Taking an Airfix Starter set on my hols - Airfix Land Rover Series 1 pick-up in 1:43

 

" this Starter Set 'Land Rover Series 1' from Airfix is a high-quality vehicle model kit specifically designed for beginners. With a scale of 1:43, this model offers a detailed replica of the classic Land Rover Series 1. The kit consists of 39 individual parts made from durable plastic. The unpainted version allows model builders to express their creativity and customise the vehicle according to their own ideas.." 

Something to build when on holiday. Just requires a minimum of tools, glue etc. This is the long wheel-base Land Rover - there is a neat conversion to the short wheel-base on youtube. I added some extra detail in the cab - a couple of levers and a gear stick. There is a decal for the instrument panel. Curiously the kit has no exhaust pipe which ordinarily would run along the underside of the vehicle of course - too long and fragile for the intended 'market' according to Luke (who is now ex-Airfix, having moved to Revell). Having said that I found the build a little tricky in places with fit being very tight. I added wing mirrors from sprue and wire and off-set the driving wheels. I painted my Land Rover with a Halfords Grey Primer rattle can and then spent a couple of hours applying various effects with oils - pin washes, filters and streaking. I also used some MiG pigments to represent 'dust' but was much less happy with these effects. You can buy this kit for less than tenner and can literally build it anywhere. Go for it!

AZ Model 1:72 Martin-Baker MB 5 - greatest prop fighter and worst-ever 72nd kit !

 

" .. The M.B.5 came online at the beginning of the jet era, and never had a chance to prove its worth. With a P-51 sleekness and contra-rotating props, it would have been a frightful opponent for the Luftwaffe. Test-flown just two months before the Gloster Meteor jets went into R.A.F. service, the Martin-Baker M.B.5 promised much, but Whittle's invention took away its glory..."

Some six years after AZ's kit of the MB 5 first appeared I thought I'd build it, inspired by the neat article on Martin-Baker aircraft in the latest issue of Aerojournal magazine (issue no. 91). Aside from this there is good reference info in Air International, Vol. 16/2 (February 1979) and 'Wings of Fame', Vol. 9, 1997 which covers the whole MB fighter range and has some useful shots.

On with the build! Aside from the rear cockpit bulkhead, the interior parts were an OK fit. The instrument panel features nice raised detail that would benefit from careful painting and dry brushing to lift out the detail. Then the fun began! The fuselage halves were of different sizes. I lined up the upper surfaces and was left with a depression ahead of the radiator on the lower surface. The nose intake is 'solid' so was drilled open. 

The poor fit extended to the butt-joined wing halves. I drilled and pinned them to the fuselage but just couldn't achieve a decent fit. In the end I broke them off and stuck them together with Gorilla glue and filled the gaps. After a mammoth filing and sanding session I achieved a (sort of) reasonable result. Obviously I obliterated all the nice surface detailing and had to re-scribe - not my favourite job!

 Another tricky area is the ventral oil cooler intake. It is made up of 3 parts; a top half, a bottom half, and a cruciform grid that fits between them. The instructions are pretty hopeless here. Instead of assembling separate to the fuselage, I assembled the parts individually in-situ, and this worked well. Some clean up required, but not that much..

To get the gear legs on at what looks like a plausible angle is a trial. Rather than take a bit out of the front edge of the main landing gear bays - having already painted the undersurfaces -  I ended up re-drilling a location hole for them a little further back in the bay. The model simply doesn't look right in this area and certainly won't if built as per the instructions. The prop blades/spinner feature a mountain of flash and I didn't enjoy the clean-up job as the plastic that AZ use is so hard. 

Needless to say the rather thick bubble canopy didn't fit at all. I cut it into two parts so I wasn't left with massive gaps but its impossible to fit it 'properly' as it is too wide for the fuselage! Nor did the decals work - I lost one of the codes as it rolled up on itself and then 'shattered' into tiny pieces. Irretrieveably. 

 
The kit is 'short-run limited technology' - and pretty poor! It goes together like the 1958 vintage Airfix DH 88 Comet (see elsewhere on this blog)  ie with great difficulty!  To sum up the kit gets a poor 2 out 10 from me and is easily a contender in the 'worst scale model kit ever' Top 10, a subject we dealt with in a previous blog post (see link below). I certainly wouldn't build another. Short run shouldn't mean unbuildable and inaccurate- it certainly doesn't with other kit producers (RS Models for example). Okay, I managed to finish it - always a positive point - but really, I'm not sure why I bothered. Even now I still think the overall shape is 'wrong'. 

Also on this blog;

1958 vintage kit - the Airfix DH 88 Comet

Worst scale model kits Top 10

RS Models Me 309 

Airfix Sea Fury FB.11- build review (2)

 Difficult to believe that this build has been on-going for one whole year!

That's one year during which I've done little or nothing...
but with temperatures hitting a record 26C for an Easter weekend here we are out in the garden again ...

Lovely kit, just a couple of 'tricky' seams. The most ‘difficult’ part of this build would appear to be the multi-part cowling; some modellers have had trouble lining up all the parts and a resin replacement at nearly £5 is/was available! I hate to think what the price of the Barracuda resin cowl part might be in £££. Another 'issue' perhaps is the lack of gun sight in the kit. However the Eduard Mk VIII, IX and XVI kits all have two gun sights and these are apparently correct for the Sea Fury. I've now got to the painting stage - apart from making my own shade of that curious 'Hawker primer' colour for gear legs and wheel wells painting should be straight forward but I'm just a little disappointed that you can't do a 'striped' example from the kit directly..

Part 1 of this build on this blog here

.. what's on the bench?

 its sometimes hard enough getting down to some modelling let alone having to actually think about why I do what I do and write about it every week....but here's a blog post that I can write without too much thought - the bench!

My bench (below, click to see the full picture) perches on top of the dryer in my garage - it is literally a bench. Its about the size of a kitchen table - that's probably because it is an old kitchen table - minus its legs.

I have a few shelves and units up for displaying old models ..though the decent looking models go straight into old shoe boxes and storage..never to be seen again. I'm not too sure why; they sure aren't good enough for any sort of competition, I'm not a member of any club and I never display them anywhere. Perhaps one day I might invest in a display cabinet. Although all you can see here are 1:72nd scale aircraft I build armour, ships and cars - although I have yet to show anything like that here. There is also a pile of Kagero 'Topcolors' books on one of the shelves - you can't really beat this series for a quick walkaround or reference pic when in the middle of a busy modelling session - all my other reference is located away out of sight - except for the magazine pile which I reckon is about 10 feet high !

..funny no matter how organised I might be I always end up working in a tiny corner piece of what is quite a large working area while debris and kits and tools and paints pile up across the table top..
The Fw 190 artwork on the far shelf unit is a Thierry Dekker framed and signed original acrylic painted artwork. Thierry has been a friend of mine from way back when he was starting out with his profile artwork. We ended up doing a book together "Profile Hangar" which is still available from Thierry's blog..the radio/cassette on the shelf is tuned in permanently to 'France infos' and I listen to French radio programmes almost exclusively, so modelling is also a good time to learn new vocabulary and keep my language skills up to scratch.

As you can see I like to keep everything out and then I'm ready to go at a moment's notice - I try and do a little bit of 'something' at least once a day, but with quite a few part-started kits on the go, progress can sometimes be rather slow!
A view of the other side of the bench - another crammed table, more part-started kits and a few built-up ones on 'display'....

to see more benches at the following links..

yet another plastic modeller
Migrant's Wanderings
Gregs Models
digital sprue
Motorsport Modeller Blog
Jay's Scale Model Adventures