I can't do anything with the Albatross for a week as I'm away for a week with work. What I was thinking was taking an old toothbrush to the powdery residue and try and get the worst of it off. Maybe some very  fine sandpaper before a recoat. Or lots of cotton swabs and white spirit...

Doc

Dr Win

completed Albatross. Until I sprayed the varnish on the underside. It now looks like its been snowed on with the powdery white deposit that came out of the can instead of Humbrol matt varnish. There ensued a great wailing and gnashing of teeth... I'm going to have to try and salvage it somehow. ...

Doc 

Hey Dr. Win:

By any chance did you thin the paint for the Albatros with isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol ? ... if so, a spray of Dullcote will produce exactly the same effect(s) as you're describing ... and ... as you've found out, a shot of Glosscote fixes the problem ...

It's a weathering technique I use all the time on my model railroad cars and structures ...

Here's an exaple:

Straight build right out of the box ...

This,  after spraying decanted Dullcote thinned with alcohol ... to reverse the effect, just spray again with Glosscote ...

pepper

Squadrons Armor in Korea book has this pic of a GMC 353 Mobile Canteen Truck ;

I saw this CMK resin 'Clubmobile' accessory over at Hannants and ordered one to use on my second Heller GMC truck ;

Gotta feed the troops ......

                              John

Excellent John!  Glad you are looking out for the morale of the trooops.  Speaking of morale, thanks for the compliments on the 'stangs.

John, the searchlight truck and M15 are looking good.  I got my Airfix M3 and Revell M16 in the other day.  The Airfix especially looks good.  I won a Milicast stowage set on ebay for it.  It isn't as nice as the Black Dog version you bought, but it will do the trick.  I think I will have to get the Black Dog one too at some point.  I like that it has stowage for the GPA also.  I also ordered some diecast .30 cals.  I did it for the 3 water cooled versions that come in the set.  They are also on vehicle mounts.  I want to mount some on jeeps.  There is a good picture of some jeeps from the 24th Infantry Regiment USA with them, in the Concord book.  They look cool!

Cheers,

Greg

Hey Pepper, that looks exactly like what's happened to my Albatross fuselage. It is odd, however, I've built the fuselage and the wings as separate assembles, the paint is the same, Humbrol No11 Chrome silver thinned with white spirit and airbrushed on. I've used the same varnish type - Humbrol Matt 49 from a rattle can, the wings were fine with the old can, but with the new can the above happened. So I'm not  sure why its done it. But I will try a gloss coat on it next weekend. If that doesn't work, I'll have to strip it down and put an appeal for decals...

Doc

Doc , No problems getting some replacement decals for your Albatross ;

One of my three SA-16B birds is going to be finished in an overall black scheme with red lettering ....

The 581st Air Resupply and Communications Wing (ARCW) , were based on Cho-do and Paengyong-do islands off the North Korean coast , rescuing allied airmen as well as inserting and extracting agents along the coastal mud flats .

I plan on doing an all black SB-17 and a H-19 as well , so I'll have a spare set of SA-16B Albatross decals just in case you need some .

                         John .

John, thank you for the offer, if things don't go well with the Albatross next weekend, I'll be in touch! Look forward to seeing the black one and the SB-17...

Doc

DP&SP: thanks for the help guys. Going to have to do some web-searching to correct the uniforms.

Dr. Win: Think I commented about a month ago about the same thing happening to me on a IJA SPG that I'd spent about two months painting and weathering. Hope you're able to fix the situation. Really ticks me off to do all that work and then have it go bad at the last step

Greg: Great P-51- I mean RF-51, well Mustang!

John: Looking forward to seeing how the searchlight truck comes out. And that Black Dog storage looks really neat.

Black SA-16, me likey!

I am now ready for the flat coat, weathering, and adding all the little things on the LVT.  Hopefully, I will get to the paint booth this week.  I also tried my hand at making some sandbags, and concertina wire.  Looks okay, I think.

Cheers,

Greg

Geez, Greg:

That can't possibly be your workbench top we're looking at in these pictures ... man, that thing is cleaner than my kitchen table :-) ...

BTW, what was the October date for the show down your way ? ...

pepper

PS  M'thinks your sandbags and concertina wire look great ! ...

Hi Pepper, the AMPS show is on October 22nd.  The Korean War is the theme.  I would love to have my M32 done by then, and it be worthy of showing.  We'll see....  Are you still going to the Austin show this weekend?

