Nathan Makes Stuff

Letter Block Toy Box

Nathan Fariss — 2020-06-29T20:08:48-07:00

Some dear friends had themselves a baby a little while back so I wanted to build something for them that would hopefully last a lifetime. After searching around for some theme ideas, I stumbled across some toy block themed toy boxes that I thought would be fun. I wasn't crazy about the ones that I saw construction-wise (they looked a bit too flimsy), so I spent a bit of time mocking up a box in the computer and landed on a design that I thought would look nice, be sturdy enough to take lots of abuse and all while being safe for a toddler.

Below you can see the couple of images that I ended up with after my design process. I'll talk a bit about the special features as they come up in pictures later on, but the important thing to note is that it is big, heavy and made from solid ash. Did I mention that it is heavy?

This one is light on details and heavy on pictures, so enjoy the show!

As usual, I started with a pile of wood from my local hardwood dealer, and milled it down to 3/4".

After cutting down to rough length, the main side panels were glued up. Below you can see the panel clamps from Rockler that I got for this project. I try to embrace Mike Pekovich's (creative director at Fine Woodworking magazine) theory that you should try to buy a new tool for each project, thereby slowly increasing your set of tools, but also trying out something new.

The panels took a bit of fine tuning, planing, scraping and such to get them smooth and clean.

Turns out that the stock that I bought was an awkward width, being not quite wide enough to use two pieces to make one side. Fortunately, this extra bit should be hidden at the bottom of the inside.

And sometimes you accidentally make a panel just a liiiiiitle bit too narrow.

Here's the main box sides glued up. One side is a little taller in order to give the back hinge a little height. More on that shortly.

Below you can see the beveled edges being glued to the top.

Here's where it starts to get a little tricky. The side have the same chamfered edging, but they are meant to stick up a bit from the side panels, in order to leave a gap below the closed lid (no pinched little fingers), and then also have a miter at the outside edges.

This makes for some unusual meeting of corners at the bottom of each side.

Here's the box all glued up, with the lid set on top.

The torsion hinges that I bought (no slammed lids) were only meant to go onto a 3/4" board, not the 1 1/2" thickness I had at the back of the box, so I need to carve out some recesses for them. Probably could have sharpened those chisels a bit more…

For the letters on the sides of the box, I had some 1/8" walnut laser cut at a local shop. Below you can see it after the burned edges had been sanded clean.

I had some high-tech clamping methods to glue those letters in place.

Finally, before assembly, I finished the box with tung oil (100% kid safe). A bit about tung oil: it smells pleasant and nutty, makes a nice rich finish and takes FOREVER to cure. On top of a few coats of the tung oil went a bit of a beeswax furniture polish (the sort that is used on children's wooden toys).

After finishing the hinges were put in place, chains added so that the top doesn't open TOO far, little rubber bumpers added on the front upper corners, for the lid to land on and non-slip rubber feet added to the bottom.

In all, I think the box turned out well and my friends seemed pleased with it :)

Here is a gallery with more photos of the finished product, where you can also see the hinges in action, holding the lid partly open.

Thanks for reading!

Front Porch Planter Boxes

Nathan Fariss — 2019-09-23T20:23:41-07:00

After the holidays last year, it became quite apparent that any packages left on our front porch by delivery people were on display for all to see. Not that we had anything stolen, but it seemed like it was just a matter of time. It got me to thinking about a way to help fix that problem and perhaps spruce up the front porch a bit in the process.

After some discussion with the wife, a bit of measuring and a quick mock-up on the computer, I settled on building some planter boxes that would run all the way across our front porch and both make things look nicer and give the delivery folks a place to hide small-to-medium packages.

This was a pretty quick and easy weekend project, using a sheet of plywood and a few pieces of construction redwood. The first order of business was to cut down the plywood to make the sides of the planter boxes.

Here you can see the boxes screwed together. The clamps are there to help glue back together the few places where the plywood split apart a bit at the edges (probably should have drilled larger pilot holes).

The idea was to have a plastic planter box nest inside the wooden boxes, so that the wood wasn’t in constant contact with the soil itself. That meant that I needed a lip inside the boxes for that plastic box to rest on. I cut the remaining plywood into narrow strips, as seen here.

The strips were then glued and screwed in place, and the screw holes filled. Here you can see the stack of boxes waiting for the filler to dry.

The next step was to prime the entire box, to make it a bit more weather-resistant, and then paint the outside surface to match the color of the house. We had a decent amount of leftover paint from painting the house, so all I had to do was dig the big bucket out of the shed and slap on a few coats.

The construction redwood that I mentioned earlier was to be milled square and then cut into strips that will be nailed to the sides of the boxes for ornamentation. I used the 2x4’s for that and the small square stock was to be cut down and made into little legs for the boxes, in order to get them up off the ground.

Once again, I did a poor job of documenting this part, but just imagine me running the 2x4’s through the planer to clean up the top and bottom surfaces and then ripping ¼” thick strips from those on the table saw. In the interest of keeping my fingers, I could only use about two thirds of each piece of wood, as beyond that it got a little dicey feeding the wood through the saw blade.

But I was able to use some of the excess wood to make a nice little lip around the top edge of each box. Here you can see the four boxes all lined up and ready for finishing. You can also see here how the brown plastic planter boxes fit inside the wooden boxes.

Just a reminder to double check your miter saw for non-wood items before make a quick cut. In this case, I missed the shiny metal ruler that I had left on the shiny metal saw. I put my wood right down on top of it and cost myself a $90 saw blade. Live and learn.

Here’s the final result, with some fresh new succulents planted in them.

I’m happy to report that the delivery people have taken the hint and almost always put the packages behind the planters when no one is home.

This was a quick and easy project, using materials that are inexpensive and easy to find (although I did have to order the long plastic planter boxes from Amazon) and could easily be altered to fit most spaces.

Thanks for reading!

Mid-century Desk Build

Nathan Fariss — 2019-09-17T21:43:17-07:00

The reason for this project was that I had been searching for a new desk for years and never quite found the right mix of size, design and price. There were desks that I really liked the look of, but they were either too big for my small home office, or maybe the materials were not very good, or they were just too expensive. After seeing a few how-to videos for midcentury-styled desks, it occurred to me that perhaps I could simply build my own desk, and in the process build up my home woodworking tool set.

I spent some time measuring and confirming exactly how big I wanted the desk to be, researched designs a bit and settled on deriving my design from the desk that this fellow makes in his video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOhE8-W2Ryk

I made a few changes, so that the plywood wouldn’t be on the corners, mostly for durability and opted for a much thicker front edge, so I could add the large bevel. I also decided to go with dowels as the primary fastener, because I like torturing myself, apparently.

Anyhoo, here’s what I designed in the ol computer:

While I didn’t make myself proper plans, I did give myself a few exploded views to work from and then manually notated those with the important measurements.

After convincing my very-patient wife that I could instead spend the desk-buying money on tools and wood, I placed a few orders and waited for things to arrive.

Here’s what I used tools- and materials-wise for this project:

Tools
- Skilsaw worm-drive portable table saw (new)
- Delta 6” Jointer (new)
- Dewalt DW735x Planer (new)
- DeWalt 12in miter saw (already had)
- Porter Cable 2-1/4hp Router (already had)
- Dewalt 7-1/4” circular saw (already had)
- Makita finishing sander (already had)
- Misc drills, drivers, etc

Materials
- 4x8’ sheet of walnut veneer plywood
- A roughly 10' x 8" piece of 4/4 walnut, rough-sawn.
- A roughly 4' x 8" piece of 3/4" spalted birds eye maple, for the drawer fronts
- Set of walnut legs and angled brackets from tablelegs.com (https://tinyurl.com/y2u48799)
- Pre-finished ½” drawer side plywood (I forgot the exact amount)
- Three 2x4’ sheets of ¼” plywood for the drawer bottoms
- Approx 10’ x 8” piece of 4/4 walnut
- Approx 4’ x 8” piece of birdseye maple
- Drawer slides and pulls
- Strong sense of adventure

First order of business was ripping the big sheet of plywood down into the top and bottom pieces. This took a bit of help from the afore-mentioned patient wife, since my table saw is far smaller than a sheet of plywood. Once it was cut down a bit, I hopped right into milling down the walnut to final thickness (going to mention why NOT to do this in a bit), and cutting and doweling the edges and corners.

Here you can see the doweling jig that I was using to center the holes.

I used these handy Bandy Clamps from Rockler (https://www.rockler.com/rockler-bandy-clamps
) to attach the corners and in this photo you can see why I say to NOT mill your wood to final thickness right away. What I SHOULD have done it leave it a bit thicker, glue it on and then plane it down, in order to avoid the plywood being a bit higher, as you can see on the right side below. This is also how I found that the doweling jig is a bit of a beast in that it always seems to be just a little off, so you need to build with that in mind and give yourself extra wood to shave down later. Ah well, live and learn.

Below you can see the top and bottom pieces with the edging glued on. This is also when I discovered that I need roughly 800 more clamps than I currently owned. What is also visible here are the end pieces of plywood that will eventually give the desk its thickness.

But before the desk gets put together, I opted to make my life a little easier and try to get the drawers all built and fit, since this would be far easier with no top on the desk. I cut all the drawer sides to length and width on the table saw and miter saw and then set up the table saw with a dado blade in order to cut the grooves for the drawer bottoms.

Here you can see the dado setup and feather board for safety. I also just learned a few weeks ago that dado blades are illegal in Europe for safety reasons. Interesting!

Here’s the freshly cut drawer sides. The plywood that I bought for these was prefinished and had the edges rounded over (right edges in the photo). I cut the drawer sides as to always take advantage of this rounded edge, so that the top edge of each drawer had this nice rounded and finished surface.

I found that using my one-car garage as a wood shop has a few disadvantages. There is no dust collection, and living in a fairly dense neighborhood, I wanted to keep the doors closed in order to keep the sound from being too disruptive. As a result, the air gets pretty thick with dust and it’s also extremely loud in the small enclosed space.

Here I am all dolled up in my dust and noise protection gear.

With the drawer boxes assembled, I placed them in the desk in order to figure out placement of the drawer slides. I simply had some 1/8” thick pieces of wood that I used to set the heights so that I could measure where the slides should be on the boxes.

Here you can see the slides in place and me getting prepared to glue all the dowels in place before gluing on the top. Also note how much saw dust is all over everything in the background.

Back to the drawers. Here you can see the milled and sized birdseye maple glued to the front of the drawer boxes.

The big glue-up! Here’s where the top and bottom came together and where I still had FAR too few clamps. This was actually pretty straightforward, since the dowels kept everything pretty well in line.

Here’s the big gap in my pictures. Since I hadn’t really intended to write a blog post about this project, I didn’t do a very good job of documenting the steps involved with attaching the legs and the finishing process.

Somewhere in here was also the routing of the front lip, in order to give it the bevel. I don’t have a router table, so this was done freehand with the edge attached to the desk. It really taught me that I need a router table ;-) There are a few bumps where the router wiggled, but it still turned out well overall.

The legs were actually quite simple to attach. The cleats that they came with just screw right to the bottom of the desk, in a position such that they do not stick out further than the edge of the desk (since they are slightly splayed out). I posted photos of the completed desk on reddit and got a few questions about the strength of the splayed legs, and so far they seem super strong. The cleats are large and solid walnut, so there is very little give.

I decided to go with Danish Oil as the finish , in order for it to not be too glossy and have it still feel like natural wood, more or less. I applied four coats (I think), sanding with 400 grit between the first couple and then ‘wet sanding’ with 800-grit using the Danish Oil as the water and I was pretty happy with that finish. I then read a suggestion to put a few coats of furniture wax over top and that’s where I ended up.

Finally the drawer pulls were attached and the little metal feets attached to the legs.

Here’s the final result, with just the Danish Oil applied

Here’s the final FINAL result, in place, with a few coats of furniture wax

Overall, I learned a ton about woodworking during this project and also learned that there is MUCH more to learn. The biggest takeaway for me was getting into the habit of squaring up all my tools before I use them and after I adjust them. Those front corners would be much tighter if I had noticed that my miter saw had gotten a degree or two out of square.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of working with wood, but also I have found that it is something that I really enjoy, so look for more woodworking projects (with more thorough documentation) here in the future!

Thanks for reading!

Building Raised Garden Beds

Nathan Fariss — 2019-09-14T19:39:26-07:00

The soil in our back yard is fairly awful. It’s very clay-heavy and previous attempts at trying to grow things like carrots did not turn out well. Instead we ended up with horror movie prop carrots, like so (eyes added for extra horror):

As a result, we decided to put some time and money into building raised beds, so we could have better soil and easier access to the garden (and less lawn to mow). I wanted to keep it fairly simple, but still have them look nice, provide plenty of planting space and I had a hunch that I could tap into the existing back yard sprinkler system in order to automate irrigation. With those things in mind, I mocked up my back yard and proposed garden beds in a 3d modeling package, and got something like this:

That also allowed me to figure out how much wood I would need and in what dimensions, so I could order it from the lumber yard. The sides of the beds were to be made from 12’ long 2x8’s and the caps are 2x6’s, with 4x4 posts for the corners and 2x4 braces. I choose to go with all redwood on this projects, since all of the wood was to be in constant contact with soil and weather. Since I planned on growing food in these beds, I didn’t want to go with pressure-treated lumber, due to concerns about the chemicals leeching into the soil over time.

Here’s my starting lumber pile in the garage:

I set myself up a miter station in the back yard and also measured out where exactly the beds were to be located (those little blue flags in the background are my makeshift corner markers.

I also knew that I wanted the beds to be level, but the entire back yard has a slope to it. This meant digging into the yard so that the front edge of each bed would meet the ground and the back edge would go down into the soil. Here you can see my process. I put two of the posts and one cross bar together, so that I could dig into the ground and get it level.

I did the same thing for the far end, and after a great deal of digging, got the long boards in place and leveled as well.

At the end of the first day, I had the two beds in place and mostly put together. Each of these measures about 12’ long by 4’ wide.

During that digging, I also figured out where the underground sprinkler pipe should be and dug down to it for later access. Here you can see how it runs underneath one of the beds.

The next day I added the caps, mostly to make the beds a little more comfortable to use. My wife and I also spent a few hours sanding the exteriors of the beds in order to smooth them out a bit and make the redwood a bit nicer to look at. Here you can see the sanded beds.

And an end view to show the change in elevation vs the ground.

A week or so later this truck showed up and dumped a couple cubic yards of garden soil onto a tarp in our driveway. It turns out that it takes a LOT of soil to fill two 12x4’ beds.

Thus began what I think might have been the most backbreaking day of labor in my entire life. Since the driveway is in front of our house and there is no way to get that truck any closer to the beds, all of the soil needed to be loaded into a wheelbarrow and pushed around the house, up this little makeshift ramp and then emptied over the edge of the beds. All that soil was HEAVY. It also took a good six hours of heavy lifting to get it all moved. I could barely move at the end of the day.

But look how nice the beds are when filled with fresh soil! No eldritch horror carrots from THESE beds!

Next step was to dig a little trench for irrigation and tap into the sprinkler line. This was all pretty simple PVC pipe work, but I did discover that there wasn’t enough water pressure to run BOTH the lawn sprinklers and the bed irrigation. Sorry middle-of-the-lawn, but no more water for you! Fortunately, the pipe in question only fed four sprinklers, one of which was now under a couple feet of soil and another of which would just be spraying the side of the new bed. Overall this leaves a little gap right in the middle of the lawn that doesn’t get water in the summer, but that’s not too big a deal.

As you can see below, I just diverted the underground pipe up to the upper bed and then added a T joint in order to get a line down to the lower bed. I also added cutoff valves in case I didn’t want to water one bed for some reason. It doesn’t really ever get below freezing here in Northern California, so no real need to worry about pipes freezing in the winter or anything like that.

The final result! Here you can see some strawberries planted, pea trellises in place and a coat of deck sealer on the outside of all the wood.

These have been in place for a bit over a year now and aside from having to add more soil this year, after it all settled a bit, everything has been working great!

Thanks for reading!

