1/35 DML Panther F - Finished

Construction and painting are now complete. I have to spray a matte coat and I do want to put this on a base with a Warriors figure standing on the engine deck. This is my 3rd complete this year - a little off my goal of 1 a month but if i can finish Dora off by the end of the month I'll be in better shape.







GB

1/35 DML Panther F

Wow two posts in one day! Online group builds are great ways to plan your builds or motivate yourself to do something. This particular model is for a group build on Model Geek (Amorama) call "Get the Job Done". The idea is to finally finish some of those projects that have been sitting on the bench for a while. I bought this model several years ago on eBay, started it, lost interest, start again, stopped again - you get the picture. Anyhow I am making a concerted effort to finish this by the end of the month.

The Panther F was to be the latest revision of the Panther line. Sporting a new, smaller turret design that was supposed to address the Panther's weakness in all-around protection. It is debateable wether or not the F model ever made it into combat in the last days of the war. There were prototypes built and several hulls were completed. Some turrets were also built but didn't have all the key components installed.

At any rate I am finishing this as if it were delivered to Panzer Division Muncheberg just before the battle of Seelow Heights and defended Berlin in the final days of the war.

The next 3 photos show pretty well where I left off about a year and a half ago.

The brighter yellow parts and the PE grills were just added this time around.
I lost the PE brackets for the exhaust so had to build new ones from plastic strip.
Here's where I am now. I need to do some additional weathering, painted details (tools) and install the tracks.




GB

1/48 Accurate Miniatures B-25 C/D "Dirty Dora"

It's been a while since I updated this blog. I have been making progress on Dora and I should be finished soon. Major construction work is complete and I'm into the painting and weathering phase. I totally forgot to take progress pics. At this point I've applied various shades of OD Green, some paint chipping and some of the decals. I was a little intimidated by the decals but they went on well. The only problem I had was when the coat of Future clouded on one of the wings when the decal set was applied. This was probably due to me not waiting long enough for the Future coat to dry. However the guys over at Aeroscale were able to give me some advise which solved my problem - basically I just had to reapply some Future and the blemish disappeared.

Here's the problem on the wing.
A little Future and ta-da it is gone!
Now to just get off my butt and finish her off.

GB

1/48 Accurate Miniatures B-25 C/D "Dirty Dora"

After that last kit is nice to be working with a well engineered kit. I've had this Accurate Miniatures kit in my stash for some time . The website Aeroscale is running a "Twin Spinner" group build so now I have the perfect excuse to do build it. I started with the cockpit as usual. The only weird thing I found was that the control panel is supplied as a transparency yet there wasn't a decal supplied. Otherwise everything went fine. I even used the supplied seatbelt decals.
The interior is full of beautiful detail but unfortunately most of it will not be seen. The problem is that you end up spending a lot of time working on stuff that doesn't really matter. Sort of like super-detailing a cockpit - at least you know it is there.


I'm very happy with the way this is going so far. At this point I'm ready to seal the two halves up.

GB

1/72 Hobbycraft CF-188 - Finished

Well it is done and that is about the best thing I can say about this model. There were so many things that needed correcting on this kit that I sort of gave up and just focused on finishing. There's a lot of things wrong - a couple of glaring gaps and I didn't bother doing anything with the landing gear and wheel wells. The Leading Edge decals are wonderful but I decided to save most of the stencils for a better kit.

1/72 Hobbycraft CF-188 pt3

The quality control on this kit is something else. Look how the bottom part of the hull where the burner cans attach are prefectly smooth. Speaking of the burner cans - check this out. Why would the open cans have surface detail and the closed one not? They are side by side on the same sprue! How could that not get noticed?
And the gaps just keep on coming. This picture doesn't show it so well but I has to add about a 1/4 inch wedge of plastic between the kit combing and the control panel. Otherwise the control panel would have been too far forward leaving a noticeable gap inside the cockpit even with the canopy closed up.
The control panel itself was pretty plain so I sanded off what little detail there was and added detail with plastic bits and finished off with acrylic paint. I think it is convincing enough for a closed canopy.
Here is yet another gap. When I was test fitting the canopy not only did the rear canopu come up a bit short it was also too high. I'll have to figure out how to fill that in.
Here I've filled in some of the gaps at the wing roots with plastic strip. I didn't find these gaps so bad - I've seen worse on other kits.


Another surprise was the angle of the tail fins. They look more like an F-15 or Mig 29! I'll have to fiddle with this to get the right (or at least more correct) angle. Note also the tips of the fins are rounded - they'll have to be flattened to be more like a CF-188's.



GB

1/72 Hobbycraft CF-188 pt2

Construction is progressing fairly quickly and at this point I am getting ready to join the forward section to the tail section.I'm trying really hard to like this kit. I've read a lot of negative comments about Hobbycraft in general but I've built a couple of their 1/48 kits and thought they were alright. The level of detail may not be on par with Tamigawa but the builds were fun with no major issues and a lot of room to add details as I saw fit. However this kit has a bit of a split personality. In some cases the fit is near perfect while in others the gaps are huge!

Here is the upper and lower halves of the tail section glued together - you couldn't ask for a better join.
Now here is the gap between the front and back halves - wow.
Also I'm not an expert on the F/A-18 but I'm pretty sure there aren't wedge shaped gaps in the underside just forward of the air intakes. What were they thinking here?
Some thin plastic wedges should do the trick. I'm also using plastic rod to fill in some of the other gaps.
To fill the large gap behind the nose section I've started out by gluing a piece of thin plastic to back end. The underside gap is larger so another wedge of plastic will be needed once the halves are joined.
While I am not planning to make this the "perfect" CF-188 I did remove some bumps not present on the Canadian version and added the quintessential Canadian feature - the starboard side searchlight. This is present on all CF-188s but is sometimes faired over. The plane this model represents actually has the searchlight in place. This was a fairly simple matter of drilling a hole, thinning the plastic on the inside and inserting a clear plastic lens. I also glued a small piece of tin foil inside the hull to finish the effect.


GB