For those interested: all aboard the trams now for our next tour.
As always, we'll start in the Hangar...
Quite a bit has been done here, particularly since I've been sick and tired of some of these long term shelf queens. This particular one comes to mind:
The A-400 I started six years ago has been fighting me almost constantly. While I was applying the decals for the French Armee del'Air in this first bay, the main landing gear and nose gear constantly broke:
Because almost all of that won't be seen, I decided to try some out-of-the-box thinking to make these landing gear stronger. Here's one technique we used, gluing an angled piece to the main gear to support the forked wheels:
That's just one example; the rest glued just fine and I was able to finally call this beast done! One Shelf Queen finally off the Shelf of Doom!
Moving on to the next bay, we were able to slather a bunch of Mr. Surfacer 500 over the Spitfire Mk. VIII, give the number of crazy gaps and seams we had after gluing it together:
After a good amount of sanding, things started looking better on this Mk.VIII:
Once I was satisfied with our sanding job, we added the canopy and windscreen to this so we could mask it all later and get ready for paint:
I was very pleased with the fit of this.
The Spitfire Mk. XIV in the bay next door, did not need nearly as much attention, a good sanding took care of those issues. However, I did lose the little cockpit door so we replaced it with some sheet styrene:
Later on that canopy and windscreen went on too:
While we were doing canopies and windscreens, we decided to finish off the canopy/windscreen assembly on the Me-110 as well. All six parts fit together nicely:
Finally in this last bay, our improved cockpit assembly for the Tu-95 Bear was test fit inside the forward fuselage halves to see how it looks. It's a vast improvement over the kit supplied parts:
The forward fuselage halves were taped together and then taped to the rear fuselage assembly to see how this beastie is gonna look. She's a long one indeed as you can see by the Exacto blade next to it:
All we have to do is add some 50kg's of nose weight to this before we can close it up. Shouldn't be too long if I can recover quickly enough.
That's all that's happening in the Hangar for now. We'll bypass the Shipyards as they've been dormant for a bit and move on to the Motor Pool...
Here in the Motor Pool, we started a little Ford Model A car in 1/72 scale from Zebrano. It's a cool little car that started well:
I can't wait to start the little Stakebed truck I got and place it next to this!
Moving on, we found another Shelf Queen languishing in this back bay since 2015. It had been started for a "Modern Armor Group Build" on a Forum I left long ago, and while cleaning out the Motor Pool, we found it back here. Wheels were missing from it, and idler had broken off, but it was overall intact. It was time to start moving forward on this.
First of all, this is my Swedish Leopard 2A6, and here is what it looked like once the wheels were all glued back on. It is a Revell kit and was quite brittle after all this time. So, to preserve the wheels as much as possible, we took the one run of track and glued it to the bottom of the main roadwheels and then to the idler and drive sprockets to hold everything together:
The tracks don't wrap up far enough on either side, but it is enough to at least keep everything together. We can add more tracks later to close things up. You can also see we started the second of the three color splinter camouflage.
Later, the third color got applied. It was a mix with a gloss green to try and get the closest match to a field green I could so once I gloss this, decal it, and then flat coat it; everything should blend:
Another couple steps and another long term Shelf Queen will be off the Shelf of Doom....
Finally, I decided we should tackle the Armory ZSU-23-4 Shilka. Now you'll see why I am reluctant to get more Armory Shilka variants.
First, the four lower hull parts were glued together. Looks simple right? There was an interesting amount of shaving that was needed to make these parts fit this way, as the flash was so misleading:
And now for the craziness to begin. I shot all the first four steps of the lower hull assembly so you can see how much was needed to do even before adding the torsion bars for the roadwheels! The hull should show you how tiny these parts were too:
That pic above shows steps one, two and three for the lower hull. Next I thought we could start on the upper hull. Again, six parts to build this before getting to the hatches and engine deck details. It's obvious Armory does not have slide mold tech. I understand it is expensive for many smaller companies, but it shouldn't be too hard to simplify things a bit to make this fun. I don't mind detail parts but to break things down for the sake of adding to the parts count, is not cool. It did go together a bit better than the lower hull:
I decided to test fit the upper and lower hulls; as you can see from the inside, they will need a bit of finagling to sit right:
One other critique on this kit: there are no numbers and letters stamped on the sprue. One has to follow the sprue map on the instruction sheet:
That makes thing tough when you have to keep flipping back and fourth to find where the part is on what sprue. Once more larger parts start getting used, finding parts like this will be even more difficult to find, thus complicating this build even more. I've dealt with worse, so yes, this will get finished.
Well, that completes this short tour of Maddog Manufacturing again. Thank you to all who have joined this latest tour. Comments are always welcome.