Building a Shed From Scratch

Nathan Fariss — 2019-09-11T07:00:00-07:00

In the summer of 2017, my wife and I ended up buying the house that we had been renting for five-or-so years. This had a few advantages in that we already knew all the things that were wrong with the place and we also had a long list of improvements that we would make, if given the chance. Pretty much at the top of my list was tearing down the ramshackle shed in the back yard and replacing it with one that was larger, weatherproof and secure. This would allow me to relocate much of the clutter in the garage out to the shed and not have to worry about it getting wet or being stolen.

While there are lots of great shed solutions out there, such as TuffShed, that allow you to purchase a kit and put it together yourself, I was pretty specific about what I wanted in a shed and it wasn’t a kit. I really wanted something that had a bit of a mid-century look to it, in order to match our 1951 house and I had a pretty specific space in which to fit this shed.

Although I build lots of buildings for movies, that in no way translates into me knowing how to actually build a building in my back yard. Accordingly, I spent some time hunting for plans online and ended up purchasing a set of plans from https://www.icreatables.com/ for their ‘8x8 Modern Shed’ Once I had those in hand, I had to do a bit of reconciling against my actual needs shed-wise and what I was willing to spend on said shed. I didn’t need nearly as many windows as the plans called for, both because I didn’t want people to be able to see what I was storing in the shed and because I didn’t want to have to buy a bunch of new windows. I did, however have a store nearby that sells used and surplus doors, windows and misc construction things.

With my measurements in hand, I went to the store, and found a door that was the proper size and a single sliding window that I could adapt to fit above the door, mostly for light and ventilation purposes. I placed an order at a nearby lumber store and a few days later they dropped off about a million pounds of wood in front of our house, which my amazing wife dragged into the garage while I was at work.

In all, it took me something like 9 days of solid work to tear down the old shed and build up the new one, which was about 5 days longer than I was expecting. Learning!

On a bright and sunny Saturday morning, I started with this pile of lumber, a mixture of 2x4s, 2x6s, 2x8s, some chip board sheet goods and some trim boards:

Here’s the old shed that I was replacing. I forgot to get a picture before I started tearing it down, so here it is after I already removed the door (it was an interior door that had warped and was coming apart from getting wet over the years).

After demolishing the old shed, I cleared and leveled out the area underneath. The helpful assistant dog also gave it a very thorough sniffing.

I used deck footers as my ‘foundation’ since I didn’t want to pour concrete and wanted to get it up above the ground just a bit. These were readily available at the local big box store and seemed well suited to the job. I used compacting gravel under the back two blocks, in order to get everything level and square.

Here you can see the framing well under way. It’s pretty much put together like a house, which is probably way more than I needed for a shed, but I’m a fan of over-engineering. I figure that if I build it strong the first time, I won’t have to fix it later.

It was around this time that I discovered how heavy all the green lumber was, when it was all nailed together into a wall. Most of my previous building experience had been using kiln-dried lumber from Home Depot, which is significantly lighter, since all the water has been cooked out. I didn't realize that the standard from a lumber yard was going to be 'green' lumber, meaning that it hasn't been dried, so still has all that water in it. This makes it heavier and also means that it'll shrink a bit as it dries.

You might also notice the bright yellow pneumatic hose in this photos. I already had an air compressor, so I bought a fairly inexpensive framing nailer and I cannot recommend it enough! There is no way my arm would have held up to pounding in that many nails by hand (did I mention that I sit in front of a computer all day?).

This is the one that I purchased and it served me well: https:www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0032JTDPO

It’s also worth noting that for the most part, I was building this by myself. There were a few occasions that I found myself unable to lift, stabilize and square-up walls all by myself, so I dragged my wife out to help a bit, but generally it was just me putting this thing together.

Here you can see the walls framed and some sheathing attached. What is also of note here is that you can see how the area above the doorway was altered from the plans in order to accommodate the single window that I found at the store.

Getting the rafters in place for the roof was probably the hardest part of this whole project. It turns out that a 12’ long green 2x8 is HEAVY. Most of the boards could be propped up and then dragged up and into place, but the front, back and outside ones were tricky. I ended up screwing a few temporary brackets onto the end of the rafters so that I had a support for the front and back boards. With my wife’s help, I could get them propped up in place well enough to be able to put in a few nails and get things secured. I was definitely sore after this day was done.

Here you can see the door and window installed and the soffits installed under the edges of the roof. This was also about the stage that I realized I goofed in a few ways on the roof. The sheer act of getting the boards in place was so hard that I forgot to measure the diagonals and make sure it was square, so it ended up just a bit off, which resulted in some gaps in the roof surface. I also accidentally made the roof stick out about 6” too far on each side, but I don’t mind the way it looks, so no worries there

Here you can see my makeshift flashing to keep water from pooling in the footers and soaking into the floor frame. In hindsight, it probably would have been better to use pressure-treated lumber for the floor framing. This was just some aluminum roof flashing and a whole lot of flashing sealer to hold it all together.

For the roof, I put down a water/ice barrier layer and then standard shingles. There was also a drip edge involved and a bunch of nails. Once again, probably far more than needed for this shed, but hopefully I’ll move away before it ever needs replacing.

A quick wrap to make it generally weather-proof. There are also some intake vents on the lower right side and you’ll see the roof vents in the finished photo as well.

Finally, some basic siding and trim installed. The siding was just a cheap plywood kinda stuff that had a horizontal line pattern that was similar to the house.

Here’s the interior of the shed and you can see the couple of shelves that I made out of a few extra 2x4’s that I had around. This was just to give me a place to store things like suitcases up out of the way and for a basic work surface, in case I needed it. Although, in practice, that lower shelf has just been more storage rather than any sort of work space.

Here’s the whole thing, primed, locks installed and some simple steps in place.

The finished product! Here you can see the soffit vents in place and the colors we went with. This also allowed us to test out a color scheme that we were thinking about for the house, which was fantastic, as we ended up using a darker shade for the trim and also going down a sheen level for both the primary and trim paints.

So far, this shed has lasted two years without collapsing, so I’m going to call it a win!

Thanks for reading!

It's Alive!

Nathan Fariss — 2019-09-10T18:52:40-07:00

At long last, I’m bringing this blog back to life! In the past few years, I’ve taken a bit of a break from model building and now I’m back to start blogging once more, but also to expand the scope of the blog.

A little over two years ago I became a home owner, and as such now need to keep the home up and running as best I can. I also live in an area where labor is extremely expensive, so getting a contractor to do just about any work at all is a significant cost. This has led me to learn quite a few new skills and build quite a few new things on my own.

That said, my hope for the blog in the future is to be a mixture of a few things:
- model building
- home improvement projects
- woodworking projects

The goal with writing a bit about home improvement things is to show that many of the simple things are well within reach of the average homeowner. Hopefully with a bit of encouragement and a bunch of youtube videos, others will also feel comfortable taking on some of these projects and save themselves some money!

I’ve got a bunch of projects that I’ve done over the past few years that I’ll be writing about and sharing photos of, including such exciting undertakings as:

Building a Shed from Scratch

Building Some Raised Garden Beds

Building a New Desk

Making Planter Boxes

Building a Workbench in My Garage

Making a Toy Box

Hopefully these will be interesting and helpful to some people, so keep an eye out for new entries coming soon!

Chris-Craft Cobra pt 2

Nathan Fariss — 2016-07-30T12:43:51-07:00

In the last post, I had just wrapped up the under-planking. Next came the mahogany planking. I began on the keel, running a plank up each side of the center line on the bottom. I also soaked some of the planks, so that they would be easier to bend at the front. Below you can see the darker plank (dark because it is wet), bent around the front of the keel.

After a few rows of planks from the center, I then added one that runs along the edge that forms the border between the bottom and the sides. Having that plank in place gave me something to fit the bottom planks to, so there isn’t a gap.

Below you can see the bottom planking done. The planks are just glued on with thick CA glue, so they go on fairly quickly.

Below you can see a detail shot of the front. I wasn’t too careful about the fitment on these planks, as they will be below the waterline and therefore painted. With a little filler and sanding, this area will be nice and smooth before it gets painted.

The planking continued on the sides of the boat. The planks were long enough to span the length of the boat, so attaching them really just consisted of tracing a line along the edge of each plank on the hull (seen below), and then using that line as a guide for where to apply some glue. With the glue in place, then I can just hold the plank in place until the glue sets.

Below you can see all the bottom and side planks in place.

Here is a close-up showing the relatively rough surface of the planks. This will take quite a bit of sanding later to get it smoothed out.

With all the planking in place, I applied a coat of the wood filler to the lower parts of the hull. This is the area that will later be painted, so having a smooth surface is more important than having good looking wood.

Below you can see the nose of the hull after a bit of sanding and refining of the center line.

It was also at about this point that I realized that maybe soaking the big mahogany planks was not the best thing to do. It seems that while the planks being wet made them easier to bend around a few curves, it also made them swell just a bit. Once the planks had been on the hull for a few days and had dried out, they shrunk back to their original size, leaving a few gaps between the planks. I’m hoping that these will be filled in a bit later on, once I put a bunch of coats of spar varnish on the hull.

Next up was carving the nose from a block of mahogany. Below you can see the starting point, which was two triangles glued together, a mid point, when I had sawn off big chunks for rough shaping, and the point at which I had finished the rough shaping using a Dremel and sanding drum.

In order to reduce the mess from the sanding, I had some luck making a makeshift dust collection system using out vacuum cleaner hose positioned near the sanding. Below you can see an action shot of the sawdust coming off of the sanding drum and into the hose. It looked cool, so I took a photo :)

That completed the underside of the boat. The next step was to cut it off of the build board, sand the ribs flush with the top surface and then start adding the top deck components. Below you can see the edge parts glued in place. This was, unfortunately, where I made a bit of a mistake, placing the side strips a little bit too far inboard. I didn’t notice the misplacement until later in the build, though.

The side strips consist of three layers, each layer overlapping the others differently. Below you can see the second layer being held in place while the glue dries.

There is a strip that runs along the inside of the mahogany parts that provides support for the decking later. Below you can see it being glued in place.

In gluing the above strip in place, I realized my mistake. The rear edge strip was in the correct place, but when I glued the side strips on, I had aligned the outside edges with the outside of the rear strip, when I SHOULD have aligned the inside edges. Once I discovered this, I found that I couldn’t pry off the side strips without doing lot of damage, so I opted instead to make adjustments to the build as I went, in order to compensate for the misalignment. The first thing I had to do was add a few extra strips to the back in order to even out the alignment of the inside edge. Below you can see the two additional strips, before sanding.

While there will need to be more adjustments later, the next few steps were fairly straightforward. Below you can see some decking glued in place, forming the front of the cockpit surround.

Front sub-planking in place, using the same techniques as the lower hull:

I order to provide support for the rear and side decks, I needed to add some support ribs. Theses were just 1/8” basswood, cut to length and tapered a bit so that there will be a bit of a slope to the decks.

Below you can see the side/rear sub-decking in place. I had to do a good deal of trimming and fitting to this piece in order to fit it into a space that is slightly smaller due to my additional thickness on the rear edge piece.

Finally, once the sub-deck was in place, I could start to add the final top decking layer. Below you can see the current state of the boat. Because the side rails should have been pushed just a bit back and out, the center basswood part didn’t reach the full length of the front deck. This meant that I had to add a little piece to extend it, which will be sanded and integrated more later. The thicker rear edge rail also required that the large basswood part be shortened slightly, in order to match up with the edges of the cockpit and still just meet the rear edge. I ended up removing approximately 1/4 inch from the straight section along the edge of the cockpit. I may also need to shorten the plastic molded pieces that form the engine cover and fin, but I was already thinking of cutting those up in order to add opening engine bay covers, so that may not cause any problems.

That is where the project stands now. Next up is applying the striped mahogany and plastic decking, and then a bunch of sanding to even it all out.

Thanks for reading!

1955 Chris-Craft Cobra

Nathan Fariss — 2016-05-15T21:47:10-07:00

Back at the end of 2015, I was in Orlando, Florida, visiting Disney World (taking advantage of a perk of working for the mouse: free park entry!). One of the restaurants in Disney Springs (formerly Downtown Disney) was just FILLED with great looking large scale boat and ship models. I was inspired to take up a wooden model project again, except this time I wanted it to end up shiny. After a bit of research, I narrowed it down to a handful of possible kit options. Mostly I was looking at kits from Dumas, as they have some great looking Chris-Craft speedboat kits. I spent a Saturday morning making the rounds at my local hobby shops (living in the SF Bay Area, there are a few to choose from) and managed to find this kit:

With a length of 27 inches, it’s a fairly large scale project (at least for me and my limited building space).

Like most kits of this type, it comes as a number of sheets of pre-cut parts, some strips of thin plywood, a bunch of strips of mahogany and bass wood, and some cast metal parts.

The instructions had me start by marking rib positions on a building board (spare plywood in this case) and then assembling and gluing the frame to the board.

That was followed by adding a few stringers and the keel boards on the bottom of the boat.

Because of the rapid change in shape between the first rib and the nose of the boat, the front is shaped from balsa. The kit came with a sheet of half-inch-thick balsa that was cut into triangles and glued in place. Below you can see the rough blocks glued in place. I had to use a little bit of spare balsa that I had laying around in order to fill the space all of the way (those thin sheets right at the front).

Below you can see the rough shaping. This was done using first a jewelers saw to cut off big chunks of the wood, then a sanding drum on a Dremel for fast shaping and then finally some 150 grit sandpaper for finer shaping.

Next up was the under-planking. This consisted of 1/16 inch thick plywood strips that are laid diagonally on the bottom and sides of the hull. The instructions said to use a thick cyanoacrylate (super glue), but I found that when the strips needed to be bent a bit, the glue tended to not have the strength to hold the strips in place. I believe that this was mostly because there were fairly small areas in which the strips contacted the frame. I had actually started the planking and then found that I had started laying the planks going the wrong direction (dark spots in photo below was the glue that held them in place). When I discovered this, I tried to take those planks off and discovered that they came off so easily that I lost all confidence in the CA method.

I decided instead to try good ol’ yellow carpenter’s glue. This required that the strips be clamped in place while the glue dried. Once dried, though, the glue was strong and the connection between the strips and frame was solid. I ended up going with this technique for all of the under-planking. Below you can see the transom in place as well as the first few planks.

Below you can see some of the clamping and weighting I needed to do in order to hold planks in place while the glue dried. Those angle blocks weigh 3lbs each, and were providing a great deal of pressure on those planks.

A closer view of the same setup.

As I got closer and closer to the nose of the boat, the angle between the bottom planks and the chine (frame piece that is the line between the sides and bottom) became shallower and the area of contact between the two got smaller. What I decided to do was add a few strips of basswood, trimmed to the correct angle, in order to give more contact area. Below you can see those strips in place.

A different angle on the same strips. You can see that the left side is untrimmed, while the right side is trimmed to the angle of the strips of plywood.

Below you can see the entire bottom of the boat with under-planking on it. The top edge in this photo has been sanded even with the angle of the side, while the bottom edge still looks ragged because it has not yet been sanded smooth.

The planking of the sides was very similar. I did attempt to use straight sewing pins as temporary nails. This worked some times and other times just resulted in lots of bent pins and plenty of cursing.

Using thinner strips of plywood near the front. The thinner strips are easier to bend and can therefore be formed to the sharper curves near the bow.

With the under-planking complete, the whole hull got a first pass of sanding.

In a few places, a plank or two ended up lower than I would like. In the case below, I added another bit of strip on top and then sanded it flush to the surrounding planks.

After that first pass of sanding, I put a thin layer of wood filler over most of the hull. This filled in gaps, leveled out the surface and gave me something to sand down in order to get things nice and smooth before the top plank layer.

Below you can see the filled and sanded result, all ready for the mahogany plank layer.

That seems like a good place to stop for this post. The mahogany planking is nearly done, so look for that in a forthcoming blog post!

Thanks for reading!

Inc in Grey Gallery

Nathan Fariss — 2016-05-15T20:13:14-07:00

As a follow-up to the last blog entry, I’ve put together a gallery of the finished Inc model.

Because of the tight timeline on which I put this one together (in order to make book publishing deadlines), I don’t have any photos of the in-progress build. Fortunately, I’ve still got another kit worth of parts AND the molds to make more parts. So, keep an eye out for future blog posts when I do get back around to making another of this model. Perhaps I’ll even paint that one!

You can find the gallery here, or click the image below.

