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DaveDeLang

IPMS/USA Member
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Everything posted by DaveDeLang

  1. It might be too late for this build, but you can keep the braided line from squishing flat by running thin solder into it before forming. I do that with vinyl tube brake lines on motorcycle kits too. Anyway, it looks great so far.
  2. I believe Airfix have a Victor in the pipeline, not sure if it's a B.1 though
  3. You could use PE railing with Micro Kristal Kleer for the canvas covered railings. I bet that would look the part. I've got the Niko USS Vermont, BB-20 in the stash. I really should pull that out.
  4. Nice job on sweet little kit. I think this kit would be a good choice for a single kit group build. I put one together a few years ago and really enjoyed it.
  5. I was walking back to the car at the Region 1 Noreastcon with a box of models, my wife was walking behind me with another box. As I opened the doors on the back of the car I heard a crash. She clipped the mirror with the corner of the box and dumped the entire contents, five models, two of them winners, onto the parking lot. I think they're repairable, I just haven't gotten up the will to start trying yet. It's a little ironic that the model of the USS Montpelier is now a little more accurate in portraying her at the time I built the kit...it was just after her mishap with the USS San Jacinto....
  6. The Fairey logos on the seat backs are a very nice touch.
  7. USS Coral Sea, angle deck. The ship was in service for 50 years and the only kit is the truly ancient Revell flat-bottomed carpet toy from the late '50s.
  8. I just finished my ACE Models PRP-3, battlefield reconnaissance vehicle. It was based on the BMP-1. The turret was replaced with a larger, two man turret and the 76mm gun of the BMP was replaced with a 7.62mm MG. It had a surveillance radar mounted on the back of the turret equipped with a fold-down antenna and an 80mm mortar mounted on the top, rear of the hull. I believe it was a breech loaded tube able to be loaded from inside the vehicle. Since the PRP-3 was an artillery recon track, I'm guessing the mortar was used for target marking. The kit was by ACE from Ukraine. It's a low-pressure injection molded kit with nice surface detail but very prominent mold seams and lots of flash. It was quite a bit of work to clean up the pieces, but trimming and testing produced pretty good fit. Out of the box except I replaced the mortar tube with Evergreen rod, added wire brush guards to the headlights and added a tiny bit of lead foil to the stowage straps on the side of the turret to give them some relief. I also drilled out the headlights and spotlight, punched out foil disks for reflectors and built up Micro Kristal Klear lenses. The headlights were shined up with Future and the spotlight got several coats of Tamiya clear red to represent an IR spotlight and add some color. I saw pics on the web of either red or clear spotlights so I chose the red. Weathering was a filter of Holbein burnt umber and a filter of Holbein "monochrome tint warm" which is a sort of beige. Then a dot filter of various colors I happen to have: white, black, gray, beige, burnt umber... Then, a no-name pigment I got at a railroad model store mixed with water. I slopped it on the lower surfaces, let it dry and then scrubbed most of it off with a stiff paint brush. Vision blocks are just little rectangles of dark blue decal that I cut out of an old RF-4B tail decal. I got this kit at the GraniteCon raffle a few years ago and including all the materials used, I've got about three bucks in it. Take that Friul Boys!
  9. I just finished my ACE Models PRP-3, battlefield reconnaissance vehicle. It was based on the BMP-1. The turret was replaced with a larger, two man turret and the 76mm gun of the BMP was replaced with a 7.62mm MG. It had a surveillance radar mounted on the back of the turret equipped with a fold-down antenna and an 80mm mortar mounted on the top, rear of the hull. I believe it was a breech loaded tube able to be loaded from inside the vehicle. Since the PRP-3 was an artillery recon track, I'm guessing the mortar was used for target marking. The kit was by ACE from Ukraine. It's a low-pressure injection molded kit with nice surface detail but very prominent mold seams and lots of flash. It was quite a bit of work to clean up the pieces, but trimming and testing produced pretty good fit. Out of the box except I replaced the mortar tube with Evergreen rod, added wire brush guards to the headlights and added a tiny bit of lead foil to the stowage straps on the side of the turret to give them some relief. I also drilled out the headlights and spotlight, punched out foil disks for reflectors and built up Micro Kristal Klear lenses. The headlights were shined up with Future and the spotlight got several coats of Tamiya clear red to represent an IR spotlight and add some color. I saw pics on the web of either red or clear spotlights so I chose the red. Weathering was a filter of Holbein burnt umber and a filter of Holbein "monochrome tint warm" which is a sort of beige. Then a dot filter of various colors I happen to have: white, black, gray, beige, burnt umber... Then, a no-name pigment I got at a railroad model store mixed with water. I slopped it on the lower surfaces, let it dry and then scrubbed most of it off with a stiff paint brush. Vision blocks are just little rectangles of dark blue decal that I cut out of an old RF-4B tail decal. I got this kit at the GraniteCon raffle a few years ago and including all the materials used, I've got about three bucks in it. Take that Friul Boys!
  10. I'm with Kevin and Noel. My dad bought a Pocher Rolls Royce back around '75 and even as a kid (well, high school kid) I thought the detail was iffy and the engineering such that it would take a LOT of very careful work to make it look good. The kit was lost, part-built when the house burnt in about '90. The individual spoke wheels were kind of cool.
  11. Probably the same place as a kit for my Honda PC800 Pacific Coast. In my dreams. If it's not a Harley or a race/sport bike, there's probably not a kit for it. Tamiya released a few cruiser/standard types in the past, but not any recently that I've heard of. The sad fact is that the only people who would be interested in a kit of a Deauville or a Pacific Coast are people who have the real thing and there's not nearly enough of us to finance such a kit. I want kits of the Honda RC45 and Harley VR1000. I'm a little surprised there aren't kits of those.
