1945 GB

Nice to see the paint on, looking nice Stick.

Hey Stik, Your SU-76 is turning out quite nicely. I have to admit that it is an interesting subject and that you are doing a sweet job on that kit. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing the finished product.

Stik, On a side note, I owe you a few bravos, kudos and well done's on your Typhoon. It was right before you finished it up that I went into my months long distraction and I have yet to give you the accolades you deserve on your fantastic Typhoon. It really is an impressive effort on your part and you performed an amazing feat on detailing and finishing that kit. So, Thank you for sharing that build with us and for demonstrating your fine skills.

Hello again all,

Well I have had a good time following all the progress here. And some of the results are stunners.

Brandon, Bobby Gibbes' Spit has done you real credit. I have loved the way you have built up the camouflage colours - what brand paints do you use? And the decals and weathering have finished it up a treat.

Steve, i thought the PE work on the Indy was incredible, then you followed up with a great paint job. Must say my heart was in my mouth when you superglued it into a bucket of sawdust! But the result - just jumps to life and makes me want to throw up over the top rail...

CN - the Sherman has come up really well with the subdued weathering. Who could get through their modelling life without making a Sherman?

Stik - you have a model there I have wanted for a while, and you are doing a great job with it.

The Shinden has lurched forward one more step - I had a chance to get the green top coat on this weekend. I was happy with the result when I lifted the masking off the hinomaru. Not  a huge amount more to do, but I will put a semi gloss coat over to tie the  colours in a bit better.

And at my pace it could be a while yet anyway...

Wow, Your Shinden is looking great. Your hinomarus came out fantastic. Comforting to see someone else who builds at about the rate as myself. It may be slow going, but the results are definitely worth the wait. As I recall you were building most of this in a motel room. Is that still the case or are you back at the comforts of your bench?

I've also got a lot of catching up to do on others fine builds here and you were one of them on my list. I'm glad I can give you the credit you deserve on your gorgeous Shinden.

GM, Bish, Joe, and Lost, thanks for the kind words on getting the paint on. I feel much better getting to that point. Today I airbrushed on a coat of Future in preparation for decals and washes. I will be able to go full bore on that tomorrow as long as no real life bad luck intrudes. And I will get more photos posted...

Lost, your Shinden is indeed looking very sharp! I love the lines of that aircraft! So out of the ordinary.

I've been out of town since Sunday (no computer) so I've been missing all the progress.

stik, that's very impressive painting you've done, especially all the detail on the interior.  Turned out extremely well.

lost--nice Shinden; the colors make the whole thing especially appealing; Military colours probably aren't meant to make a fashion statement, but the combination of green and the red meatballs is looking really good.

Stikpusher - I'm loving the progress, and I commend you on including the figures. It'll really liven up that vehicle, and I'm sure you will do them justice.

Lostagain - Thank you for the kind words. I really like your Shinden, and especially the painted markings. Those look so nice. I am not at a place where I'm comfortable doing that yet, but one day I hope to! TO answer your question, I used Tamiya paints for the Spitfire, except for the spinner, which is Model Master insignia red. The tamiya paints are ocean gray, medium sea gray and RAF dark green straight from the bottle (but of course with the 50-percent white mix for the lightening coat.

Can't wait to see more progress on the Shinden!

-BD-

Thanks Brandon. An AFV is not complete without at least one crew figure. Especially if it is open topped like this one.

I like the SU-76 and must get one. I've seen the Mini-Art rendition praised as a kit but torched for having very fussy tracks. Never done metal tracks before and there are some for the 76 - widen the horizon.

Real world has been causing serious problems but things are getting under control. Pretty much finished with construction of IS2. This kit has been a headache made much worse by the worst instructions I've seen from anybody. I've got some yellow box Cyber Hobby and I may dump the lot. Tamiya bends over to give multiple views of how each stage should look after assembly - CH Yellow Box dispenses with that altogether. Incredible.

I haven't done Magic Tracks for a while and they actually came out okay, although I may fix one on the top if it's visible. I did luck out. I've always used Testors cement (or orange bottle Tamiya) because it takes so long to set. But I'm a great fan of Annie's Tacky Glue - use it on everything somewhere - and decided to follow the advice of Phil Flory who's an aviation specialist. But he recommended the first cement used be PVA - so I thought I'd give it a try. Good thing too. I had the MT mostly complete with weights on for sag, figuring I'd finish the next day. I finished five days later. But because PVA was the main glue, along with a streak of Testors up the middle, the MTs were still very flexible. The MTs did drive home one point - the Stalin was one whopping big tank especially with that huge gun.