Thanks for reading!

Inc Project

Nathan Fariss — 2016-04-04T10:18:39-07:00

A little while back, I put the Ferrari Enzo project aside so that I could try something new.

A good friend of mine, Neil Blevins, along with Bill Zahn, Stephan Bugaj, and a collection of concept art all-stars, have been working on an ‘art of’ book of sorts. For those unfamiliar, an ‘art of’ book is usually a book that contains the concept art for a film, television series, or something similar, i.e. ‘The Art of Inside Out’ or ‘The Art of Game of Thrones.’ The big difference here is that this book is full of art for a production that has not yet been made. They’ve been painting images and writing a story for a few years and this presented an opportunity for me to add my own bit of flavor to the mix.

I’d been interested in trying my hand at producing a garage resin model kit for a while, so that I could learn a bit more about the process. I talked to Neil about such a project and we decided that I would take his digital 3d model of the main character, who is a can-shaped robot, and see if I could turn it into a model kit. This blog post is about some of that process.

First off, I received a 3d file from Neil, which was the version of the main character that he was using to digitally render images from. It was set up to look good in pictures, but had lots of fine detail and various features that would be tricky to turn into physical object. Neil and I had agreed that we’d like to aim for a completed model that was 8-10 inches tall, which meant roughly 1/18 scale for this character (it was meant to be a pretty large robot). So, it fell to me to take his digital 3d model and figure out how to shrink it down, alter it and cut it up so that it could both be 3d printed and then replicated in resin, and then actually print it, clean up the prints, make molds of the parts, make castings from those molds and finally put at least one kit together so that Neil could put images of it into the book that they were working on.

Here are a few views of the digital model that I was working from.

Before jumping into the bulk of the work, I did a bit of a test. The robot had a weapon of sorts that was part gun and part spot welder. It was a fairly complex shape, with both thick and thin areas and would make a decent trial for the printing, clean up and mold making. After a few additions in the 3d file, to bridge some gaps, add some support and make it a little more mold friendly (less undercuts), I had the gun printed at Shapeways. Below you can see the print I got back, sprayed with an initial coat of primer.

The print itself was a little rough in a few areas, so it required a few cycles of priming and sanding, in order to fill in and smooth out the striations that the printing left behind. Below you can see a close up of one such area and the ridges on the flat surfaces that should be smooth.

With that test done, and a few lessons learned (how to keep print costs down, basic mold pouring techniques learned, etc), I moved on to a few more pieces. Below you can see the head, split into three parts, as they arrived from the printer. They come in a clear plastic that makes it difficult to see the texture from the printing process. This is why I primed the parts before sanding, as otherwise it was nearly impossible to see if the surface was smooth or not.

Here is how they go together, just press-fit in this photo:

Once the long and dull process of prepping all of the parts for mold making was complete, I split the mold making process into two main groups: single-piece molds and two-piece molds. The single-piece molds are for relatively flat parts, that only have detail on one side. The parts can be attached to a board, have a little box built around them and the silicon poured over them. The two-piece molds are for parts that have detail all around them. Those are more complicated to make molds for and require a form be built up around them with something like clay, defining where the mold seam will be. A pour spout and registration indentations need to be added so that the mold halves align and there is a place to pour in the resin in the finished mold.

First though, a bit about this process: Since the intent here is to make resin castings, using silicon rubber as the mold material, the requirements are a little different than if I were making molds for something like injection molded plastic kits. The silicon has a great deal of flexibility, so there can be some undercuts on the piece to be cast, and you don’t have to worry about the piece getting stuck in the mold. Also, basic molding and casting with these materials don’t strictly require any special equipment, although the addition of a few small machines can help the quality level a great deal.

In my case, I opted to supplement my process with the addition of a vacuum pump, a vacuum chamber, a pressure vessel and air compressor. I’ll go into more detail on those a bit later.

For the mold making, I started by ordering a box of corrugated plastic sheet. This stuff is commonly used for signs, but it is easy to cut, reasonably strong and inexpensive. For the one-part molds, I simply put a sheet down, hot-glued my parts to the sheet, and then built little walls around each part that would hold in the silicon. Those walls were hot-glued to the base and any gaps sealed up with more hot glue.

From what I had read, the mold should be at least 3/4” thick from the highest bit of the part being cast. I measured and marked on the walls of each box so I knew where to pour to. Now, when pouring a silicon mold, you’ll get the best mold quality if you eliminate bubbles from the silicon. Additionally, if you would like to pressure cast later on, you MUST get rid of the air bubbles in the silicon or they will give you a bumpy surface on your casting. There are a few ways to eliminate or minimize bubbles: pouring slowly into one corner of the mold (easy way, but not good for pressure casting), and vacuum degassing (harder, requires equipment, but good for pressure casting).

There is lots of information out there about mold making with silicon and casting with resin, so I’ll gloss over most of this. See the end of this post for links to various information sources to learn more.

The executive summary is that pouring your silicon from a little bit of a height (maybe 6 inches) and fairly slowly prevents bubbles from forming around your object, so you get good fidelity, but it does not prevent bubbles from forming in the silicon itself. So, if you are going to just pour resin into your mold and let it cure, this works just fine. If you are intending to pressure cast, you’ll need to get all the bubbles out of the silicon as well, so that requires another step: vacuum degassing. This is the technique of putting your mixed silicon under vacuum so that all the air bubbles expand and rise to the top, leaving your silicon bubble-free. If you skip this step, and pressure cast later, you’ll get what are commonly called ‘measles’ on the casting. These are when the bubbles in the silicon shrink under the pressure, and make little bumps on the casting, which you have to clean up later.

Since my goal was to be able to make the highest quality parts possible, I decided to invest in a bit of new equipment. This consisted of a vacuum chamber and a vacuum pump. This allows me to mix up a batch of silicon, put it into the vacuum chamber, place it under vacuum for a few minutes, watch all the air bubble out, and THEN pour it into my mold forms. Below you can see my setup and a batch of silicon bubbling away under vacuum.

After the single-piece molds were poured and cured, and a test casting or two had been done, it was time to move on to the larger and more complex multi-piece molds. For these, I got a box of water-based clay to use to build up half of each mold. Below you can see the arms and legs in their molds, ready for the first part to be poured. You can see how there are a few divots and grooves to be used for registration as well as little lumps that will be the pour spouts at the top of each part. You can also see the final state of the 3d printed parts, after they had been sanded and primed a few times and then finally had a gloss clear coat sprayed onto them, in order to get a smoother finish on the cast parts.

After pouring the first half, the molds are pulled off of their bases (but the sides left in place), the water-based clay washed away, some mold release agent sprayed on, and the other half of the mold poured. Below you can see a bunch of the other pieces ready for their second mold halves to be poured. On the lower left you can see the feet and their pour spouts that are plastic instead of clay, and the face plate and mouth in the center lower row, where I’m connecting two parts in one mold for faster casting later.

For the largest parts, including the two halves of the body and the head dome, the molds were still just two parts, but they required a bit more engineering in order to be sure that they could support their own weight later on. My fear was that if they were not thick enough, they would sag and close off the narrow space between the two halves of the mold, thinning the final part. For a few of the halves, I ended up enclosing a few scrap metal rods inside the mold in order to add support, which seemed to work decently.

Below you can see the head dome, getting prepped for pouring the first half of the mold.

Similarly, one of the body halves, on its little bed of clay, ready for mold walls and some silicon.

Once the molds were made, I did a bit of testing with casting. First off, I tried to pour some resin into my new molds to see how it turned out without using any fancy tricks. Below you can see some freshly-poured resin, which pours clear and turns opaque white as it cures.

What I discovered is that while this lazy casting works pretty well for the larger, thicker parts, it doesn’t work as well for the smaller thinner things. Air bubbles tended to get trapped in the thinner parts, resulting in unusable castings. So, the next step was to move on to pressure casting. This entails pouring resin into the molds and then putting those molds into a pressure chamber and cranking up the pressure. This both pushes the resin down into the molds and also compresses any bubbles down to tiny sizes, making them much less of an issue. If this is combined with vacuum degassing of the resin, you get the best of both worlds, with nearly bubble-free resin squished down into the molds.

While I don’t have any good pictures of my pressure casting setup, it was decidedly DIY. I purchased an inexpensive pressure chamber (from Harbor Freight) that is intended for painting and then did all the things that the warning labels tell you not to do. I took most all of the fittings off of it, plugged up most of the holes, and removed the paint intake tube. The end result being a pressure pot that has a fitting to attach an air hose, a pressure gauge, and a valve that can vent the chamber. Combine this with an average-power air compressor and I’ve got a pressure casting setup!

The tricky part here was that the resin I was using has a pot life (time between mixing and curing) of about 7 minutes, during which I needed to vacuum degas the resin, pour it into the molds (which was complicated in a few cases), and then get it into the pressure chamber and under pressure, all before it starts to thicken. To help pack the most into the pressure chamber (which wasn’t very large), I built a little shelf that I could load up and drop into the pot. It was just a couple round pieces of wood held apart by long threaded rods with some nuts on them. Below you can see the shelf (with the top shelf removed), and various molds, after removal from the pressure pot.

This allowed me, if everything went perfectly, to make one kit worth of parts in three cycles of the pressure chamber. Unfortunately, there are a few parts that are tricky to get good castings of (like the hands), so often I’ve got to try those a couple of times in order to get a set of good parts.

That’s the basics of my adventure in building up a model kit on my own. Keep an eye out for a near-future blog post with a bit about the finished parts, some casting tricks and photos of the first finished model in grey primer.

Thanks for reading!

Visiting Tamiya Headquarters!

Nathan Fariss — 2015-09-07T17:45:48-07:00

Earlier this year, I spent two weeks visiting Japan. As part of that trip, my wife and I visited her brother, who was studying in Shizuoka, a medium sized city about an hour and a half bullet train ride south-west of Tokyo. When looking into what to do for the couple of days that we would be in Shizuoka, I discovered that it was home to the headquarters of the Tamiya corporation! After a little research, I discovered that a) At the headquarters, there was a museum that was open to the public. b) The headquarters was a 20 minute walk from where we were staying.

My wife and I walked across town and arrived there around 11am. We signed in at the front desk and were left to our own devices to wander about the first floor, which had a few galleries of models and full size cars. There is a showroom of their full size car collection, a room full of their current model releases and a room that is full of various models of historic significance to the company. There are also a few areas that have original box artwork on display and a few miscellaneous displays scattered about. After we wandered around for a few minutes, the receptionist called us over to a corner of the room that had some seating and a television. Through her broken English and out terrible Japanese, we determined that we should watch whatever she was about to show us. So, we sat and watched a 15 minute video about the Tamiya corporation and their model making process from start to finish, which was actually very interesting (and in English!). We were there on a weekday, and it was pretty much empty, so should you be in the neighborhood, I highly recommend stopping by!

What you see below are some of the photos I took there, along with some descriptions where relevant.

Here’s the view after passing through the main gates:

Right outside the front doors:

Over the years, Tamiya has purchased various vehicles as reference (or maybe just because they wanted to drive them around for fun). As a result they have a bit of a car collection, much of which is on display on the ground floor of their headquarters.

More of their car collection:

I’m sure this was totally for reference and definitely not driven around by the boss at any point ;)

Who knew that Isuzu made a V12 engine? Definitely not me!

Some of the original paintings for box art:

Here are a few photos from the gallery of current plastic models:

I built that Bimota model about 10 years ago!

The whole Calsonic collection:

The wall cases in the background are all of their R/C releases.

These were some models and dioramas that were on display out with the full size cars:

Here are a few from the gallery of models of historical significance (to the Tamiya company). The below ship appeared to be made entirely of paper!

This ship had to be five or six feet long!

I guess the beginnings of Tamiya were in the wooden ship kit business:

This was a pretty nice display of all the parts in a motorcycle kit, put together like this to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tamiya:

Finally, here’s a photo of the 1/12 scale Ferrari Enzo kit, assembled by their master builders. Hopefully mine will look half as good as theirs does when I’m done:

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think in the comment section below!

Tamiya Ferrari Enzo

Nathan Fariss — 2015-08-30T18:22:24-07:00

After over a year of slacking on my blog, I’m back! Coinciding with a re-work of my web site and a move over from the blogspot location, I’m getting this blog moving again with a few new projects. I’ll touch on the second project in later posts, but for now, let’s have a look at…

The 1/12 Tamiya Ferrari Enzo!

This kit is a monster, at 1/12 scale, with tons of detail and construction methods that mirror how the car is built at full scale. It’s got working, spring loaded doors, fully detailed engine and front trunk, working suspension and the molding is all top notch. Tamiya always does a great job with their kits and this one is no exception.

I also am calling upon some great resources from Scale Motorsport on this project. They offer a handy dvd full of reference photos of the Enzo, which allow me to pick through photos of the real thing and see which things the kit is missing and what details should be added.

But, as anyone who has followed a few of my projects knows, I’m never one to leave well enough alone. I couldn’t help but try to make this great kit even better. Scale Motorsport makes a few sets of extra parts for this kit that make it even more detailed.

They offer a giant set of photo etch parts that add detail in some places, replace molded details in other places and generally make things look nicer. They also offer some great carbon fiber decal sets that are designed for this kit. I purchased the kit that covers the interior surfaces of the car that are unpainted carbon fiber on the real car.

Below you can see the photo etch sheets, which are quite large.

Below you can see the sheets of composite decals. On the back of each sheet are the cut lines for each piece along with the part number that they are to go on to.

The first step in construction is the engine. At 1/12 scale, the engine is pretty huge. The big benefit here is that the parts are large, easy to work with and the detail well defined. This also presented the first opportunity to use some of the photo etch parts.

Below you can see the painted engine block with a quick dirt wash on it to help pick out the details.

In picking through the reference photos, I noticed that the headers didn’t end in a flat plate like the plastic parts do, but had smooth 3-to-1 collectors. I decided that this was something that I needed to change. Using some Milliput epoxy putty, I formed some transitions, let them harden and then ground them into final shape. Below you can see the headers with and without the putty in place.

Part of the photo etch upgrade kit are these little plates that attach to the headers and catalytic converter.

Below you can see the engine coming together and starting to look more engine-y. The valve cover piece was not part of the composite decal kit, but I order a few extra sheets of the decal so that I could add it in a few places. This one took quite a bit of fitting, cutting and adjusting to get it mostly conformed to the part. A healthy dose of decal softener and some clear coat got it looking pretty good.

I noticed in the reference photos that on the real car, there was a heat shield underneath the headers, presumably to help keep heat away from the oil pan (?). Whatever they are for, there was no corresponding part either in the kit or in the additional photo etch, so I made something out of some things I had in my extras drawer. I had some of the thin aluminum that was left over from the Curtiss Jenny model, cut out a piece of the appropriate size and then, because the real part has some pattern stamped into it, I used a little piece of screen (from a faucet) to hammer some pattern into my piece.

Below you can see the part installed.

Next, construction moved to the drive train that is connected directly to the engine. This began with the brake assemblies. The photo etch kit had some replacement parts here. It had me sand the kit discs smooth and then put an outer disc, hub and bolts on in order to better represent the multi-piece rotors on the real car.

Looking at the reference, I thought that the brake calipers could be improved upon a bit, since the little tube that connects the two calipers was molded onto the plastic and wasn’t very convincing. I sanded that one off and replaced it with a bit of solder, in order to better mimic the real car.

As the hubs and rear suspension came together, I tried to add in some of the plumbing that wasn’t added by the kit. In some cases, the kit did supply some plastic tubing to be used for brake lines. Those that have put together a Tamiya kit before will be familiar with the hollow tubing that they generally supply. It usually looks very nice, but can be tricky to work with, since it is very light weight and a bit springy. This just makes it difficult to get the tubes to stay right where you want them to be. My trick with these tubes is to carefully run a bit of solder through the tube that is just small enough to fit through. The weight of the solder helps the tubes act a little more like the real things and the solder also allows me to bend and shape the tube as I see fit. Below you can see the solder sticking out of the end of the tubes before I added them to the model.

Below you can see the rear assembly and some of the tubes that have been added.

Next, assembly moved to the front trunk area. The kit includes the visible parts of the trunk, as well as the various electronics that go underneath the trunk. The trunk itself is removable, should you want to show off the details. After checking the reference, I decided I wanted some more wires under there, so I put together a simple wiring harness to tie into the various boxes. Below you can see the wires before they are installed.

