can probably just fill in the gap, since it's all so small.

I went back and forth a couple of times on whether it would be easier to make the parts from scratch, but in the end I decided that I wanted to at least use the stock ridged sections, to avoid having to re-create the curvature and ribbing of that part.  In the end, the whole thing still snaps together using the original tabs, so I'm pretty happy with the result.

Real nice looking BOP!

[MechTech]

NZEOD - "Hey kids, get off my lawn!" I hope that was a good sandwich (in the photo)! Seriously though, the ground pattern is looking realistic.

Chronocidal - The mods are coming along nicely! - MT

[Chronocidal]

14 hours ago, Thom said:

Real nice looking BOP!

It's a really -small- BoP, only about 4 inches long, but Polar Lights has done a really nice job of molding it to where a lot of the seams are hidden in the construction.  Not quite Bandai level of engineering, but they're getting pretty good.

Edit: Think I call this a success.  

I'd still like to get the edges of the inserts a little closer to the edge of the mounting area on the wing, but at this scale I'm thinking it's close enough.

Edited June 18, 2020 by Chronocidal

[NZEOD]

Golf course nearly done, angry golfers and the berated unit LT next along with a golf cart and some decals and a Matt coat on the Defender to finish.

[wm cheng]

Kept busy while I waited for NZEOD's canopy to repair and finished my F-18F Super Hornet.

My best buds are together again.  What great kits, amazing engineering, however they are a bitch to build if you want to paint them.  The tolerances are so perfect that a layer of paint throws everything off and a lot of modifications need to be cut and performed to build them out of order to facilitate painting.  I'm pretty happy with the finished product though.

I Alclad all the blue panels with chrome first, then sprayed Tamiya Blue Clear as a clear coat over it so they have a iridescent sheen to it like anodized aluminum.

...and my big ass quarter to show scale!

 

[arbit]

Gotta love those two!

Fantastic painting too.

[joscasle]

57 minutes ago, wm cheng said:

Kept busy while I waited for NZEOD's canopy to repair and finished my F-18F Super Hornet.

My best buds are together again.  What great kits, amazing engineering, however they are a bitch to build if you want to paint them.  The tolerances are so perfect that a layer of paint throws everything off and a lot of modifications need to be cut and performed to build them out of order to facilitate painting.  I'm pretty happy with the finished product though.

I Alclad all the blue panels with chrome first, then sprayed Tamiya Blue Clear as a clear coat over it so they have a iridescent sheen to it like anodized aluminum.

...and my big ass quarter to show scale!

 

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!

[MechTech]

NZEOD - That will look funny when you add in a golf cart!

WM Cheng - The finish on those two looks awesome! Nice, clean and SHINY on the metal parts with just enough weathering elsewhere. - MT 

[derex3592]

Great job on the droids @wm cheng!!!

[electric indigo]

Perfect finish on that classic duo. Did you add a gloss coat after the clear blue?

[wm cheng]

On 6/19/2020 at 12:26 PM, electric indigo said:

Perfect finish on that classic duo. Did you add a gloss coat after the clear blue?

Thanks all!  Nope the clear blue is really glossy (gotta leave a lot of time for it to properly cure before handling, I kept getting fingerprints on it - argh).

[neptunesurvey]

Nice C-3PO and R2D2.

[derex3592]

Speaking of Star Wars.... Today I decided to try my hand at the "mottled" method of painting for the Star Destroyer... It's hard work, but I think I like it!  I'm really glad this thing isn't any bigger now! First round done! Rain is here so humidity has shut me down for today. 

[arbit]

Derex, Great idea. I think that will give it a lot of texture.

[pengbuzz]

4 minutes ago, arbit said:

Derex, Great idea. I think that will give it a lot of texture.

Especially with a wash to bring out the panel lines; that should give it that "made of millions of pieces of metal welded together" look.

[NZEOD]

On 6/21/2020 at 7:43 AM, wm cheng said:

Thanks all!  Nope the clear blue is really glossy (gotta leave a lot of time for it to properly cure before handling, I kept getting fingerprints on it - argh).

is the canopy not there yet?

[Thom]

5 hours ago, derex3592 said:

Speaking of Star Wars.... Today I decided to try my hand at the "mottled" method of painting for the Star Destroyer... It's hard work, but I think I like it!  I'm really glad this thing isn't any bigger now! First round done! Rain is here so humidity has shut me down for today. 

Will be nice to see that peeking through the top coat.

[wm cheng]

@NZEOD  Covid has all the postal stuff delayed, I'm sure its on a boat over (no real air travel - at least for packages) anymore.

@derex3592 That SD is lookng great!  I was thinking of masking some of those rectangular patterns to get the mottled look, but your method my look as good without being insane effortwise.  Can't wait to see how it turns out.

[derex3592]

See....that's kinda why I went that route, laziness wins the day on the paint job as I spent a whole lot of time on the lighting.  I really didn't wanna cut hundereds of little "L" shaped pieces of Tamiya tape.  I argue that what was seen on screen wasn't ever what the actual filming model really looked like because of the 70's lighting conditions in the studio. 

Edited June 22, 2020 by derex3592

[joscasle]

7 hours ago, derex3592 said:

Speaking of Star Wars.... Today I decided to try my hand at the "mottled" method of painting for the Star Destroyer... It's hard work, but I think I like it!  I'm really glad this thing isn't any bigger now! First round done! Rain is here so humidity has shut me down for today. 

Nice!!!! I know your pain   But the results will be great!!