I wish my workbench was that clean!  I have a 90% done Ju-290 occupying most of it.  I need to finish it, but it is too big to put anywhere.

Cheers,

Greg

Weird, but true!

On the way home from work yesterday I happened to notice that the RoK Army truck turning in front of me looked unusual.  Definitely not one of the M-35's or Daewoo equivalents.  It was a 'workshop' truck; welders, generators, etc.  And it was definitely an M-19!!!

No kidding, they are apparently still in use with the RoK Army! 

Hi Greg:

Can't make the show this weekend but do plan to attend the October bash ... when we get a bit closer, let's put our heads together and figure a way to meet up down there and enjoy the modeling and more ...

pepper

Andy , you must have been suprised to see that ROK M19 truck still in use ; I really like the look of the GMC CCKW 353 rag top truck and I have ordered another three Heller 1/72 kits and one 1/35 kit .

Greg , excellent progress on the LVT and those sandbags look good , as does the concentina wire ; Please share your technique on making the wire , I'm busting to have some on my truck bumpers .

As for me I have been making steady progress on my 1/72 Armor builds , I have added the Airfix AEC Matador and Hasegawa jeep and trailer into the mix with the other vehicles I'm working on ...

My AEC Matador kit was missing a front cab door , so I went to the spares box and found an old Airfix AEC Matador Tanker . It's the second time I have used parts from this scrapped vehicle , I used part of the chassie to fix the broken / missing section on the Revell M19 Tank Transporter . This time the whole front cab section was still all glued together , so it made sense to just use the old cab , rather than trying to cut out one door .

Here's Hasegawa's Jeep and Trailer sprue pic ;

Both builds are quite straight forward and it only took one evening to have them ready for the spraybooth ;

The last three evenings I've been decaling all the other vehicles and Centurion tank , as well as 24 soldiers to place in and around the vehicles ;

Tonight I added a little black enamel wash and all the armor and vehicles are now ready for a final flat clear coat . So I'm quite happy that I'm in the home straight on these beauties .

I do have an idea floating around in my busy little head and I was thinking about having a first attempt and building a display base for the Searchlight Truck to sit on just like the photo in Squadrons Armor in Korea book ....

Do you guy's think these materials are suitable to use ;

The Searchlight Truck appears to be sitting high on a mostly gravel hill top , so I thought about using some spakle powder mixed with water to make the hill top along with some Noch Light Gray medium ballast as the surface , there's a tree for one corner of the display board and the variety pack of camouflage netting arrive today to go over the searchlight Truck . Academy have some nice gun mounts in their 2.5 Ton truck as well as machine guns , so I can place a couple of those on the hill top as well .

So is just ordinary spakle okay to use , I'll only mix a little at a time and build the hill and roadway slowly ???

Any advice would be greatly appreciated .

                            John .

Helo H-34

So is just ordinary spakle okay to use , I'll only mix a little at a time and build the hill and roadway slowly ???

Hi John:

Spakle is a great medium for building up the ground on a dio base BUT, please, please be sure you put down a good coat of latex house paint - top, bottom, even the sides of the base before you put the Spackle on it ... in fact, 2 coats simply (but smoothly and neatly) slathered on your plywood base would be in order ...

Reason ? ... the Spackle is a 'wet' medium and as it dries, your wooden base is gonna warp and look like a pretzel ... don't ask me how I know ... when we lived in San Diego, all 4th graders had a project every year to build one of the missions which are a part of the California scene ...

My youngest and I build a grand clone of the Mission San Diego de Alcala and when finished, put it out on the back porch to dry and set up hard ... next morning, we came out to see our mission had crumbled as if it had been struck by a California earthquake and all caused by the Spackle warping the ply base ... too late to make another, my daughter took it to school with a placard stating that this is what might happen should such a quake occur ... her teacher was not amused ...

Otherwise, Spackle is good stuff - easy to work with - sands nicely - builds up the underlying groundwork like a champ ... takes paint and ground cover beautifully ... when I use it, after it has dried, I paint it with the base earth tones, then use model railroad ballast, grass and weeds and such to get the desired effect ... I shop a lot in the railroad section of my LHS for just such materials ... you can also smooth it out nicely, paint it concrete color and stripe it to look like a runway or taxiway at an airport ...

All in all, good stuff ...

As always guys, kudos to one and all ...

BTW - the Shooting Star is finished and just as the sun dips below the horizon this day, I'll shoot some photos to share and 1 to go up on the first page of this GB ...

pepper

PK: Gee I like your explanation about the earthquake on the school project Looking forward to the P/F-80 photos.