Here they are in place. I also used some black tissue paper, dampened with a white glue and water mixture, to simulate the cloth wrap that is used around the real wires.

The battery didn’t have any decals with the kit, so I tracked down the brand that the car uses, and made a few decals of my own. I also fabricated an approximation of the little bracket that holds the battery in place.

Here you can see everything in place in between where the front wheels will be.

That’s all for now. Construction has moved on a bit further, so look for another post soon, with the front suspension construction and some difficulties with the photo etch on the muffler. Thanks for reading!

Walking Tanks Are Done!

Nathan Fariss — 2014-07-14T19:59:07-07:00

Another project wrapped up! Unfortunately I was super lazy when it came to taking progress photos of the rest of the build. But, rest assured that it was more of the same. The MIG tank (older looking one) was sprayed with red, stippled with rust colors, sprayed with hairspray, and then over-coated with a cream color and some orange stripes. The same chipping technique was used there as on the Rook (futuristic one). Lots of pigment was added to both in order to dirty them up, as well as a wash or two of dark, in order to bring out the details.

On the diorama, I added a bit of dirt and some sprigs of longer grass between the rocks. The figures were painted and added in there as well.

With all that said, let's get on to the photos! Click on the image below to get to the gallery, or click on the menu on the side bar.

Hairspray and High Voltage!

Nathan Fariss — 2014-05-13T21:37:06-07:00

In this post, I'm going to cover just two things: a new (to me) weathering technique that uses hairspray and the construction of a DIY electrostatic grass tool. Both of these things were totally new to me, although I had read a good bit about the hairspray use and had watched a video about the grass tool.

First, the hairspray: The basic premise of hairspray weathering is to spray a base coat of paint in a color that you want to see when the top coat chips away. Then, once that is dry, you give your model a few coats of the cheapest hairspray you can find. Once that is totally dry, you spray on a your top coats. Then, you can wet areas of the model, the water will soak right through your top coat (I think this only works with acrylics) and will soften the hairspray. You can then poke at your paint with a toothpick, cotton swap, etc and the top coat will chip off, revealing the under coat. Magical paint chips!!

To start with, I sprayed my model with Tamiya Hull Red as the base coat. Next, to break up the paint, and add some dirt/rust details, I mixed up a batch of paint that consisted of mostly Vallejo Flat Earth, with some MIG pigment in Light Rust. In order to keep it from getting too thick and to keep with workable for longer, I added a small amount of Vallejo Retarder Medium (slows drying) and Thinner Medium (reduces thickness).

I used a small piece of natural sponge to dab it all over the model. After the first pass, I added a bit of Standard Rust pigment to the paint mix to get a redder shade and went back over the model again. Below you can see the model after all the under coat was applied.

Next I took it outside and gave it two or three coats of hairspray. Be generous, as it doesn't seem to bulk up and shouldn't add any strange texture. If you wanted to prevent some areas from chipping at all, I'm sure you could mask them. As far as what sort of hairspray to use, I don't think it matters much (I'm no hairspray expert), so I recommend just getting the biggest/cheapest can you can find. If there is such a thing as waterproof hairspray (Google says there is), you do NOT want that. The whole premise of this technique is that the water dissolves the hairspray later, so if you used waterproof hairspray, you'd be out of luck when it came time to chip the paint.

Below you can see my model with the hairspray applied and dry. It dried to a semigloss finish.

Next came the top coat. In my case, I first put down a coat of light grey, with the thought that it would make for more interesting chipping later as well as give me a more neutral base to paint over. Next I used Tamiya Field Blue as the main color, and then went back and lightened the panel centers with the same color mixed with a bit of light grey.

Then the fun began! For water application, I just used a cotton swab, and painted water on a small area at a time. I would swab on some water, wait a few minutes (the paint texture changes a bit once the water is soaked in) and then I scraped it a bit with a wooden toothpick that had been cut to a chisel point. I thought it worked great! In fact, I had to be careful not to take off too much of the top coat, as once the hairspray is wet, it is very easy to get the paint off.

Below you can see some finished chipping on the tank legs.

Below you can see how the paint texture changes once the hairspray is wet and the paint is ready to scrape. Fortunately, the paint does flatten back out once things dry. The only catch is that the hairspray does mix in with the water during the process and once things dry, some of the semi-gloss finish that we saw earlier will be present on top of the flat paint. Nothing a bit of Testors Dullcoat won't fix later.

Next we turn back to the base. Before I could get to grass application, I needed to paint it. I was going to follow the standard order of preshade-with-dark, main color coat, sponge to break up some areas and dry brush to pull out details.

Below you can see the first pass of pre-shading.

Next was the various color passes. My idea was to try to make this look like an old unused road, so I masked the road lines off and just dry brushed the lines on, so they were old and faded looking. Everything will get a good deal more dust and weathering later on, in order to blend it all together.

I was hoping to use electro static grass on this base, in order to get some nice grass on the upper area and in the nooks and crannies around the rocks. I knew there were various devices that one could buy in order to apply the grass and get it to stick up nicely. Once I actually went to BUY one of these tools, I was in for a bit of sticker shock. As much as I enjoy getting a good tool, I couldn't justify spending $150+ just to do my little diorama. With a bit of searching around, I ran across a video on youtube showing how to build your own grass applicator using a few cheap parts and a little bit of work. I decided to give it a try.

Here is the video I watched first, if you'd like to give it a try. Have a watch and then see what I did afterwards.

I'm no electrical engineer, but here's a little bit about how some of this stuff works, as I understand it. The bug zapper that I ended up with takes two AA batteries. If you touch both ends of a AA battery, you don't get shocked. The 1.5 volts that that battery puts out is not enough to get through your skin, bones, etc. Even stacking up the two batteries, giving you 3 volts, still doesn't result in a shock. So, in order to be able to zap bugs, the bug zapper has a small transformer in it that boosts that voltage up to something like 15000 volts. That ends up being enough to jump across small gaps and also fry bugs. The way the bug zapper works is that it then routes that current into the various layers of the racquet, which are spaced closely, but far enough apart that the current can't jump across. In the case of mine, the outer layers got the negative terminal and the inner layer got the positive. When you swing that thing as a bug, the bug passes through the holes and probably hits both layers or is close enough to both for the current to jump across the gap, through the bug, completing the circuit, and electrocuting the insect.

Our goal is not to electrocute anything, but instead use all the static electricity that is generated by that high voltage to make our grass all stand on end. With the ground of the zapper attached to the glue on the base of the diorama, and the positive current attached to the strainer, the static grass flocking should fall out of the strainer a few hairs at a time, stick to the glue on the base, and then stay standing up because they are attracted to the strainer's static charge, the same way your arm hairs stand up when you hold a statically charged balloon above them. So long as the glue is fairly thick and sticky, the hairs should just stay where ever they land, and you'll get a great looking patch of grass.

With that said, PLEASE BE CAREFUL. While I don't think this is strong enough to do any extreme damage, it is probably enough voltage to give you a good shock, a small burn, or some other unpleasant injury. If you decide to try this yourself, be very careful and don't leave any of this stuff laying about where a curious child could get ahold of it.

Okay, with the legal disclaimers out of the way, let's get down to business.

I was far lazier than the fellow in the video and just went to good ol Amazon for my parts. Since I've got Amazon Prime, I wasn't concerned about shipping cost, so I order up the following parts:

Zap Master Bug Zapper - $6.97
Stainless Steel Mesh Strainer - $6.71
Insulated Alligator Clips - $3.99
Insulated Solid Wire (lots) - $20

Obviously, I got way more wire than I needed, but it was time for me to stock up anyway, so you can ignore that one if you already have some wire laying about that you can use. Same with the alligator clips, as that $3.99 was for a pack of 10. Also, I bet you could find a cheaper mesh strainer at a local dollar store, if you were concerned about the budget or just wanted to keep it under $10. Below you can see the parts that I ended up with.

Taking the bug zapper apart (be sure there are no batteries in there!), you can see the circuit board that does the current transformation and that has the activation button on it. Unlike the zapper in the video, all the components on mine are under the board, so harder to see. The first order of business was to get rid of the old wires that came off the board and replace them with tougher and longer ones. This requires desoldering the old wires, and in the case of my zapper, melting and soaking up some protective wax that was over the various contacts. Below you can see the board with my replacement red wire coming off the left side of the board. This will be the wire that will contact the metal strainer.

Once the longer ground wire is attached (I made mine roughly a foot long), I had to figure out how to attach the strainer. I had a bit of scrap aluminum around (from my bag of scrap bits that I got at the hardware store ages ago), so I just made two little strips, and drilled holes in the strips and in the handle of the zapper. The strainer handle needed to be cut a bit shorter in order to fit, and then the whole thing could be bolted together. I was originally going to solder the red wire to the strainer handle, but it ended up being easier to just sandwich the wire between one of the plates and the handle.

Next, I put the other side of the handle back on, and attached one of the alligator clips to the ground wire and I was ready to flock!

How this works, step by step:

1) Mix up your flocking grass. I mixed roughly equal parts 'Medium Green' and 'Burnt Grass' from Woodland Scenics in order to get a more natural mix of color.

2) Spread some undiluted scenic cement (or maybe Elmers white glue, or PVA glue) on to whatever you want to flock. Apply it in such a way that all the glue is contiguous. The electrical current needs to be able to get to all the glue, so no glue islands!

3) Poke a small nail into the glue somewhere (preferably somewhere that the little hole won't be noticed) and clip your negative wire to the nail.

4) Put some of the grass mix into your strainer bowl.

5) Hold your strainer bowl over the glue (a couple inches above, don't let them touch!), press and hold the button on the zapper handle (red light should illuminate), and gently shake your strainer over the glue until it is all covered.

6) Err on the side of too much grass, as you can always shake off the stuff that doesn't stick later and it is really hard to put another coat of grass on later, since you'd have to paint the glue on over your first coat of grass.

Following those steps, here is what I ended up with on my test patch:

As you can see, I left the glue off of the rock and the toe divots. I was pretty happy with how the grass stood up, but still felt fairly natural. If you wanted patchier grass colors, you could mix your grass colors a bit less that I did, so you got clumps in the strainer, which should give you areas with a bit more of one color or another as you go.

Below is a side view of the same area as above.

And that is that! Next up for me is some weathering on the base, and painting on the other tank.

Thanks for reading!

Continuing Construction

Nathan Fariss — 2014-05-13T19:23:41-07:00

At the end of the last blog post, I had just tacked everything together and tested to be sure it all fit properly. The next step was to solidify all the leg joints and make both models able to support their own weight. So, without further ado, let's get right to it:

Below you can see all of the legs glued in place. For the tan legs on the right, this was a fairly simple matter of cutting the pistons to the correct length and then epoxying them in place. For the grey legs, I left them in place on the base and dripped a bit of thin CA glue into each joint, so that each leg was locked into its correct position.

Since that thin layer of CA isn't really going to hold up very well once weight is put on it, I then spent some time drilling holes through each joint and inserting brass rod. The idea was to get the rod all the way through each joint without actually poking out the other side. My hope was that this would give the joints something better than the friction of the CA glue to support them. So far, it has worked very well.

Below you can see a tiny drill bit mounted in the Dremel extension thing (easier to handle in small spaces than the whole Dremel). The little tape tab is there so I know how deep to drill.

Once the legs were all locked in place, I put a little extra spackle on the base and squished each foot into the ground so that they had little footprints to fit in to. This both made it look like the model is heavy enough that it is digging into the ground and gives me registration marks so that I know exactly where the model is supposed to fit onto the base. Below you can also see a missing toe on this foot. I have no idea where it went! I didn't notice when it broke off and, despite searching all over the place, I couldn't find it. So, I'm just going to put some extra rust there later and pretend like it is supposed to be like that.

Moving along to the leg armor plates, a number of them called for grab handles. This was just regular old brass rod, bent to shape.

The photo etch that comes with this kit is interesting in that it builds up into large shapes that fit into some of the vents on the upper body of the tank. Below you can see the component parts and assembled collection that fit into the main exhaust tubes.

There are similar etch assemblies in the smaller square vents. These fit well, but had the tendency to fall through the holes they were supposed to cover. As you can see below, I just glued on a few strips of styrene in order to give them a little lip on each side and keep them in place.

The instructions also pointed out various places where wire grab handles should be added. Like on the leg armor, these were just simple bent brass wire. In this case, though, the wire that I was using was a bit brittle and tended to snap when bent. In order to soften it up a bit, I annealed it with a torch. For those unfamiliar with this process, I took the brass wire in some pliers (it gets hot!) and slowly passed it through the flame of a butane torch. The goal is to get the metal red hot, but not so hot that it starts to come apart or distort. Letting the metal cool in the air results in a much more pliable bit of wire. The wire is far softer and much easier to bend.

With that done, it was time to start putting everything together. Below you can see the leg armor plates held in place while epoxy cures.

Below you can see the legs clamped in place while the epoxy cures. If you look at the base of the lower left leg, you can see various marks. I put those on there to keep the legs sorted, so that I knew which one went in which spot and at which angle. This should, in theory, result in the legs all being just right when I place the model back on the base.

I say, "in theory" because, after everything was glued and assembled, I placed the model back on the base and the leg that was in the left corner was hovering about 3/8 of an inch off the ground. Not sure if there was a good way to fix it, I decided that that was a good place for a rock!

Back on the future-y tank, the kit had come with a photo etch version of a little railing around the hatch. Given the scale, though, this rail seemed much too thin. I decided to have a go at building my own version from some brass rod and solder. I tried a few methods of soldering using the tools that I had, but it was pretty messy and I managed to incinerate a few pieces of rod by accident. What you can see below is the second version (the blackened surface came from the first version). I have since read a brief article in Fine Scale Modeler magazine about working with brass, so the next time I do, I'll be a bit better off. Anyway, with a bit of filing and sanding, some drilling on the resin, and a spot of CA glue, the railing was cleaned up and attached around the hatch.

A bit more wire bending got me some protective bars around the sensitive equipment hanging under the front end of this tank.

Similarly, the other kit came with some plastic-coated wire to act as hydraulic hosing for the leg pistons. Unfortunately, this wire was not easily shapable and when added, really seemed out of scale. Having just done a bit of soldering on the other tank, I decided to replace the kit wire with some thin solder, since it is so easily shapable. Also, instead of just letting it hang free (which seemed implausible to me, as far as tank design goes), I added a few styrene brackets on the sides of the joint plate, so that it looked like the hosing was held in place.

And, with the exception of the gatling gun that goes on the front of the grey tank (and that is fragile!), that wraps up construction on the two models. Below you can see the unprimed models, on the incomplete base.

Turning back to the diorama base, it was time to start adding things to it. First was the guard rail. If you recall from the last post, this was made from some sheet copper that I had in a bag of scrap metal bits. In order to attach it to the styrene posts, I just used a small drill bit in the Dremel and drilled through the copper, into the posts. I then made some small bolts out of the top 1/8" of straight pins and used those, with some thick CA, to attach the metal parts.

Next up, it was time to add some different sizes of rocks, gravel and sand in order to start to blend things all together. I picked up a few bags of model railroad decoration from the local hobby shop.

Below you can see the three stages, from clean to primed. I simply worked from large to small. First I added the largest size of rock, clustering them around the base of the hill, then the next size down, clustered around the larger rocks, etc. I decided that the road needed a bit of texture, as the base spackle was just too smooth. I was going with the premise that this bit of road has been long since abandoned, so it wouldn't be super clean and smooth. So what I did was to add a layer of the finest gravel/sand that I had onto the road surface. It ended up a little bit rougher than I had hoped, but I think I'll be able to make up for that with a bit of weathering and dirt on the road later.

With a couple coats of primer on the tanks and base, that should wrap up construction. All that is left now is a great deal of painting and an attempt at flocked grass.

Tune in next time (very soon!) for my attempt at a new (to me) weathering technique and my shot at building a flocking device out of a few cheap parts.

Thanks for reading!

Resin and More Resin!