Some heavy weathering to come. I'm going to send mine to help Zhukov drive into Pomerania after mid-February 45. So we'll be done some more fading white wash but hopefully work in some late winter snow/ice in a nice Pomeranian town. Nasty fighting. It'll be a challenge to put the thing in the remains of a nice tidy Prussian village. 

I've also stumbled into some neat techniques and tools. Woes and cheers will explained in the eventual build log.

Eric

Thanks EB. This really is a nifty little kit. Although as I said it is a bit on the clunky side and the armor panels are certainly over scale thickness. But hey, it looks like an SU-76 to me. I cant say anything one way or the other about the Miniart kit aside from they are out of my price range. And still having another of these in my stash I have no need for another.

So here is today's update:

Future airbrushed on yesterday and allowed to dry overnite

decals applied this morning- I modified and combined the kit decals for a generic Battle of Berlin vehicle

and this afternoon I have done the detail painting, including a white recognition stripe applied to many Soviet vehicles during the Berlin battle

I will get another coat of Future on in the morning and then commence to washes, etc, later tomorrow...

Nice work on both these Soviet behemoths.

Well, I don't think the SU-76 would make the behemoth league. Only weighed about 12 tons but it carried the T-34 gun so it could do serious damage to many German AFVs (PZ IVs, Stugs, Marders etc) not to mention soft skin vehicles (which dwarfed tanks in numbers in all armies) and ground support. A really clever design. (The US M10 was twice the weight.) The Stalin was a whopper in dimensions with a huge 122mm gun - but not really sure why a tank that big had the relatively low weight of 46 tons - about the same as a Panther but considerably lighter than a Tiger. But in one variation or another the basic Stalin was in service well into the Cold War. I recently bought a US Army study of German tank destroyers and it mentions that Soviet armor was not of particularly high quality during WWII. And simplicity of construction also no doubt kept unwanted weight down. Anyway it had the makings of a classic tank design although in US terms it would have been beastly on crewmen - especially if they were over 5'10''. Don't think Stalin put crew comfort high on the priority list.

Eric

When my SU-76 is all done I'll pose it with my IS-2 for a good size comparison of the two. Regarding the IS-2's weight, I think that one way the Soviets pared it down was by the arrangement of the armor. It was not uniformly heavily armored all around, but pretty much only in the frontal arc. The thickness and angles of the castings were quite well designed. But as you said at the expense of crew comfort. And yes, the IS-3's final variant, the T-10 did serve well into the Cold War, being phased out of secondary service in the late 70's or so. I remember in 1983 still being taught that one as a possible tank to be encountered on the battlefield. I know that the Israelis fought them in 1967.

Today was a day of washes. On the 76, and on the crew figures... and a lot of time spent waiting for oil washes to dry up for clean up or another application.

The SU-76, wash on- wash off... actually cleaned up and with some left behind

and most of my time was spend on figure washes. I have several going, just to fill the time and make it so the mixed washes didn't go to waste. Allied and Axis, most are MiniArt and some a Dragon. There are actually more going but these are a few that are examples.

a close up of my Russkies

and next to their ride

Tomorrow- flat coat, dry brushing and final weathering...

I had a really interesting day with the airbrush. First, I went back through a large number of threads concerning Russian green used on tanks. No agreement - ranged from something very like a light olive drab to an almost forest green to anything you want because Russian paints were not standardized. (Someone really jumped on that one - I know one of America's top experts on Soviet WWII tank production and he stresses that the big tank complexes were designed to create as many parts of the tank as possible to avoid inevitable delays when using large numbers of sub-contractors - US tanks were closer in cost to German than to Russian because of dispersed nature of our more mature industrial base. Anyway, as of now I don't dismiss the possibility that the big factories created their own paints and Soviet attention to detail wasn't famous.) I looked at a lot of pics, museum pieces (I used to see a pair of T-34s at the Brandenberg Gate daily in 1972) and line drawings. Mike Rinaldi suggests LifeColor Dark Green UAO91 (approx FS34079). Looks more like a British tank green than US OD, but not a deep green. I respect Rinaldi and it looked as close as anything to a number of color pics. 

