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Thank you Gil! It has been awhile hasn't it? Wow, the manufacturing plant has been humming along quite a bit! It feels great to have all this time to keep things going. It's time for another tour, the trams are waiting! All aboard! Starting in the Hangar again, you'll see that the Japanese OH-1 has finally got her markings on. This kit has been fighting me more than expected, but we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel: Not much more to do on that one. Since decals were being applied, the AH-56 Cheyenne got markings as well: Just for fun we added the main rotors to get a preview of what this one should look like when it's done: Next up it was time to paint the canopy so the whole thing was masked off with tape and a black base was painted on first since the paint is always so transparent on first pass: Here it is all painted up: I know the color looks dark here in this pic, but it is the same OD color. Another dry fit to see how well this canopy fits: Amazingly perfect fit for such an old mold! I love it! There was an ejector pin mark on the front of this canopy so we needed to sand that away and then polish the clear part to bring it back to standard. I didn't shoot pics of that, but we did install the cockpit permanently, after painting the front instrument panel. Here's a shot of the cockpit and instrument panel: Afterward we put on the two tail rotors: Finally the canopy was cemented into place. All that's left is a bit of touch up painting and this bird is done: Our next project is this AH-1Z that had the cockpit painted so it was finally enclosed inside the fuselage: We then started construction on the nose gun turret. Once the two halves were put together; we found that the bottom was open ended: You're looking at the bottom of that turret. We searched everywhere on the instruction sheet and sprues and found no trace of a part that is supposed to go there. So, out came the strip styrene. A bottom plate was fashioned and glued in place: I may put another larger plate on on top of that.... Once that was done, we assembled the gun... all four parts of it: Main rotors were than assembled: Engines, horizontal stabilizers, and stub wings were installed after that. I also added the small piece that holds the tail rotor on top of the tail. Here's the whole thing all ready for paint: That completes the Hangar portion of the tour. A brief detour through the shipyards shows that the RAF Rescue launch got some additional detail parts: Followed by the installation of her screws and rudders: Now on to the Motor Pool. A few things got painted with a base coat first. One was the troublesome HUMVEE that finally got a coat of US Desert Sand: The Swedish Assault gun also got a base coat of green drab: ...which was left over after basecoating this little gem: While those were drying we tried to assemble the wheels on the SdKfz 234 Pakwagen. After doing these two; I had enough. I'll do the other six later: After that, I decided to move forward on this Shelf Queen, which had been languishing for some time because first the decals went missing, then when they were found the instruction sheet went missing, then the decals disappeared again when the instruction sheet was found again. Finally after this happening four times, I was able to keep both and so we got the decals on this German Type SSYMS 80 flatcar: Some more detailing on that and it will be done. Next we had gloss coated the Cadillac Gage to add decals, but found that these had no markings. So this got a wash, followed by the addition of the machine guns on top: Then the dull coat went on: I found it quite interesting that the Testor's Dullcote frosted the wheels on this. First time that ever happened to me. The little piece of sprue is holding that turret machine gun up while it dries. I may even dig through my decal stash to add some decals to this, even though it went without markings. When the Cadillac Gage got the gloss coat, we also shot a gloss coat on the SAS Bushmaster, thinking that decals were provided for this as well. There were some but the instructions stated that this didn't really need them. We checked out where they would go and found that they go on rather difficult areas to apply them to so I decided to leave all off but one. More on that later. First, here's the Bushmaster after a brown wash over the gloss coat: I had not cemented the upper hull to the lower one on this because I still needed the interior painted. We pulled off the top and painted the interior; basic as it is. We had also installed the wheels and tires: Some of that interior might be seen through the rather large windows so I felt that was needed. Following that, We shot a dull coat on this; removed the masks and assembled the machine gun assembly on top. A few last detail parts were installed too. Here it is with the machine gun assembly dry fit to the top: Oh and that one decal I used, you'll see it in the finished post. Now that concludes our latest tour of Maddog Manufacturing. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you all for stopping in, comments are always welcome.

This acknowledges that there may be structural parts that would be outside of the single media criteria that may be used. Rivets, polycaps, screws or other mechanical fasteners, metal weights, etc. They are typically structural/internal and not for detail purposes