Nathan Fariss — 2014-02-25T20:25:41-08:00

So, at the conclusion of my last post, I was all ready to spend a bunch of time practicing car paint finishes. Well, I did that briefly and discovered that it was pretty boring. Without a real end goal to aim for, I lost interest pretty quickly. So, since I am dealing with some resin-related things in a side project, I decided that I should to a side-by-side build of two resin kits that have been in my collection for a while. They are similarly themed, both being walking tank sorts of designs, but they are very different kits.

First of the two is a heavy walking tank kit from MIG Productions, who are more commonly known for their pigments:

Along with that kit, I'll be building a more futuristic walking tank kit, the Rook, from Industria Mechanika:

Before I get into construction, let's compare and contrast the two kits. Industria Mechanika's kit consists of a very large number of parts (many of which are in the bags seen below), cast in an opaque grey resin. This is accompanied by a few pieces if brass rod, to be bent into grab handles and two sheets of photo-etch. It also includes two figures in the form of pilots that fit into the cockpit seats.

The casting quality is some of the best I've ever seen on a resin kit, with most of the parts having a small tab left on them, which doubles as part identification numbering. Generally, though, there are almost no large pour blocks on any of the parts. There are a few areas where a thin sheet of resin is left, that needs to be trimmed away, but I personally find this to be much easier than having to cut/sand a large block of resin away. The quality of the resin on this kit is very plastic-like, in that is is not too brittle and carves easily with an x-acto blade.

The MIG kit is cast from a tan resin, which is a bit more standard in cast resin parts. This kit is nearly all resin, with a bit of tubing for hydraulic hoses.

This resin is a bit more brittle than the grey resin seen above and has the more commonly found pour blocks, bubbles and need for a great deal of clean up. It also requires a good deal more shaping, drilling, etc in order to get it all to go together. Overall, though, the fidelity of the parts is still good. Below you can see some of the parts with their pour blocks still attached.

I decided to get started with the MIG model, beginning with the legs. I found that most of the leg length, on the outside, would eventually be covered by an armor plate, so I did a fairly rough clean up job. Below you can see the trimmed parts, with the various hinge holes drilled out.

These legs are held together by resin pins that go through the drilled out holes. Then, the leg position is held by hydraulics, part of which needs to be cut to length. This means that each leg consists of four main parts and a bunch of pins and cylinders that hold the big parts together. Below you can see the four legs with the pins in (not glued yet), but without any of the hydraulics.

Next, I put the hydraulics in place, but just kinda stuck on there, so that the legs were easily positionable. Then, using some museum tack, I stuck the legs onto the central body part, making sure that they all fit, etc. Below you can see it standing on it's own (although precariously, since nothing has been glued yet).

It was at this point that I realized that in order to be able to glue the legs into the correct positions, I'd need to know what they were standing on. This meant that I needed to stop the leg building and start figuring out what the diorama was going to look like. I decided on a rough base size, and then made myself some handy paper cutouts that were about the size of the finished tanks. In order to get an idea of the Rook kits size, I rubber-banded together one leg, stuck it to the body and guessed from there. Below you can see my two tank cutouts and my indication of where I wanted a road to be running. I got the width of the road by taking a standard two lane road with and dividing by 35, since the tanks are 1/35 scale.

My idea was to have a road running through the scene, with a bit of a rocky hill next to it, separated by a guard rail. This meant I could have some interesting terrain, with both tanks in there, but separated a bit by both height and what they are standing on. I'm hoping to get a few figures in there as well, but that is for a later blog post. In order to get a base to work with, I just cut a piece if 1/2" plywood down to size and got myself a bunch of floral foam from the craft store. Below you can see it roughly cut and glued to the board.

Next, I kicked around a few ideas for large rocks and was planning to use some stones I found outside, along with some sculpting, but then I ran across these rock molds when I was at one of my local hobby shops. The mold was only about $10, and I knew my wife had some two-part plastic resin at home that I could appropriate, so I bought the mold and decided to give it a try. Below you can see the mold, which I believe was intended for railroad decoration building.

Completed: Morgan Three Wheeler

Nathan Fariss — 2014-01-05T14:55:17-08:00

In the last post, I mentioned converting this model from an air-cooled engine to a water-cooled one.

When I began the project, I did my usual reference hunting on the internet. I pulled together a couple dozen images, made myself a printout of a collection of those and got to work. After a little while, I started to find large discrepancies between the model kit and my reference images. What I discovered was that there are a few different engines that all seemed to be used around the same time (mid 1930's). Of those, two were made by Matchless, one of which was air cooled. The differentiating features of the air-cooled engine are the fins on the cylinders and the smaller opening on the cowl behind the engine.

The other Matchless engine was water cooled, which can be spotted by the smooth cylinders, larger cowl opening and pipes going from the tops of the cylinders to the radiator inside the cowl.

The kit had an air-cooled engine, but, like many other parts on this kit, it wasn't a very good rendition. The detail was largely obscured by extra flash and poor mold alignment, even after all of the chrome was stripped off. Aside from that, I really just liked the way that the water cooled engine looked better. So, I decided to make a replacement engine.

I'd been toying with the idea of making model parts in the computer and then having them 3d printed, and this was the perfect opportunity to try it out. This presented a good test case for a number of reasons. First off, this engine is not very big, so many of the details on the engine are on the tiny side of what 3d printers can handle. This meant that I could see how well the details are reproduced when it gets down to the limits of the printers. Also, this let me get the same part printed in two different materials, to see if the higher-detail material was worth the extra cost (spoiler: it was).

So that said, I fired up trusty ol 3dsmax, and modeled up an engine that was sized to fit in place of the kit engine. This took a bit of quality time with the assembled kit engine, some calipers, and lots of careful measuring. What you see below is what I came up with and sent to Shapeways for printing. I sent them two files, one for the engine and one for the radiator.

The radiator worked just fine and moved from prep to printing pretty quickly. The engine, on the other hand, got kicked back to me for various reasons. Mostly, it was because of various areas being too thin. Instead of them just trying to print whatever you send them (which is what I thought they would do), they check the file first and let you know if there are any areas that could cause trouble. After a few go-arounds with that process I ended up with the engine model you see below. It has many of the thin bits thickened up, and the valve spring cap things removed entirely.

So, while the engine was being printed, the new radiator arrived! What you see below is my first 3d printed model part, cleaned and primed, next to a penny for scale.

A few weeks later, the 3d printed engine arrived and below you can see my first test fitting, as well as what the raw printed material looks like.

While the initial test fitting went pretty well, later fittings caused a little bit more trouble, as there were quite a few things to get aligned all at once. In the end, I ended up replacing some of the pins that were printed with the engine (the ones that go through the chrome plates) with small brass rod, for durability and so that I could reposition them slightly. Below you can see the final fitting, with radiator piping, made of brass rod and heat-shrink tubing, in place.

Once I was sure everything would fit, it was time for paint. Below you can see the painted engine, with some valve springs made from wound wire and the front frame plates attached.

And finally, the finished engine, in place, along with some plumbing (although the radiator pipes are not glued on in this photo), ignition wiring and some wiring to where the headlights will go.

Overall, this was an informative project, and a good test for the 3d printing. Click on the image below to go to the galley of photos of the finished model:

Next up for me is some practice with car paint finishes.

I've also got something bigger in the works, which I'll reveal here once it's a bit closer to being ready ;)

Thanks for reading!

Beginning the Build: Morgan Three Wheeler

Nathan Fariss — 2013-12-01T14:19:17-08:00

On my continuing quest for a better car paint finish, I've chosen a Morgan Three Wheeler model, from Minicraft, as my next build.

Often, when I pick out kits to build, I do so because of the difficulty and complexity of the kit. I look for well-engineered kits, with lots of extras like photo-etch, metal parts, great decals, etc. This kit, on the other hand, I picked out because I really like the Morgan Three Wheeler. I've seen a few in person and always though that they were just really cool vehicles.

As a result of that method of kit selection, this one ended up taking quite a bit of extra work to make it acceptable. Below you can see the parts as they came out of the box: A few trees of a fairly soft grey plastic, some hard-ish rubber tires, some clear parts, a length of tubing for the engine and one tree of thickly-coated chrome parts.

First and foremost, I knew that the chrome parts were just not going to cut it. The varnish/primer that they use under the chrome was on there pretty thick, and in combination with the chrome paint, was filling in many of the details on the parts. That's not evening mentioning the fundamental problem with parts that are painted on the trees: The spots that are left unpainted on the parts once they are cut off the sprue. I decided to give a technique a try that I had read about online and in magazines: de-chroming the parts with Bleche-wite. Bleche-wite is a cleaner that is meant to whiten the whitewalls of tires. It's a pretty aggressive cleaner, so should be handled with care, in a well-ventilated area. I used a baking dish, with the bottle of cleaner emptied into it. I dropped the chrome sprue in there and covered it with plastic wrap. I found that it took a couple multi-hour sessions to get all the chrome off, but because this solvent isn't as aggressive as something like lacquer thinner, I didn't have to worry about the plastic itself dissolving. If you are going to try this yourself, I recommend giving it a few hours in the cleaner and then giving it a light scrubbing with a toothbrush (don't use the brush afterward, despite the tooth-whitening potential), and repeat that process until all the chrome and underlying varnish is all gone.

With that out of the way, I should probably mention something about this kit: It is a mess. Compared to many of the other kits that I have built, from the likes of Tamiya, Hobbyboss and Dragon, this one is of markedly lower quality. There is heaps of flash, the registration between the mold halves is not very good, there are ejector pin marks and sinks all over the place and it just requires a great deal of work to get into shape.

That said, I began by getting the body into a state that is ready for primer and paint. There were sinks on the exterior of the body in every place where there were structural braces on the inside. I ended up thinning some green Squadron putty with some lacquer thinner and spreading that over these areas. After that, I worked my way through various grits of sandpaper, wet sanding until it was smooth enough to be primed. Below you can see the exterior has been sanded, but the rear tire area still needs to be cleaned up.

Also, while consulting some reference, I determined that the way the instructions wanted me to put the wheel halves together would have resulted in wheels that didn't really look like the real things. The 1:1 car's wire wheels look to have an offset pattern, making for a much more visually-dense criss-cross pattern. The way the parts aligned resulted in all the spokes lining up, making for a much simpler look. I wanted the more complex look, so I shaved off the locator pins and offset the halves a few degrees. Below you can see the stock and offset locations of the wheel halves.

Some thing unusual about this kit is that it is constructed very much like the real car, with an underlying frame that the body sits on top of. While I'm not sure if this was the best idea, since the plastic that this kit is made of is pretty soft and not the best structural material, that is how it is made, so that is what I had to work with. While assembling the front end, I did notice that one of the bracing bars was cast out of scale, so I just replaced it with some extra brass rod that I had laying around, bent to match.

Below you can see a painted wheel, tire mounted, attached to the rear drive assembly. This whole assembly ends up being covered by the body, though, so there were some things here that I would usually fix, but decided not to bother with in this case. As a side note, to anyone else who may attempt this kit: The instructions mention dipping the tires in warm water in order to soften them before stretching them around the wheels. Use HOT water. It took me a few tries, with increasing warm/hot water to get the tires onto the wheels, and I managed to damage a few spokes. Using very hot water from the start would probably avoid any damage.

Below you can see the fairly simple dash board, with decals applied. The kit came with some very thick lenses for these gauges, but I decided to just use some clear parts cement to coat them instead, so that the graphics could still be seen.

Below you can see the frame all together, and the body painted with the interior painted and attached.

Here I'll touch upon something that will be addressed more in the next blog post: conversion from an air-cooled engine to a water-cooled one. The first part of that involved reshaping the front cowl a bit. The model part also had a very large raised band where there should have been a barely sunken weld bead. I reshaped the front opening a bit to give some curve to the sides and then cut off the raised ridge and used a heated sewing pin to carve a bit of a weld bead. Below you can see the reshaped cowl along with a few other parts after getting a coat of primer, black gloss and Alclad chrome paint.

Finally, below you can see the rear rack mounted and a general indication of the quality of the paint job on this one. It's generally better than the SLS model, but still not quite what I was hoping for. This one is Tamiya british green and clear paints right from the can. I've decided that after this model is done, I'm just going to get a bunch of cheap car kits and just spend some time practicing my painting techniques on the bodies of those models.

Thanks for reading, and tune in for the next post, which will have some interesting new developments in model building!

Repairing a few Older Projects

Nathan Fariss — 2013-12-01T13:55:45-08:00

Before I move on to the next model build, I wanted to put up a quick post that had some updates from previous projects.

Repair #1:

So, after I completed the Panzer and BMW motorcycle models, I put them together into one display case, and took them to my office at work for display. I was bringing various other models in at the same time, in various other display cases. Some of those cases had the plastic tops that snapped to the bases and some had the tops that just sat on the bases. Unfortunately, when I picked up the case that held the tank and motorcycle, I THOUGHT it was one that snapped together, but it wasn't. This resulted in the lower half of the case dropping to the table and then bouncing onto the floor, doing a bit of damage to both models, which were wired to the base.

I was pretty mad at myself for making such a mistake and, after a great deal of cursing, decided to put the models and all the broken pieces back in the case, and the case back into its box, to be fixed later. Fast forward a year or two and I finally felt like I was able to open the box up and see how hard it would be to repair the models. Fortunately, it turned out to be pretty easy! Below you can see the two models and their detached parts all spread out, ready for fixing.

The tank lost a few hatches, some road wheels and some chunks of track. A bit of time with some plastic cement and it was good as new. I also took the opportunity to repose some of the hatches into a more natural position, but forgot to take a picture of the finished project. Just imagine that those engine hatches are no longer sticking straight up :)

The motorcycle just needed a few small parts reattached.

Repair #2:

The Hornethopter model itself wasn't damaged, but the base that I built for it ended up throwing me for a loop. I have since learned that the chunk of wood that I bought for the base, which was a 'turning block', was actually pretty wet wood. The turning blocks come with a wax coating, which keeps the moisture in the wood, presumably making it better for turning on a lathe. When I prepared the block, I burned off the wax, cut the shape that I needed and carved it a bit. I put some polyurethane on there, attached the brass name plate, tube for the model and some felt dots on the bottom and called it done.

Fast forward a few months, after the model had been sitting under a bell jar at work, and the moisture had all evaporated from the block of wood. As the wood lost its moisture, it also shrunk. It shrunk enough to significantly buckle the brass name plate. I brought the model home, thinking that I could pop the plate off, and re-glue it into place. Unfortunately, the plate didn't really want to flatten out properly, so I decided to go a different route. I scanned the hornethopter logo and printed it out onto clear decal sheet. I sanded the glue off of the front of the wood block, made it smooth again and gave it a coat of gloss polyurethane. Then I put the decal on there, where the plate used to be, and gave it a few more coats of gloss polyurethane. Good as new!

Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG

Nathan Fariss — 2013-12-01T12:14:45-08:00

In an effort to get better at shiny car paint finishes, I've decided to do a number of cars in a row. The first in this line of increasingly-shiny vehicles is this Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG.

Below, you can see the various trees of parts. The body is a single piece, with no opening panels. There are a few parts (wheels, brakes, ducts) that are pre-painted in a satin metal that looks decent. There is also a bit of photo-etch that provide for replacing some of the plastic grills.

Since the goal of this project is practicing my car paint finishing, let's just right to that. I had been doing some reading on various scale modeling forums (Fine Scale Modeler forums, mostly) and had read good things about Testors one-coat lacquer, so I decided to give that a try. I bought one of their metallic red colors and some of their clear coat. After sanding out some seams and priming, the body and spoiler were ready for paint. In the image below, you can see how it looks after a few coats of the red paint (first image), after one coat of the clear coat (middle) and after two coats of the clear coat (third image). As you can see, I had a good deal of trouble trying to get the paint to go on glossy, always ending up with a pebbly finish. When the clear went over that, it smoothed it out a bit, but was still not the best.

In an effort to get a better finish, I took a series of sanding pads to the surface, smoothing out the orange peel texture and trying to get a better surface to spray more clear coat on to. Below you can see a few stages in the sanding process.

The problem I was having with this metallic paint was that as I sanded it, the metal flakes would come to the surface, and be silver spots, instead of the red-tinted flakes that they were when deeper in the paint. I suppose that is the nature of metal flake paint, but it definitely made things a bit more difficult as far as getting a nice consistent look.