I've got a Vallejo conversion chart and LC DkGr is identical to Model Color 893 US Dark Green. Obviously I could have used the Vallejo - looked good and I'm very used to airbrushing with it. But I really wanted to try a new type of acrylic paint from Golden arguably the best art house acrylic paints/mediums producer on the planet. The new type is called High Flow. (Chris Floodberg on Model Warship plugged it - I felt a little dull - I've used Golden Fluids for years and I hadn't heard of the new line.) There are no military colors so you have to mix, but that's a kick for me - and I'm getting better at it with experience. Golden's pigments are identical across the viscosity range, but the type I've always used are Fluid Acrylics - very like Vallejo Model Color in viscosity. A little learning curve to airbrush with it, but I've used it on many kits - a couple were exclusive. I am a fan - and when it comes to hand painting you can't do better. High Flow replaced their old "Air Brush" brand which was more for canvas, plaster, wood. The new stuff is a variation on Fluid Acrylics. It's a little like Vallejo Model Color (Golden Fluids) & Vallejo Model Air (Golden High Flow). That's the idea but the difference is larger in the Golden line. There's a trade-off, but HIgh Flow is dynamite paint. (About $4 per ounce - wonderful bottles in both - and really durable paints: haven't had a bad bottle yet and some are well over two years old.)

Pros for High Flow is an extremely low viscosity (I didn't use any thinning agent - I do with Model Air): it has some chemical brew designed to slow the drying process. That's the main trade off. If you hurried and laid down a few coats right after the other to get a full cover, I think the paint would take half an hour to do a basic cure. Bad if you're in a hurry. However, if you're willing to use low psi and several coats (I used an initial mist, followed by three increasingly heavy coats and it laid down perfectly. I don't have much choice because in St. Paul I use a Chinese knock off of the Iwata Silverline compressor, so 15psi is tops regardless.) There was absolutely zero drying on the tip of my Iwata Eclipse (.35 nozzle) and it was a breeze to clean. And if you do use light coats it dries in a few minutes - ideally I'd let it dry for five minutes, but I did it faster. Golden pigments are splendid and opacity is very clear on the label - their Titanium White and Carbon Black are the most opaque paints of those colors I've seen. (Golden does not use dyes for pigments so it's possible that some of their earth colors might be a tight squeeze in an ultra thin nozzle like .15 on my HS Infinity.

The brew I made up was half neutral gray; maybe 15% raw umber; 15% SAP Green and bits of light sienna and green gold to lighten things a bit. The batch was almost identical to the MC 893 sample I used. I like the color a lot - whether Stalin would approve I don't know. This model is going to get some heavy weathering and complex modulation would be a waste of time. However it was going over Vallejo German Gray surface primer (great stuff) and if you gave sun exposed areas an extra coat, areas where you'd expect shadow are darker in hue. Wethering begins directly. Decals pretty soon, but the kit came without them - I'd like to think it was a packing error but there are no numbers attached to decals on their painting schemes. Also no tow cables. We'll figure something out. Pics below:

Eric

As far as Soviet Greens go, compared to the stuff I've seen in real life here and there, TLAR (That Looks About Right) ;)

and now for today's update:

I tried a Future/Tamiya Flat Base mixture for my Flat Coat. It looks a little more frosted under the flash here than it does to the Mk.I eyeball in daylight. I think this will be a good alternative once I get my mix ratios worked out. But it does have a good weather worn appearance.

Then I did some drybrushing. But  I forgot to take a couple of photos before I went to the next step, adding the Burnt Umber on the running gear... ah well...

And finally a coat of Raw Sienna over the Burnt Umber

I am still gonna add a few stowage items and another light dust coat, in addition to the crew figures. But no time for that today because it's off to AMPS ...

Stik, that's looking really nice. I have used the future Tamiya flat mix a few times and I do rather like it. I usually start with the mix heavy on the future then add a little more flat if needed. I do like the white strips on the sides and front as well. It would be to easy to mask those and have nice neat lines, but they look just as I imagine they would have done, perfectly untidy.

Nicely weathered, stik.  Looks very good.

CMK & Bish, thanks for looking in and commenting. The Future/Flat Base mix is a nice option to add to my workbench. I can see some possibilities with playing with the mix ratios.