John: You might want to check over in the dioramas section of this site if you haven't already. Several WiPs have been posted over there recently and von Hammer is running a dio GB that you might ask advice in.

I've done a few dios but nothing really involved. I picked up a base at a craft store, cut some styrofoam in the shape I wanted, covered it with spackle, painted it brown, and glued static grass to it. You can take a motor tool or flat screwdriver and chip away tracks and then paint that light brown with a dark brown wash. That's what I did with my K1A1 scene.  

Gamera

 I picked up a base at a craft store, cut some styrofoam in the shape I wanted, covered it with spackle, painted it brown, and glued static grass to it. You can take a motor tool or flat screwdriver and chip away tracks and then paint that light brown with a dark brown wash. That's what I did with my K1A1 scene.  

Heya Guys:

Great suggestion and something i forgot ... if you put foam down and the Spackle on top of that, you won't have the warping problem I spoke of ... you can get foam at any craft store down there I'm sure, John ... I use 1, 2 and 4 inch thick foam on my layout and 3 and 5 mm thick white foam on dio bases ...

Give that a try and let us know what works for you ...

pepper

Pepper and Cliff , thanks for the tips on making the dio .

The display board I was thinkinking of using already has a piece of laminate (laminex) glued to the top , so I suppose that would eliminate any warpping issue's .

I never thought about using styrofoam as the main base and then adding spackle on top where needed , I have some sheet styrofoam and I cut a piece to see how things might look ...

It needs to be a little higher overall but I think the base piece is a good start .

I'll keep playing around some more .

Thanks again guy's

                        John .

Heya John!

Another option for a base is to buy a picture frame with glass in it.  That's what I've done and then used 'spakle' or what we call 'dry-wall compund' in the USA.  One suggestion on yours:  Leave the tree out, or make it a very short, de-limbed one.  Due to the Japanese occupation taking all of the coal for war use and for the Japanese elites, the native Koreans were required to use all the wood that they could find for cooking and heating.  By the end of the Korean War (and even at the beginning) there were virtually no trees left on the peninsula over about 6' tall.

BTW, AWESOME WORK ON THE ARMOUR!  That stuff you're doing is finally coming together all at once.  And it's beautiful.  Can't wait to see the final pics. 

John: She's looking good! I like the styrofoam since it's cheap, light, and easy to shape to get what I want.

You might want to find a copy of Shep Paine's 'How To Build Dioramas'. It's an older book so it won't include some of the newer stuff but still I've found it worth it's weight in gold. It's stuffed with useful information.

Draken Andy: I had no idea about the trees. Makes perfect sense but I never thought about it- gee you learn something new every day.

Your group post John, AWESOME!  What a cool bunch of additions to your ever growing ground collection.

Draken, well your earler comment makes sense of some things for me.  Seeing all the KW pictures of a treeless Korea, and when I was there in the '90's it had lots of pine trees, I was wondering what had changed????  Now I know, thanks.

No progress at all.  First week of paramedic school has been busy.  It is pretty cool, but lots of reading.

Pepper, I hope we can meet up in October then.  I'll try and remember my camera for once, and post any interesting finds.

Cheers,

Greg

Gregbbear

Draken, well your earler comment makes sense of some things for me.  Seeing all the KW pictures of a treeless Korea, and when I was there in the '90's it had lots of pine trees, I was wondering what had changed????  Now I know, thanks.

I'm on friendly terms with the director of the 2ID museum on Camp Red Cloud and he tells me that one of the first things that the returning vets mention to him when they talk is that they want to kinow where all the f'n trees came from!

And it's STILL a problem up in the DPRK.  The famines are a result of not only mismanagement and lack of good farmland.  It's also a result of the severe erosion due to the destruction of forests for heating and building.  Because the coal is being exported for hard currency and taken by the elites, the masses are forced to take down the trees.  The trees in turn hold most of the soil down and without them, there's no land to plant.  And massive flooding because the rains don't soak into the ground.  Sad but true.

On another note, I'm still debating what to start next.  I've been dead dog tired when I get home and haven't been doing any modeling.  I've got the C-46 ready for decals and then I'm going to start something, maybe the LSU, I've got it out and it's looking kinda nice.  Would be cool to have another boat for the build.

Hope that this helps!