After some more clear coat, the paint finish was definitely better, as you can see in the final images, but still not as good as I would like, as it still had a little bit of orange peel.

In reference that I found, the wheels also were available in a gunmetal color, which I think goes much better with the metallic red paint. Below you can see the wheels after being sprayed with some Alclad gunmetal paint and a couple coats of clear gloss.

The brake calipers, after some paint, decals, and clear.

The chassis, after being painted black, masked for spraying of the various metal bits (exhaust, braces, engine, etc).

After the painting:

The interior of the real car looks to have a two-tone black/grey scheme (it may be black leather and Alcantara). I made an effort to replicate that scheme with black and grey paint and some selective application of some gloss varnish (from Vallejo). The dash after painting, and decals:

Since the kit didn't come with any seat belts, I used a bit of masking tape to make some, and added some buckles that I already had.

Below you can see the completed interior, before the top and bottom of the car was put together.

And finally, everything was put together and a bit of Tamiya model wax applied to clean and shine things up. Click on the image below to see the gallery of photos of the finished model:

F-84e Thunderjet Completion

Nathan Fariss — 2013-06-10T20:42:57-07:00

Picking up where the last post left off, the decal work continued. It was pretty straight-forward, with liberal use of MicroSet and MicroSol to try to get the decals to sink into the panel lines and rivets. This was generally successful, but if you look closely in the finished model galley, you can see a few areas where the decals were a bit stubborn. This was mostly on the large wing insignias and the stars and bars on the sides of the fuselage. I'm just guessing that the white layer was a little tougher than the others, making those decals a bit harder to soften.

With all the decals on, I sprayed the whole jet with a few coats of Testors Flat Clear to kill the gloss and give everything the same sheen. Below you can see the canopy with the masking removed and everything with a nice dull finish.

The last step in construction was to assemble all the fiddly bits that are prone to breakage, and thus left to the end. This was also an area that had the most replacement with either kit metal parts or Eduard photo etch detail parts. The landing gear all had metal parts that came with the kit as well as a few small details that were from the Eduard kit. The air brake and small gear doors (upper left and lower center, respectively) were full replacements with Eduard parts, although with the air brake, I completely misplaced some vent louvres, so I had to make a few replacements with very thin plastic card (the white you can see through the holes in the image below). Below you can see them all built and ready for priming and painting.

Those parts all got the same paint treatment as the body, and were then decalled, sprayed with flat, and then assembled. Below, you can see the jet propped at a funny angle as the epoxy on the landing gear sets.

This is where I got a bit lazy with the documentation photography. But after this point, all that was left was some weathering, and the assembly and painting of the two bombs that attach to the pylons. Weathering was done using a neutral wash from MIG. I tested out using black watercolors first, but it just didn't like the flat clear coat, and just wanted to bead up and make black water spots. I settled on a fairly easy technique where I'd paint on the neutral wash with a small paint brush, covering all the panel lines and rivet lines. Then, I'd let it dry for at least a few hours (so that it was completely dry), and then go back over it with a lint-free wipe, dampened with thinner (the sort that is meant to work with MIG pigments). That wiped most of the wash away, but left just enough behind in the lines and rivets to be pleasing. It also left just a bit on the surface to make things look not quite so clean.

Well, that one is all wrapped up, so check out the images of the finished model by clicking on the image below. Thanks for reading!

F-84e Progress

Nathan Fariss — 2013-04-27T20:25:56-07:00

Hey there! It's been ages, I know, but I'm back with an update on my progress on the F-84e. Since the last update, lots of other exciting non-model-related things have happened, such as me finishing work on Monsters University (in theaters June 21st!), some vacation, and misc other tasks. But recently, I decided to quit slacking around and try to make some real progress on this model. Here's what I have been up to…

After the cockpit, the next step was the landing gear and air brake bays. The detail kit from Eduard included various panels and brackets for these, so you can see a few of those in the images below. The Eduard instructions also called for me to cut one of the corners out of one rear gear bay and replace it with an etch panel (lower right, in the below photo). This was questionably successful, as the part that I was supposed to replace the floor corner with didn't fit very well and the thickness between the plastic floor parts and the etch version just weren't close enough to blend together. I decided to just let it slide and replaced the etch floor with some polystyrene card and leave it at that.

Below you can see the same bays after priming and painting in a base green. They had various details picked out by hand in steel paint, the raised bits picked out with a lighter shade via dry brushing and the whole things hit with a grungy brown wash to give it all a bit of dirt.

Next up was prepping the fuselage halves for assembly. Since the front gear bay, air brake bay and cockpit are all locked between the halved when they go together, the inside of the fuselage halves need to be painted to match where appropriate. As you can see in the image below, most of it was painted the same green as the cockpit. The metallic bit at the front is the area that is seen through the nose intake, which, according to reference photos, matches the exterior aluminum color.

Similarly, the front landing gear bay had to have the upper section of it painted that same aluminum, since it goes in that same intake, and splits the flow of air. I'm not sure what the little black panel is, but all the reference I could find showed it being black and shiny, so there you have it.

Below you can see the fuselage halves in place, while the glue is drying, with the cockpit sandwiched in between.

Skipping ahead a bit, the next step was to assemble the wings, which sandwich the rear gear bays in them. This was another area where the Eduard detail kit had a few extras for me to add. The place where the flaps go had an extra photo-etch piece, which showed a bit of the structure of the wing itself. These were a little tricky, as it required that a little bit of the wing be cut away to make room for the flap connections (which were also replaced by etch parts). You can see in the photo below that the two sides are different colors, as I first tried filling in the gaps with super glue, on the right side, and then, not being happy with that (but also not willing to take it back apart) I took a different approach on the left side and filled the area in with green putty. The putty was then sanded back into a flat surface which fit the etch part a little better. While neither side is perfect, I'm hoping that the imperfections are mostly covered by the flaps, once they are in place.

Also visible below is a bit of the filling that was added between the fuselage halves to help cover up the seam.

Next up was to mask the canopy parts, using the precut masks that came with the Eduard kit. Generally, they fit well, but were tricky to place in a few cases. You can see below where I ended up just adding a little bit of extra tape, because it was giving me too much trouble getting the mask into just the right place. Also, this is where I ran into a bit of a snag. I discovered that, with all the cockpit stuff in place, the front canopy section wouldn't actually fit over it.

Whoops!

The HUD glass was sticking up a bit too far to allow the canopy to fit into its spot. What I ended up doing was detaching a few of the parts that held the HUD and then shortened a few of them, so that, once back in place, they were low enough to allow the canopy to fit. A side note here: I found that the clear HUD piece that came with the kit seemed strangely large. If I were to go back and do it again, I'd probably make a new piece that was quite a bit smaller and substitute that instead. But, by the time I got far enough along and realized that its scale didn't really match the reference photos I had, I really wasn't up for tearing it apart again and building something new. Oh well :)

The rear canopy section is taped in place on the front and held in the back with a tiny dab of clear-parts glue, with the thought that it'll be easy to pop back off after painting.

Below you can see the various gear bays masked off and ready for priming and painting.

The various flaps and such with the standard scrap-sprue handles, also ready for priming and painting.

The model after priming with Mr Surfacer 1200:

I made myself a little handle out of some scrap bass wood I had around and some self-adhesive cork sheeting I had left over from when I lined my desk drawers. I'm pretty sure I may have snapped off a few of the etch parts inside the exhaust, but I'll fix those later ;)

Next up was some pre-shading on the panel lines with some Tamiya German Grey. The idea here is to just give some contrasting tones that can subtly show through the metallic paint later on. This helps break up the otherwise flat surface and hints at wear and tear.

Next up was a base coat of Alcald Aluminum paint. Then various panels were masked off and painted with a darker aluminum shade. Then more panels were masked and painted with a lighter aluminum shade. Next, the top of the canopy was masked and painted flat white. Finally, the top of the fuselage was masked and painted olive drab.

In the below photo, it is a little easier to see some of the variation in the panel shades. These will be picked out a bit more later on with weathering and pin washing.

Next up were two coats of Pledge Future, to prep for decals. For those not familiar with this stuff, it is a floor care product that is widely used by modelers since it has a number of features that make it great to work with. First off, it can be airbrushed directly, without any diluting (very handy). It provides a nice glossy surface, to help prevent silvering (this is the reason to want a gloss coat at this point) with the decals and also lays nice and flat after drying, so you don't have to worry about it adding a ton of thickness or filling in fine panel seams. Also, it is an acrylic product, so I can put it right over the fragile Alclad paint and not have to worry about the solvents eating away the paint. It also smells nice :)

Since it's no longer called 'Future', I figured I'd add an image of what my bottle looks like, so that others wanting to use the same had an easier time tracking it down (it can be ordered from amazon.com).

And finally, here's a little teaser of the in-progress decal work. At this time, I've got one side pretty much complete decal-wise and am moving on to the other side.

Once the decals are all on, then it's back to the landing gear, in order to give this bird some legs to stand on. Then comes an overcoating of flat clear to kill the gloss from the Future, removal of the canopy masks and then final assembly. I'm still debating how I want to display this one, so I'll leave thoughts on that to a later post.

Thanks for reading!

New project: F-84e Thunderjet

Nathan Fariss — 2013-01-13T18:28:08-08:00

With the Hornethopter wrapped up, it was time to move along to the next project. I bought this kit a year or so ago for a few different reasons. First, the kit looked well made and came with a number of things that you usually have to pay extra for and order separately, such as metal landing gear. It also was 1:32 scale, which is on the larger side for aircraft, allowing for more detail and a little room to work. I had bought this with the intention of learning more about natural metal finishing, since that wasn't something I had done much of previously. Finally, I haven't made a plastic aircraft model since I was maybe 13 years old, so it seemed like it would be a fun change of pace.

This one is made by HobbyBoss and is of the Korean-war-era F-84E Thunderjet.

Since I don't seem to be able to leave well enough alone, I also ordered the 'Big Ed' kit of detailing parts from Eduard. It consists of four sets of photo-etched metal (seat belts, cockpit details, exterior details, and remove-before-flight tags) and one set of pre-cut canopy masks. Below you can see, from left to right, the canopy masks, exterior detail kit and remove-before-flight tags.

Below you can see the two frets of photo-etch for the cockpit details (left two) and one (partially used at this point) fret for the seat belt and ejector seat upgrades.

While I was ordering things, I expanded my collection of Alclad metallic paints by ordering a few more. These were chosen to provide a few similar shades of aluminum for the main aircraft skin as well as a few other colors that I thought would be handy (gunmetal, jet exhaust)

With the addition of all of the upgrade parts, I found that I needed to be much more careful of the order in which things are assembled. In addition, there was quite a bit of work that had to be done to the plastic parts, in order to shave off raised details that were to be replaced by photo-etched parts. To start, though, I put together the seat belts, since they were not replacing any kit part, making them safe to build without worry. The parts are pre-printed photo-etched metal, which is pretty cool, but also a little shinier than I would prefer and a bit tricky to bend without the paint flaking off. Here are the belts after being assembled but before bending them into final shape on the seat.

Here is a close-up of the little foot-rest-looking things for the seat in bent and unbent form. They are on a Hold-and-Fold bender (very handy!).

Here is the seat, pretty much all assembled with kit and upgrade parts mixing. Although, as I discovered later on, the upgrade parts seem to actually be for the F-84G seat rather than the F-84E (at least so I have read, as I wouldn't know for sure myself, and have had a hard time finding good reference). What this meant, though, was that the seat, with the new frame behind it, sat quite a bit further forward in the cockpit that the kit seat. This required a little bit of trimming and planning in order to get everything to fit again. Mostly just taking a bit out of the center pillar and moving the control stick forward. Also, I made a few modifications to the kit part that helps align the seat in the cockpit, so that it would fit in there securely.

Here is the seat with paint. I also had a hard time finding good reference of this cockpit as far as color goes. Most of the reference is of the F-84G, and most of THAT is of planes that have long since been decommissioned, been repainted, and have been sitting in museums for a while. Even checking other models that have been built, the colored ranged from all black, to all green to a mixture of both. Since my seat was already a bit mismatched version-wise, I decided to just go with a mixture of black and interior green. If I was a stickler for historical detail, I'd probably rebuild the seat to remove the back structure. But I'm not a stickler like that, and I like the way it looks, so I suppose this one will never win any IPMS awards ;)

Next up was to start putting together the cockpit tub. This is where is started to get a bit trickier, as there were many kit parts that were being replaced by the upgrade parts and many kit parts that just needed altering. The kit parts had many of the controls molded into the plastic, but since those were being replaced by more pre-printed etched parts, I had to shave off much of the raised details. There were also a few boxes and cylinders that either needed to be cut off and replaced with folded etch or needed to be cut off and saved to be put back on top of the printed etch parts later.

Directly connected to the front of the cockpit tub is the gun bay, with four machine cannons. Looking at the kit parts, the gun barrels were not looking so good. They were a little soft around the edges, didn't have a hole in the end, and had a mold seam that I would have to clean up. I had seen various articles in Fine Scale Modeler magazine where people used fancy turned brass gun barrels that looked just fabulous. Not having anything like that, I instead dug into a bag of scrap metal bits that I got at the local Ace Hardware, and found some lengths of 1/16" brass tubing that I could cut down and use instead. With a bit of careful cutting (I put the tube on the desk, put a sharp x-acto on top and slowly rolled back and forth, letting the knife cut through the soft metal with only light pressure), I ended up with four 1" long gun barrels that looked much better than the kit versions.

Below you can see the various cockpit and gun bay parts attached to scrap plastic and ready for painting.

Below is the current state of the cockpit and gun bay. The gun bay parts are not glued yet, but just put in there to demonstrate how they go together. Also, only a few bits of the pre-printed etch have gone into the cockpit so far, and they will get touched up a bit later and possibly sprayed with a matte medium overcoat in order to dull them down a bit (pending a paint interaction test, to avoid any possible mishaps).

The painting was made up of a base coat of Mr Surfacer 1200, then a layer of Tamiya Dark Green (XF-61) followed by an overcoat of Tamiya Cockpit Green (XF-71), all sprayed with my Paasche Talon airbrush. On the lighter green, I avoided the corners a bit, to let them stay a bit darker. The gun bay parts are Alclad Gunmetal and Dull Aluminum. Everything got a light wash of Abteilung Dark Mud in order to pick out some details and make it all a bit less clean. It still needs some selective dry-brushing of highlights, and much more of the photo-etched details, but that's for next time!

Thanks for reading!

Hornethopter Completion

Nathan Fariss — 2012-11-18T09:08:07-08:00

Painting continued on the Hornethopter. Once the exterior surfaces were generally complete, I moved on to the cockpit. I aimed to have a red velvet seat, wood panelling and misc metal and gray control surfaces. After I got most of it painted, I found that the red paint that I used had a bit more of a sheen than I had expected, and instead of a flat velvet-like red, it was more of a red leather. But, since I wasn't too married to the idea of red velvet and I actually like the way the red leather looked, I decided to just stick with that and leave it as-is.

At this point I was ready to start general assembly. Below you can see the two major structure parts joined together.

The catch was that I couldn't really do much more assembly until I could get the model up off of the ground, since the legs hang down and were likely to just get broken or scratched up if I attached them too early. With that in mind, I headed over to a local hardwood store and picked up a block of wood that was intended for turning on a latch. This meant that it came in large blocks, and was dipped in wax (presumably to keep it an even moisture level). I found a fairly small and inexpensive chunk that had a nice burl look to it and brought it home. It required cutting down a bit in order to get a proper sized piece as well as some quality time with a blow torch in order to melt off the bulk of the wax coating. So, with a hand saw/mitre box combo and lots of elbow grease, I ended up with the piece you see below.

As you can see, the flat surfaces are a bit plain, and I wanted something that went with the steampunk theme a little better. I opted for a more organic hand-carved look for the block. This meant that I had to spend a bit of time going over the whole thing, breaking up the smooth surfaces and making it all look a bit more rustic.

After that, the block spent some quality time with gloss polyurethane and a brush, getting it all nice and shiny. I painted the name plate black and then gave it a light sanding to bring the raised text out. It then got a few coats of spray clear and was mounted to the flat front of the block. Finally, I ran some 1/8" brass tubing through a tube bender to get it curved nicely and attached that to the block as well.

