AMK's 1/72nd L29 Delfin

With thanks to Martin Wilson of AMK, here are some quick sprue shots of the brand new 1/72nd L29 Delfin which my valiant postman has just delivered to my grubby mits.

It's packaged in the beautiful way we have come to expect of AMK, in those lovely re-sealable little bags that crackle so wonderfully when you handle them! A few pics of the "flat bits" first. . .

 

 The instructions aren't actually a booklet as it appears, but  fold out map style. 
 

Five schemes are offered in the kit, a lovely selection of schemes, but I'm particularly smitten with the Egyptian aircraft with red undersides! That's my one.
 

Nice little etched fret with flap details and some other minor buts, although surprisingly no seatbealts.

And so onto the main sprues - four small grey sprues , two of which are duplicates. Beautifully moulded in that superb medium grey plastic, pretty much the best quality plastic in the business. Detail is superb - I know some think AMK's surface detail may be a touch heavy, but as a purely personal thing I really like it. I'll probably replace the moulded in pitots on the wings with some Albion Alloys tubing, but otherwise I'm hoping for a quick, simple build.

And finally a beautifully clear canopy sprue, not much to say here - just look!

And. . that's it for now, just a quick share of what's in the kit. I'll be starting it in the next half hour or so (yes, really!) and hope to spend only a few days on this bank holiday weekend  getting it largely done. Stay tuned!

Many thanks to Martin Wilson of AMK for the kit, and many thanks to AMK for delving into my favourite scale and making me a happy man! 

Drewe's Model Blog: Airliner!

Drewe's Model Blog: Airliner!: So, while waiting for the postman (men) to turn up with the next set of projects for the magazine, I had a space on my workbench. Every now ...

Airliner!

So, while waiting for the postman (men) to turn up with the next set of projects for the magazine, I had a space on my workbench. Every now and then I take a shot at an airliner. I've had Revell's baby Airbus, the A319 in my stash since it was released, and decided to do a quick build of that, utilising only what's in the kit - no aftermarket decals, windows or details. So after a few evenings of leisurely modelling, here we are:-

 Although a simple build, the kit does have some flash and sink marks that need to be dealt with - you can see along the wings around the spoilers and ailerons, where an application of Mr Surfacer 500 has been sanded back to deal with those marks. It's nothing bad, but these are the details which lift a model. The engines, however, needed some work. They are simple halves which trap fans and exhausts, leaving a tricky seam. So I cut the noses off at the rear of the fan recess, assembled and sanded the internal seams and then then added the fans back in before joining the noses to their nacelles

 Usng a fine saw to remove the noses, they glue back in place very nicely. Some clean up will be required along that join, and I may lose some detail on the nacelles themselves, but in this small scale I'm not too worried.

These pics just show a bit of the work required on the fuselage and wing seams - nothing drastic, just careful filling and sanding.

 
 That's all for now!
 

So, what I'm doing. . . .

At the beginning of the year I embarked on one of my semi-regular armour binges, inspired by the Takom Chieftain, I had been awaiting a new Chieftain for a quarter of a century, so it was almost inevitable that in amongst the plethora of new Chinese manufacturer and their prolific output, that a Chieftain would show up eventually. . and here it was! So that was the start. . I'll post some pictures in due course when I re-shoot it.

But that led on to the Meng Leopard 2A4. I had made a mess of one of these last September, but it was my fault, not the kit's, so having another go seemed only fair. Some lessons learned from the ruined one were applied and it all went pretty well. And this was the result.

 Using the techniques for base painting from my good friend Spencer Pollard, I used very light shades of base colours - the base green is in fact Tamiya XF-71 cockpit green, a very pale grey-green colour, with significantly lightened XF-68 red/brown and Panzer grey for the black. 

I tend to keep my armour models on the light side weathering wise - some filters darkened the green down and made it more olive, and aside from that just some pin washes, drybrushing and sprayed dust.

But overall I was pretty happy, and I hope you agree!

With that one complete I still had the Leopard bug, however. So I looked at the recent Revell Leopard 2A4 that I had on the stash and decided to see how it stacked up. How does it stack up against Meng's? Well. . . okay. It was a fun build. I chose the Greek option with it's variation on the MERDC camouflage. 

 This one was painted with Mr Color lacquers over a Stynylrez primer. Whilst painting some of the colours looked a little "off" 

 But I think after varnishing and weathering they look pretty much spot on , and it was a great opportunity to practice my freehand airbrushing

 The kit builds up pretty well, and is much less complex than the Meng one, sometimes to it's detriment, sometimes not. But all of the vinyl is basically unusable, and this is a HUGE shortcoming - enough to make me think twice about building another. Of the vinyl parts the tracks were replaced by AFV club plastic link by link (each vinyl track comes in two parts for a start WHY?!?) , the tow cables with the sublime Eureka XXL brass and resin replacements, and the mudguards were scratch-built from .010" plastic card using the kit parts as a pattern. Really basic stuff but lifted the kit greatly.

I'm really proud of this one, it came out exactly as I wanted, and gives me great pleasure to share it

So that was my armour adventures in the first quarter of 2016 - next will be either a Shilka (Meng) or AMX-13 (Takom), with an outside chance of a Type-10 (Tamiya). . . but I reserve the right to change me min. . . Oh look, a squirrel!

(Pics of the Chieftain soon, I promise!)  

Back To It!

Over the last couple of years since I last posted here much has changed - I'm now writing for magazines on a frequent basis, am a bit more involved in some aspects of the industry (in a VERY minor way just to be clear) , and I feel maybe a little increasing of my footprint web-side may be in order. So I'll hope to add some stuff to this here blog thingymajigg from time to time and maybe encourage some conversation. 

See you soon!