Found this with StumbleUpon.  Some guy visited Ft. Sill and took pictures of everything on display.  There's a lot of more modern stuff, as well as some WWI stuff.  I was very happy to see some of the specifically KW equipment, including Communist Forces artillery.  Check it out, it's pretty nice!

http://www.cdsg.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=482

Thanks for the tip on the size of the tree , Andy .

Like Greg , I did notice very little vegertation while looking through the Squadron Armor book ; I can cut some of the smaller branches and just have shrub size trees in a few spots .

I'm still messing around with sheet styrofoam for the Searchlight Truck display base , in the meantime the 1/72 Heller GMC 353 Searchlight truck is finished , so here's a sneek peek ....

Here are some finished pic's of the other Armor / Vehicles I've been working on  ;

1/76 Airfix Centurion Tank from the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars 1950 ...

Overall I'm quite happy with the build and there was no problem stretching the tracks to fit given the overall 5mm extended length in the hull

1/72 Academy U.S. 2.5 Ton Cargo Truck ;

1/72 Hasegawa M3 Halftrack Ambulance ;

1/72 Hasegawa Jeep and Trailer with Italeri Jeep in the background and Imex Korean War figures ;

Here's the 1/72 Airfix M3 Halftrack kitbashed with SHQ metal M15A1 Turret ...

Like the Centurion build , I'm really happy how the M15A1 came together ;

I used some of the figures from the Hasegawa M3 Halftrack and I cut a small piece of clear plastic and painted some frame lines for a windscreen ;

Well , that's it for the time being , hopfully the display base will work out for the Searchlight Truck dio .

Thank's for looking .

                            John .

WOW!  AWESOME WORK HELO! 

One of these days I'll get the decals on my C-46 and jump into something else.  Strange but true, I noticed that my rubber tires on it are flat on the bottom with bulges.  ISTR leaving on top of my toaster oven for a few minutes while toasting some bread.  Who'd'a thunk that would work!

Anyway, can't wait to see some more from Helo, that braille scale armour is AWESOME!

Yo, Helo!

In the words of Ray Davies of the Kinks, "You've really got me going now, I don't know what I'm ever gonna do."

Here's the progress on the Commando.  I have to mask and paint the walkway strips, and then string the multitude of antennae.  But the DECALS ARE ON!

Yeah, the canopy joint is really nasty on mine.  i tried to putty it twice and it always seemed to break away.  And don't remind me, I've got the landing gear swapped left to right!  I broke off half of the antennae while trying to mask off the nose to do a white portion and gave up.  I went with a full red nose, but will be adding a black line to differentiate.  The same goes with the tail between the red and white.  I made it two different heights to show that the rudder had been replaced from a different a/c.  The majority of the antennae came from the Testors/Italeri C-46 and stretched sprue.  I had opened up everything available (except for the under fuselage doors, which I now regret not doing!) and the only thing not showing is the door for the passengers that hangs down when the cargo door is open.  I've got the tail wheel turned as though it's on the tarmac having already landed and awaiting a new cargo.  I might just use one of my GMC trucks and make a loading ramp for it.  Who knows!  Now that I can keep the younguns outta mmy office, I can display stuff like this on a table or shelf without fear of breakage!

Hi Andy ;

Thank's for the kind words on the recent builds , they are very much appreciated .

I've had Academy's Dragon Wagon on and off the bench a few times and I think it's time to get it built .

I already gave the parts a few light coats of olive drab while on the sprue , so it's time to start cutting parts off and glueing ...

I keep looking at your Dragon Wagon build Andy for reference , hopfully mine should turn out okay .

I was going to start another Academy 2.5 Ton truck and another Heller GMC 353 as well as a Centurion Tug but it's the Dragon Wagon  that shoud get done first .

                          John .

The Commando is looking nice Andy .

Nice touch dropping the flaps , I also noticed that you cut the smaller door completely out from the large cargo door , I think I will do the same.

I decided to buy Squadrons vacuform canopy for the Commando as well as some pre cut masks , as I also struggled with the kits two piece canopy

I see your props worked out okay and the silver finish overall looks great as well .

Once I knock out a few more vehicles , I'm sure I'll get the itch back for things with wings .

On your workbench , what's the Royal Canin used for ?

                  John

stick -- pm inbound

Helo H-34

On your workbench , what's the Royal Canin used for ?

                  John

HA HA HA HA HA! 

It's gushy fudz I use as a treat for my cat.  I just hadn't gotten around to putting it on his food shelf yet.  Thanks for reminding me, though!