Below you can see the frame of the Hornethopter mounted to the base.

With that done, construction could precede, with the other parts being mounted and the wings finally being started on. I realized that it probably would have been a bit better to figure out the wing mounting techniques a bit earlier, before painting, since it was going to be tricky to not damage the paint now. I settled on a little trick that worked pretty well: I drilled holes into the wing sockets on the body of the model, and the set brass rod in there that was the exact depth of the hole. I put a tiny dab of super glue on the end of the rod and then pressed the wing base into the socket at the angle that I wanted it to stay at. This caused the bit of rod to stick to the wing in the exact spot and at the exact angle that I needed. I then gently removed both and drew a bunch of reference lines in pencil on the wing base. Then I could remove the brass rod and drill a hole at just the right angle to make it all fit back together perfectly (except stronger).

Below you can see the wing bases with their brass rods glued it, and with the reference marks still in place.

The wing frames after their coats of black gloss paint and a few coats of the same chrome paint that the rest of the body got.

Using the wing template available from the manufacturer's web site, I designed some wing film inserts that had the same general color scheme as the rest of the model. These were printed out on ink-jet-friendly transparency film and glued in between the layers of photo-etch wing. Here you can see them before the excess was trimmed off.

Finally, the wings were attached, any paint chips were touched up, and a little bit of grease/oil/rust was added here and there.

Click HERE or on the image below to see the galley of the completed model.

Hornethopter Painting

Nathan Fariss — 2012-09-25T20:42:43-07:00

Hi there! Just a quick post today to show a bit of progress on the painting of the Hornethopter. In the last post, I showed my inspiration sheet, with the heat-treated titanium images on it. Also shown were the various parts that had been sprayed with the chrome paint. This post aims to show a few of the steps in going from chrome to heat-treated.

I switched the airbrush to the super-fine tip and needle and loaded it up with just a tiny bit of diluted Tamiya clear yellow. With the pressure set to about 15-20lbs, I freehanded some soft bands of yellow across the abdomen sections. Once I had bands of yellow on all the parts, I followed up with similarly-diluted clear red. Soft bands of clear red gave me something like so:

Below you can see the yellow and red in place and the part masked before applying the clear blue.

And the abdomen masked and painted with the first pass of blue:

Thorax fully sprayed with all three colors:

The abdomen was tricky, because it had to be painted in three steps. This was required in order to give each section plenty of space to blend the blue in, but still get a clean line against the section below. Below you can see the abdomen with all three colors applied.

Next up is putting a contrasting dark steel color on the filigree-like metal strips between the sections as well as the casting plate right at the tail. That will be following by the beginning of hand painting the cockpit and picking out all the rivets with a contrasting paint. Thanks for reading!

Hornethopter Continued

Nathan Fariss — 2012-09-09T20:00:43-07:00

I should never have claimed that the build was moving quickly and wouldn't take very long, as that pretty much ensured that it would grind to a halt almost instantly.

So, the problem that I had with this one was that I didn't have a clear idea of exactly how I was going to paint and mount it. I hit the point where I needed to start assembly and drilling/pinning parts together, but I didn't have a mental picture of how the legs should be posed. After stewing on it for a few weeks I finally just started searching the interwebs for inspiration. I really liked the ideas of having some of the parts look like heat-treated titanium. I also wanted to embrace some of the kits steam punk look while also incorporating some modern military cues and some elements from real wasps. At the same time I did't want to repeat what I had already seen online, but I wanted to draw some inspiration from good looking models that others had built.

With all that in mind, I collected images, put them all together into a 13" x 19" format and printed myself out a big ol inspiration sheet. Below is the fun-sized internet version. Please note that this is a collection of other peoples photos, so the copyrights generally belong to them, so hopefully they won't sue me or anything ;)

Also, I have recently purchased quite a few new paints (mentioned in a previous post), but didn't really have a good way to organize them. I was finding that these taller skinny bottle were just lurking about my model desk in a group, often falling over, and generally being difficult to deal with. It was hard to quickly find the color that I wanted and it was easy to bump them so they all fell over. After a bit of consideration, I decided it was time to build a new little paint shelf, better suited to my new model desk and the differently-sized bottles. On my way home from work, I swung by Home Depot, picked up a $5 sheet of 1/4" thick MDF board and got to work. I settled on a shelf that was about 4ft long and about 7.5" tall, and 4" deep. I just sketched it out quickly, marked the board and cut out a bunch of pieces. I then realized I had cut the slot in two of the upright parts in the wrong place and called it a day ;)

The next day, I cut two new parts and glued the whole thing together. Below you can see the end result, putting most of my paints and pigments within arms reach.

With some inspiration gained, and the model desk freshly organized, I began gluing things together. Below you can see the legs put together. I glued the upper and lower sections together first and then drilled through the joint with a pin vice and glued some brass rod into the hole in order to strengthen the joint. The leg pose that I decided on was one that hopefully mimics the legs of a real hornet, when in flight. The image above of the flying hornet is what I was aiming for. While I can't hit the pose exactly, since the kit legs can't fold up against the body quite that far, I'm hoping that the general feel will be similar.

With a coat of primer sprayed onto these parts, I began the rough assembly. This consisted of marking, taping and sticking (with museum tack) the various parts together, so that I could drill holes and glue in brass pins where needed. The legs, for example, were posed and then held by one hand, while the other hand used the Dremel (with the flexi-wand attachment thing), fitted with a tiny drill bit, to drill through the ball joint into the body. Then, I could fit an appropriately-sized length of brass rod through this hole. I glued the rod just to the leg, making it so I could take the whole thing apart, but once painting is done, it can be easily reassembled just as intended. Below you can see the first three legs pinned in place.

Once I had all the pins installed in the legs, I prepped all of the sprayable parts for painting by attaching various handles to them.

As I alluded to earlier, I decided to go with a metal finish for most of the model. I decided to use Alclad lacquer on this model, which is not something I have tried before. For the finishes I am using, it is a two step process. First, a gloss black paint is sprayed over the parts, and then, after drying for a day, the metallic paint is lightly sprayed over the black. Below you can see the legs with their gloss black coat.

The abdomen with its gloss black:

For the legs and connecting frame, I used Alclad Steel paint, which is a darker, semi-gloss finish. Below you can see the legs hanging to dry.

The rest of the parts were painted with Alclad Chrome. This is a nice bright, high-gloss paint, although a bit trickier to apply well than the steel color was. The plans is to get these parts nice and bright and then go back over them with a few colors of clear yellow, red and blue paint, hopefully getting the rainbow looks of heat treated titanium. Depending on how that turns out, I may then dull it all down a bit with some weathering and dirt, but I'll play that by ear.

Below is the thorax drying.

And the abdomen after its chrome treatment. This one ended up with a few duller areas, and may need another coat to even it out.

Below you can see the main connecting structure painted in steel, with the stinger painted chrome.

That's where I am as of this evening. Next up is a bit of repainting on the abdomen and then a shot at the multi-color clear treatment. Also, as soon as the cockpit section is done with airbrushing, I can begin hand painting the wood and seat in there as well as the pilot and control panel.

Next Up: Hornethopter

Nathan Fariss — 2012-07-14T19:23:33-07:00

Moving right along, I've decided to try something new for my next project. While I worked with resin castings a bit during the Panzer build, I have never done a full resin model before. A little while back, my good friend, Neil Blevins, pointed me towards the Industria Mechanika web site. Industria Mechanika does both resin kit design as well as coordinating other artists and their designs. They bring the designs together with the production means and end up selling limited-run resin kits in a variety of themes. Finding their designs, and the premise of trying out a resin kit, interesting, I ordered up one of the smaller kits just as they were running the third edition of it.

That brings me to the next model:

This one is a steampunk-styled Hornet-shaped ornithopter.

As you can see below, this kit is mostly resin castings, but also has a few photo-etch sheets (which are impressively thick), a clear windshield and two glass eye lenses. It also comes with a bit of coated wire for the leg rigging, but I don't think it i visible in the image below.

Here is a close-up on the straight-from-the-box leg segments. These will require a bit of clean up, a bit of filling and things of that nature, but overall, the castings look good and have lots of detail.

Below, you can see the main parts of the wasp body and the bodies of the figures that come with the kit.

This build is moving fairly quickly, since the overall parts count is much lower than the average plastic model. I expect to complete this one within a month or so, so watch out for more updates!

Kröte - Finished and Photographed

Nathan Fariss — 2012-07-04T20:42:33-07:00

Another one wrapped up. Below you can see the finished product. Once I went to put everything together, I found that the concave bottom of the robot feet made it quite difficult to glue down to the base. I ended up having to build some additional structure on to the feet bottoms so that there was something of substance under there that could be glued down.

Weathering was done with MIG pigments and Abteilung oils. I also went back and added a good deal of red primer-colored paint along many of the edges to represent chipped and scraped paint. It's another new technique for me (since I don't do much armor modeling) and I feel that it was somewhat successful. Next time, though, I think I'll approach it a little differently, using some of the same salt-mask techniques on the flooring and maybe looking into a similar technique that uses hairspray as a masking agent.

Next, various washes of dark oils and pigments, spread around with mineral spirits were used to accent the details. Some selective areas of dirt and rust, also spread with mineral spirits, picked out areas that I thought would likely rust a bit. Finally, a few touches of MIG Oil and Grime mixture (basically a black/brown sludge that dries glossy to look wet) were used to add some leaky areas and a few spots on the floor.

Click on any of the images, or the link on the side bar to the left, to go to the full gallery.

Thanks for reading!

Kröte - Diorama and Weathering

Nathan Fariss — 2012-07-04T11:34:23-07:00

Part way through the build of this kit, I decided that I wanted a little bit of environmental context for the completed model. For me, that meant building an appropriate base for it to stand on, as well as a few props to give context to why the model had its side panel opened up. Since the kit also came with the figure, I thought a good solution was to make the floor something like an aircraft hanger floor, to add a table and ladder, a few dollhouse tools and accessories and a few painted parts from the spares drawer.

Starting with the floor, as I mentioned in the last post, I painted it all a metal color and gave it a few thick coats of clear to protect the metal paint. Next, I decided to try out a new technique: using salt and water to roughly mask coats of paint. This involved dampening the surface and sprinkling table salt over it. The water made the salt stick and I pushed it around a bit with my finger to get it to clump together a bit. Once allowed to dry, the salt hardens up and is ready for painting. Below, you can see my freshly salted floor.

After the salting, I applied a few coats of various shades of grey paint. Then I rubbed some of the salt off, exposing the bright metal underneath. Being that this was the first time I tried this technique, I found that I had probably used a bit much salt, making my chips very large and very numerous. So, I left some of the salt on there and then airbrushed a few light coats of more grey paint over the newly-exposed metal areas. This dulled them down a bit, and added some depth. Next I masked and sprayed a white line across the floor, just for visual interest. Finally, I rubbed off the last little bits of salt, leaving a few fresh paint chips. As an added touch, I took a fine grain sanding stick and gave the surface a very light sanding. As I had hoped, this took the grey paint off of the raised areas, but didn't get down to the metal paint, because of the thick coats of clear in between. This gave me the look of having the grey paint rubbed off of all of the raised parts of the diamond plate.

Next up was to build a few extra bits of furniture in order to help fill out the scene. I figured that a little work table would make sense, so I put one together using some strip and sheet styrene that I had around. Below you can see the completed, but unpainted, table in place as I tried to figure out where things should be situated on the base.

After the table, I noticed that the figure would be far too short to reach the open access panel of the machine without some sort of stool or ladder. So, using the same sort of strip and sheet styrene, I built a little ladder to lean against the side of the model (although I forgot to take a photo of it). This just left a bit of painting on the new parts and weathering of all parts. Below you can see part of my collection of pigments and oil paints that were used for the weathering and detailing. You can also see the couple of doll house props that I bought to go along with this (oil can, lunch box)

That's it for this entry. Up next: photos of the finished model and diorama. Thanks for reading!

Maschinen Krieger - Kröte

Nathan Fariss — 2012-05-28T21:58:23-07:00

After a year spent with the Curtiss Jenny and all of its wood, metal and string, I was definitely ready for a change of pace. I have had this model sitting in my collection for a bunch of years. I bought it a while back, had started working on it, but for whatever reason, ended up boxing it back up.

Part of the Maschinen Krieger series, the model is a mixture of WWII armor and sci-fi designs. This particular model is a bipedal walking tank design, and comes with a figure as well.

Beginning construction, the upper hull consists of four main parts. The fit wasn't as precise as I would prefer, so there were a few rounds of fitting, gluing, filling, sanding, etc, in order to make it look like one solid part. In the picture below, you can see the main parts assembled. In the front gun area, I added some sheet styrene (where the dark filler is, in the photo), as the kit just let the insides of that area open, which I thought looked a bit odd. The lower hull is just two main left and right halves, which you can see below. The upper and lower sections just twist together and are left unglued.

One of the few upgrades/changes I decided to make on this project, was to add a bit of detail to the side panels of the upper hull. As you can see in the image below, the uppoer hull had a recessed area with some cursory detail molded in.

The kit instructions just called for covering that recess with a panel (molded to look like two panels) and going on about your merry way.

At this point, I thought it might be fun to set this up as a little diorama, making it look like the figure was taking a little break from some repair work on the machine. The first step in this plan was to make these side hatches be opened instead of closed and then add a bit of detail in there. First, I cut the hatch in half, so I could have the two parts be opened a slightly different amount. Next, using some sheet styrene and some shallow U-shaped styrene strip, I added some reinforcement to the back side of the doors.

Along with a few left over parts from previous models, some more strip styrene and some soft copper wire, more detail was added. Finally, the hinges on the hatches were carved a bit (added detail to the side that we now see), and then the panels were glued in place.

Below you can see all of the various hull subassemblies ready for priming.

One of my new acquisitions, is this indoor spray booth. It has a vent hose that can be fished out of a window, so that the outside world can enjoy my paint fumes (after running through that blue filter), and it also collapses down into a small-suitcase size, so it can be tucked into the closet as needed.

Below you can see the main parts all primed up and ready for another pass at sanding and smoothing seams.

While this was going on, I also assembled the figure and had a shot at painting him. I haven't done any figure painting since I was a kid, so this was somewhat new for me. I stocked up on Vallejo paints before starting, since I had read various mentions of them being great for hand-brushing. I had long been disappointed with the Tamiya paints performance when hand brushing, and found the Vallejo paints to be a welcome change.

After a pass at painting the main parts, I assembled everything for the upper hull. Next was a pass at rough shading with a darker shade of green and some dry-brushing to highlight the details. A few decals went on and then one more pass with the green paint in order to blend them in a little bit. Below you can see the current state of the top and bottom halves. I have still yet to do a weathering pass, to get things feeling a little more natural. I'm also looking to come up with another decal or two for the inside of the hatches, which would involve some Photoshop work and printing out the images on to decal paper.

Upper hull:

Lower hull and legs:

The beginnings of the base for the little diorama can be seen below. I got a wooden oval from a craft store, and stained it. This was followed by a few coats of polyurethane. I ran across some diamond plate styrene sheet at the hobby store and though that might make a good hanger floor. So far it has just gotten a few coats of Testor's metalizer paint, soon to be followed by some yellow markings and some grey to dull it all down.

That's all for now. More updates to follow as this project wraps up!

Curtiss Jenny All Done!

Nathan Fariss — 2012-03-14T20:30:40-07:00

At long last, another model can be called done!

Since the last blog post, I've moved, gained a new (and improved!) model work space and managed to finish both the model and a simple base for it. Picking up where I last left off, I had a bit of carving to do to shape the propeller. It was constructed from a bunch of thin walnut strips, glued together to make a block that was thick enough to carve the prop from.

At the same time, I managed to start the wing rigging. There were a TON of wires on each side, which, on the real planes, kept the wings from folding up when flying.

Once the wings were rigged up, there were a few extra wires to add on, the finished prop to attach and the plane was done! Next up was to put together a base of some sort to attach it to. I wanted some sort of base, so that I could fasten the model to it and thereby make it much easier to transport, less likely to damage and maybe add a bit of visual appeal. I headed to Home Depot and grabbed some plywood and wooden molding. Some quality time with a saw, and a few small nails, and I had myself the makings of a base. board.