  12. Fine. Where's the rest of the ship? Half a battleship? Rick L. At the risk of showing my age...it's like the old AMC Gremlin commercial, "Hey Mista, where the rest of your car?"
  13. Oh, yes. Inquiring minds want to know! That looks fabulous!
  14. Ah, I didn't see anything in the post that reflected that. Sorry about the pedantry but "ultimate" is so often used with the intent of meaning "best", not merely "last", and "penultimate" really confuses some people.
  15. umm, "penultimate" means "next to last". Is that what you meant?
  16. I use a sewing machine needle chucked into a pin vice to start the line as I find it easier to guide. A couple of light passes with that, and then I freehand it with the UMM scriber to cut a clean line. I find I can do straight lines free had okay with the needle line as a guide and by using good magnification so I can watch the tip of the UMM scriber. I think the sewing machine needle works better than a regular needle because of its thicker shank and less acute point. Plus I believe the sewing machine needle's steel is harder to stand up to the pounding a sewing machine puts into it. I didn't know UMM had a smaller version of the scriber. I'll have to snag one of those since I'm a Disciple of the One True Scale.
  17. A store that sells automotive paint products is a good place to get sandpaper. You can get grits down to 2000 at least. Using wet or dry sandpaper with water increases the effective smoothness of the sanding and also makes the paper last longer and softens it so it conforms to the shape of what you're sanding better. I got a pack of about 100 sheets each of 2000 grit and 1200 grit for about 20 bucks apiece at a "swap meet" at a car show from one of those tables that sell cheap tools. They'll probably last the rest of my life. You can also make sanding blocks by using double stick foam picture mounting tape to fasten sandpaper to balsa wood sticks, or even just wrapping the sandpaper around both sides of the double stick foam tape. It has enough rigidity to make a fairly good sanding pad all by itself. Also, all model putties aren't the same. The finer the grain of the putty, the better it will fill small scratches and "feather" out to a thin edge. I use 3M Acryl Blue (also from an auto-paint store), there's also Acryl Green and Red. I'm not sure what the exact differences are but the blue is a very pale shade and paint covers it well. Any automotive putty listed as a "glazing putty" will work. They're laquer based and so they stink and shrink, but they dry so fast you can apply multiple thin coats, allowing each to dry and be sanded in one modeling session with no problem.
  18. I know I'm a cry-baby but the auto scroll bugs the heck out of me. I hate stuff that moves in the background, ads like that drive me nuts, too. I know, get a life...I figure there's no harm in asking though.
  19. another hint/tip in metric/inch conversion is 1mm is almost exactly .040 inch.
  20. It's not that hard to paint them. I did it on a 1/700 Nimitz once. Paint the deck white or yellow or whatever color the stripes are and then mask them with bits of masking tape. It probably isn't "much" harder than laying the stripes out in a graphics application and printing them and they'll look much better. The two color stripes aren't that hard, either, pant it one color, mask (and it can be wider than the stripe will end up, the "dashes" just need to be the right length, then paint the second color. Then remove the masking for the "dashes" and use thin strips of tape to mask the total stripe and paint the deck color. Check the timeframe of when you're representing her, details of color and pattern changed. I think early on, most of the deck was a gray and the actual landing area "runway" was quite a bit darker. Later on the decks were almost black when fresh non-skid was applied, maybe Tamiya NATO black darkness. It faded as it aged to maybe gunship gray darkness or a little lighter. I also used a trick to do the skid marks in the landing area. I made a small stencil from a file card by cutting about 20 little rectangular slits in it and airbrushed black through in onto the deck in the center of the landing area. Then moved it a little and sprayed again. I kept doing that until the "skid marks" were overlapping in a rough oval centered on the #3 wire's area with a few "bad landings" extending up to the #4 and back to the #1 wires. Sorry, no pictures, that was years and years ago when the Italeri kit first came out. Pretty nice kit as I remember. Sorry, no pictures, that was years and years ago when the Italeri kit first came out. Pretty nice kit as I remember.Sorry, no pictures, that was years and years ago when the Italeri kit first came out. Pretty nice kit as I remember.Sorry, no pictures, that was years and years ago when the Italeri kit first came out. Pretty nice kit as I remember. Or, check "Starfighter Decals" http://www.starfight...om/1700-de.html He makes a sheet for the Enterprise and is a real nice guy to boot! Oops, just saw Rusty had already posted Starfighter's stuff. Sorry!
  21. I looked at my kit. It just has bumps around the intake lip. No antennae either.
  22. I believe that Talos kit was never re-released after the original '57-'58 molding. One comment on the build, it's missing the four fuzing antennae around the ramjet's intake, or at least, I can't see them if they're there.
  23. Since you said it turned white, I'm guessing it's a clear area? Can you cut away the decal film? That way you can get a second dab of future onto the whitened area without the decal film impeding it.
  24. Okole Luna - Means "butt above" literally, "Bottoms Up" figuratively in Hawai'ian.
  25. Here's a picture of some men standing in front of the base of a cage mast. It shows the size of the tubing used in its construction: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h91000/h91202.jpg It looks about 4 inches in diameter to me. That would be just short of .012" in 1/350th. Here's an article that describes how to make one. http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/dio/Old_Navy/part-1-jl/jl-index.html One thing, there were more pieces at the bottom than there were at the top. I think they reduced in number in two spots. For a model you can probably overlook that fact.
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