Bish, as far as the ID stripes go. I had some decals in my stash that would have worked, but then I came across this photo, and figured the nice rough look was what I wanted.

You defiantly made the right choice. I doubt the Soviet troops applying them had some nice masking tape or even an airbrush to put them on with. A quick swipe with a paint brush would have been all it got.

I have seen these stripes before, am I right in thinking they were applied for the Battle of Berlin.

Stik: I really like what you have done with the SU-76. Your detail painting and weathering are very well done. I also like the hand painted white ID stripes.

Eric: Sweet paint work on the IS-2. Overall it's coming out nicely. I'm no authority on Russian armor, but I like your take on the green. Also, I want you to know that your M8 and your Jagdpanzer IV. They are both excellent builds. The weathering you applied, especially to the M8, is quite superb. I always enjoy your analysis and the detail you put into setting up each model. Thank You.

Joe, thanks for the kind feedback. I still have a bit more to do, but it is now at about the 98% point.

Bish, I am not well read on the subject, but from what I have come across, the white ID stipe was applied for the Berlin campaign. I did recently read that it was also applied on vehicles head towards the Elbe link up as a method to help prevent "friendly fire" incidents between the Western Allies and the Soviets in that AO as well. But from photos it appears that this was not universally applied to all Soviet AFVs involved.

Makes sense to have applied it then. And given the chaos that things must have been then, I am not surprised some vehicles didn't carry it.

I made a start of the P-61 tonight, so will hopefully have some pics in a few days.

I now need to get caught up on the remaining builds here that I have yet to acknowledge. I can only hope that each individual is still checking in here so that you may know how much I've enjoyed each of your efforts.

Steve: What can I say? I am absolutely in complete awe of your USS Indianapolis. That is an incredibly stunning and impressive build. Your PE work is excellent as well as the fine paint job. And then there's your turbulent seas representation. Absolutely awesome!!! Your skills and techniques are certainly top notch. Also, Thank you for the very detailed and well executed progress presentation. You've certainly given me some tips to work off of when I finally get into building a ship model. Bravo Steve. BRAVO!!

jibber: Your locomotive is one fabulous subject. I am quite astonished at your skills. Your locomotive is beautifully represented and just amazingly detailed. The overall presentation is very realistic and impressive.

Doug: Wow! I didn't realize you had such auto modeling skills (yes I did. Just wanted to be dramatic). You have done an absolutely excellent job on your '45 Ford. Great subject by the way. Superb work on the paint job. Incredibly well done my friend.

Andrew: Your Stuka came out fantastic. Really like your painting and weathering techniques. Definitely produces some fine results. Beautiful work sir.

Brandon: Gotta give you another round of love there on your Spitfire. You've done an impressive job on it by all means. Like I mentioned over on your WIP, Thanks for the tips and advice for when I build mine. Just nice work.

castelnouvo: That is a sharp looking Sherman. Very nice paint and weathering. Very excellent work on your part.

plasticjunkie: Sweet Mustang. The NMF came out great. I sure hope can achieve similar results on my P-47 redo. Thank You for sharing your P-51 with us.

Whew! I believe I've caught up with each one of you. Again, I am taken aback by the overall quality and skill of all the builds. Great job everyone. Sure is an awesome GB so far.

Alrighty, as promised, here is some pics of the parts of my P-47 that I had completed previous to this rebuild.

Cowling with engine and prop:

The R2800 engine. This was my very first attempt at wiring a radial engine:

And the rest of the accessories:

I made the brake lines on the landing gear out of copper wire.

I've made a start on the new cockpit. This time around I will be using an Ultracast seat w/ harnesses rather than the kit seat w/ PE seat belts.In order to do this I have to make some modifications as the seat bracket on the Ultracast seat is slightly wider than the kits. Thus, I've had to widen the mounting holes in the floor and drill out holes in the back armor plate in which I will mount sprue rod to create new mounting posts for the back of the seat bracket. I've almost got this done. I'll get some pics of the modification later.

Very commendable progress, Joe.  What you've accomplished is pleasing to the eye.

Thank you Joe, speaking of good work... your doing a super job on your P-47 , keep it up!

Doug

Stick... Very cool subject and Very well executed!

Doug

I've been working on the Jeep the past few days. So, I'll try to get a .  or ., if I don't get sidetrackedI got an MRC Mash helicopter, So I'll be posting pics of it in the Helicopters pages