I decided that I wanted a simple covering for the base that was stain on the molding (that matched the plane) and a grass-like covering for the plywood. I grabbed some common model train terrain supplies and gave it a shot. This wasn't something that I had ever tried before, so I pretty much just winged it.

My shot at little tufts of grass:

\

With that done, I was ready to photograph it. The challenge here was that this was pretty much the largest model I have ever made. I decided that instead of using my regular background, which is just a couple of large sheets of paper, I should instead order a proper roll of backdrop paper, which was 53 inches wide and way longer than I'll ever need. This presented me with the challenge of how to hang the roll up while shooting my photos without having to purchase a bunch of backdrop stands. After another trip to Home Depot, I came home with a broom handle and a length of light chain. A few hooks screwed into the broom handle (cut down by a few inches) and hooks into the overhead wood and I've got a removable paper roll hanger.

Then, I dragged out the photo equipment and spent an hour or two shooting photos.

So, without further ado, here are the photos of the finished Model Airways Curtiss JN-4D Jenny:

Next up: A Machinen Krieger plastic model...

Almost done...

Nathan Fariss — 2011-11-14T20:12:40-08:00

I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on this project. All the big pieces are starting to go together and at the time of this writing all that is left is some rigging and the shaping of the propeller. I suppose I'll also have to fashion some sort of base for the plane to be attached to, in order to help keep it away from damage. Here's what's happened since the last post:

First up, the tail needed to be attached. When I went to fit the tail, I discovered that the turtleback ended a bit too far back on the fuselage, resulting in the tail hanging off the back. This made it so that the rudder wouldn't go on, and clearly, some adjustment would be needed. I brought out the razor saw and trimmed a few millimeters off of the turtle back.

This made some room for the tail to be fitted and the back edge of the vertical stabilizer lined up properly with the back of the fuselage.

Since I cut off the laser-cut part, I needed to craft a new rear rib for the turtle back. Fortunately I had kept the scrap thin plywood that the turtleback parts had come attached to. I snipped off a little bit of that wood, and fashioned a replacement rib. Here you can see it glued in place.

That new piece had to be stained to match the rest of the plane, and then a coat of polyurethane. Next, the tail was glued in place, the rudder attached and the various control lines rigged to connect to the cockpit fittings.

Next up were the lower wings. Below you can see the rough fitting. This mostly just consisted of me drilling out the holes for the connecting pins to go into and then setting the wing in place.

The lower wings are supposed to have one degree of dihedral. In order to get just such a thing, I had to build a little support rig which I could add little shims to until the wing was at just the right angle. Below you can see my high-tech angle measuring method along with my low-tech support and shim method.

Once the angle of the wings were set, a bit of epoxy held them in place permanently. Next, a similar fitting for the upper wings, although those just sit on top of the inter-plane struts, so were a bit easier to fit. They really just required a boring out of the connection holes, so that the wings could lay at the proper angles.

Finally, below you can see the state of the model this evening. The top wings are epoxied in place and the inter-plane struts are glued in place.

Next up: rigging and shaping of the propeller.

And Picking Back Up Again...

Nathan Fariss — 2011-10-30T20:45:56-07:00

I'm back!

I realize it has been a bit over two months since the last blog update, but I feel as though I have a decent excuse. It turns out that I went and got married about a month ago. So, what with various wedding preparations, the wedding itself and then the honeymoon afterwards, I hardly had any spare moments for working on the ol model. But now that that is all settled and I've got some free time back again, I have finally got a bit of an update.

I'm getting into the home stretch now, and the model is beginning to wrap up. I've assembled the wheels, which were a combination of cast hubs and rims and photo-etch spokes. It seems like these sorts of things never fit quite right, and so each wheel has one side that is a little more warped than I would prefer, since the spoke discs were just a hair bigger than they should be. Someone with more patience and some fore knowledge of this might file them all the way around to be just a little smaller, but I'm not and I didn't, so I just bent them into place and called it good.

Below you can see the wheel, and also the little jig that I made from the engine stand and a leftover part of the axle. This setup put the rim and the hub at just the right offset to keep everything centered nicely.

While that was going on, I also was working on putting the gear assembly together. It was a fairly simple setup, with the same fitting of metal parts to wood that was required on the interwing struts that I put together earlier in the build, but haven't fitted to the plane yet. With a bit of sanding and shaping, the various wooden parts were contoured and smoothed. Since this gear was going to have to support the weight of the model, which, with the engine in there, is not insubstantial, I decided to do a little reinforcing of the joints. I drilled a few holes through the joint/hub part (where everything connects) and put some metal rods through that and into each other piece of wood. Hopefully this will add enough strength to keep everything happy attached.

With some O-rings stretched around the wheels for tires and some string wrapped around the landing gear, the plane is finally standing on it's own legs! On a side note, there is a tail skid that Ive finished as well, but I don't have any photos of that handy, so look for that next time.

Here is a close up of the wrapped string. On the full-size plane, this added reinforcement to the wood, perhaps keeping it from splitting on landing. On the model, it is just nylon string glued in place with a dab of superglue.

To simulate the simple bungie-cord-like suspension that the plane had, the model has a couple of metal fittings and some wrapped white string. This is actually holding the axle in place, though, so I had to be sure it was good and tight. Once in place, a dab of superglue made sure it wasn't going to go anywhere.

Finally, bringing the blog up to what I was working on just a few hours ago, the aluminum cowl around the cockpit in in progress. Below you can see it bend into place. I used the plank-soaking tube that I made for the Armed Virginia Sloop model (out of some simple PVC pipe) as a form to bend the metal over. The metal just gets bent a bit and then glued into place with the help of a few tabs that wrap under the wooden longerons.

Next up: windshields, cowling trim, and beginning to put all of the parts together!

Engine Is In the Plane!

Nathan Fariss — 2011-08-22T21:24:56-07:00

At long last, tonight I mounted the engine to the fuselage!

Here are a few images showing how I got there.

First, I made a few more 'springs' for the rockers and such.

That gave me the parts to finish up the cylinder assemblies.

Next up was the polishing and mounting of the exhaust headers.

After that was a bit of wiring. This was tricky, as the instructions just mentioned gluing the wires to the spark plugs. Except that, in reality, the wire is very stiff and wouldn't stay glued to the plug tips. Anticipating this issue, I drilled tiny holes in the side of each plug and glued the wire tips into these holes. This was a bit of a pain, but seemed to work out decently. Next up were some little dowels, painted brown, to simulate the fiber tubes that collected and routed the plug wires on their way to the magneto. Finally, there were another eight wires that came out of the dowels and into the magneto.

With that step complete, the next step was to mount the engine to the fuselage. While the engine isn't quite complete, all of the remaining steps require that the engine be in the plane, as they mostly involve various tubing and wiring.

Ta Da!

Next up: Wiring, tubes, the radiator and propeller.

Engine Updates

Nathan Fariss — 2011-08-07T20:19:39-07:00

As some may have noticed, it has been quite a while since my last update. Those same some might be thinking, "Oh, it just another blog, where the updates get further and further apart." I would like to rebut that with, "Balderdash! The updates have been sparse recently because I am in the midst of wedding planning and have had very little time for modeling, let alone model blogging!"

With that said, I got a bit of time this weekend to do a little bit of modeling, and got the model desk reassembled (the web cam part had been taken apart for wedding related reasons). Once things were back in order, cleaned up and ready to roll, I managed to test out an idea I had been toying around with for some upgrades to the engine, and I think they turned out pretty well. But first, let's get up to date with the state of the model.

When last I wrote about it, the engine was just beginning assembly, with the large pieces coming together. The next step in the process was to add the cylinders. Here are a few of them, sanded and polished and ready to be epoxied to the engine block.

In order to get them all properly aligned (there is a bit of slop in the attachment points on the engine block), the directions recommended using the intake runner and exhaust headers to insure that everything will align later on. In order to make this easier, I set the whole engine assembly up so that the cylinders balanced on the top while the epoxy set.

And then the other side:

After the cylinders were all in place, I added on the water inlet piping and the air intakes.

Along with those, there were other miscellaneous pipes that got added. Below you can see the test-fit of the intermediate piping. The kit came with some clear rubber tubing for these parts, but since rubber tubing is a pain to paint, AND I already had various sizes of styrene tubing, I decided to go with the hard styrene tubes, cut to length.

That tubing was then painted black and glued in place on both sides.

This brings me to the previously-mentioned upgrade. The kit has various pushrods, rockers and such for the top of each cylinder. Cast into two of those parts are 'springs' that I felt were not satisfactory. The castings were shallow and hardly looked like springs at all. So, I decided that I could replace the springs with a center rod and some wound wire that looks like a spring. I wound some very thin wire that I had left from a previous kit around a mandrel tool, and cut some lengths of thicker brass wire for the centers. I cut off the cast springs, filed everything clean and drilled some tiny holes to keep the center rods in place.

Here are the results on my first test cylinder:

I think these look much more like the real engine. I've got a pile of photo reference of the engine that I have collected and have found it very useful to refer to while building.

And that brings us up to the present. I've got two of the eight cylinders done with the springs, as of tonight, and hopefully I can continue with this during the week and next weekend.The next update should see the engine mounted on the fuselage! Stay tuned!

Engine and Deskcam

Nathan Fariss — 2011-06-26T20:49:39-07:00

The Engine!

So, I've finally arrived at the reason that I purchased this kit in the first place: the engine. I was completely taken by the engine detail in the product images and wanted a shot at making that same engine and perhaps even improving upon it. The engine, fuel tank and radiator are all mostly made up of cast Britannia metal, which is a mixture of tin, antimony and copper. These parts are all delivered in the kit as raw castings, which gives them a dull surface and sometimes rough details.

Some of the raw engine block castings:

This means that the bulk of the work on the engine is the cleanup, sanding and polishing of these parts, in order to bring them up to a quality finish that complements the rest of the kit. I'm currently wearing through various sanding sticks and a few bits of sandpaper, but I've got some higher grit sandpaper arriving tomorrow, which should make short work of getting these parts in order.

First item to be added was the fuel tank, which was actually a combination of a cast metal frame and photo-etch front and back plates. Here you can see some pictures of the final product after quite a bit of sanding, polishing and a bit of buffing with the ol Dremel. Added to that are three other separately-cast parts, the fuel cap and fuel gauge on the top and sediment trap hanging off of the bottom. This tank is held in place by three brass strips, two cradling it underneath and one over the top.

Next up was the engine block itself. For a little while I was working with the block, unattached from the fuselage, but once I started adding more parts, this seemed less and less practical. So, I took a bit of scrap wood and built a little engine stand for it. Here you can see the engine cleaned up a bit and mounted on the temporary stand.

Stay tuned for more additions to the engine as work continues!

Desk Cam Gets a New Computer and Comes Back to Life!

As, I'm sure, many of you noticed (or perhaps didn't notice), the computer that runs my model desk web cam and time-lapse camera managed to die a couple of weeks ago. I think the culprit was the local power company replacing a nearby transformer combined with the computer power supply being on its last legs. Whatever the cause, when the power supply failed it took the motherboard with it, so now all the computer is good for (after I replaced the fried power supply) is moving a bit of air around. Yup, the only things that seem to still work are all of the fans. Alas, poor computer, I knew it well.

As the untimely demise of my model desk computer left me without a way to run my time-lapse camera and no way to update my desk cam web page, I had to find a new way to run things. Fortunately, I still had my old laptop computer in a closet (actually, the original desk-cam computer ALSO came back to life out of a closet), which I thought might be able to be used in a pinch. So, today I dragged it out, plugged it into all of the appropriate cables, updated and installed various bits of software, and now have a whole new computer running under my model desk!

Rest in Pieces, old model desk computer.

:(

Long live the new model desk computer!

The upside here, is that I've gained a great deal more leg room under the model desk and probably will save a little bit of electricity. Here's the current state of the model desk, including new computer and such:

That's all for now. Tune in next time for more engine progress and hopefully no further news about the model desk computer ;)

Cockpit Fittings

Nathan Fariss — 2011-06-19T21:45:43-07:00

Picking up from the last post, the rigging for the fuselage is complete between the tail and the cockpit. I've left off around the cockpit so that it is easier to add various fittings, seats, etc.

First up in the fittings were the rudder pedals and their connections and mounting points.

Those were followed by the control sticks and their various connections.

Next up were the seats. The kit came with photo-etch metal backs and wooden seats. The instructions mentioned that the real seats were covered with cloth on the backs and had pads on the seats. I decided that I should add a few of those extras to the seats on my plane. I had some tubing left over from a previous model that I used to line the edges of the seat backs. I feel that this had mixed results and I am not entirely happy with the results. For the cushions, I decided that I would find some leather-like fabric and wrap that around some wood.

I went to my local hobby shop in search of such a material, but they didn't have anything like that for purchase. But I DID notice a dollhouse chair there, for about $8, that had the type of material that I was looking for. So, I decided that instead of going store to store, looking for what I wanted, I would just buy the chair and strip the cloth off of it.

Behold, the sacrificial chair:

And the end result of my chair-enhancing efforts:

Before installing the chairs into the cockpits, I had to do just a bit of rigging. Here you can see the aileron control wires.

And finally, the seats installed.

With this done, I'm moving on to the engine and fuel tank. It's a fun-filled world of cast metal and sanding/polishing. Stay tuned for further adventures!

Strings and Things

Nathan Fariss — 2011-05-30T16:28:42-07:00

At the end of the last update, I had assembled most of the wooden components of the fuselage. Since then, almost all of the rest of the wooden parts have been attached, the whole thing has been stained, and I've added a few coats of polyurethane. I'm now on to an intermediate step of adding many of the rigging strings to the back half of the fuselage before starting to add the various controls and engine parts to the front half.

With that in mind, here are some photos of what I've been up to, along with brief explanations.

Below is an image of the turtleback all assembled. It turns out that it would have probably been a better idea to assemble this off of the main fuselage, and then add it later, as it ended up making some of the rigging a bit harder.

Here is the whole fuselage right after having the turtleback attached and right before staining.

Here are the two control panels. The front one (for the navigator) has a little scratch-built map case. Although it's a little blurry in this image, the knob for the map case door is made from a pin head. I've left the dials and such off, as I wanted to stain and polyurethane the parts first.

Here is the fuselage right after staining.

Once the stain and polyurethane were on there, I could start gluing on some of the photo-etch metal parts. Here is a close-up of the frame that goes in front of the engine.

Here is a close-up of the little door that is at the front end of the turtleback.

Next up was something new to me: printing my own decals. The kit doesn't provide any sort of instrumentation graphics, but rather only comes with the cast metal base parts. I thought this might be a good excuse to try my hand at making decals. I picked up a package of ink-jet-printer decal sheets and a can of decal sealer at my local hobby shop and then spent a few hours scouring the internet for images of old airplane gauges. With some cleanup work in Photoshop, and a bit of experimentation with the printer, I was able to print myself a few sheets of gauges. The sheets below have so many because I wasn't sure how tough the decals would be, and fully expected to ruin a few before getting one to transfer correctly. I also printed one set on a clear sheet and one on a white sheet. It turned out that the decals held up great and the white-backed ones looked good, so I have lots of extra gauges now.

Here you can see a few of the gauge decals in place. Once all was said and done, I think they ended up a bit smaller than I would like, but I had erred on the small side to be sure that they would fit in the tiny embossed ring of the cast metal part.

Here are the two completed control panels in place and with all decals applied.

A few more photo-etched parts in place. The half-circle one is where the pilots step is, used to step up into the plane.

The engine-bearing supports, with various straps, wires, etc, holding them in place.

Finally, a sneak preview of the (in progress) next fun-filled step: Rigging the fuselage.

Thanks for tuning in! Hopefully next update will see the fuselage complete and work on the engine beginning.

Fuselage Continues

Nathan Fariss — 2011-05-09T20:27:39-07:00

In the last post, I mentioned that I was not happy with the construction method used in the kit instructions to make the mortised fuselage ribs. The instructions wanted the ribs to be cut from a solid piece and the mortises carved out from those. I made one test piece and found that: a) this is really hard b) the wood that the kit came with for these parts was not the best quality, and tended to flake apart during the carving and c) the final product, because of a and b, was simply not as refined and clean as I would like.

So, what I ended up doing was to get three strips of wood, cut the mortise shape out of two of them, and then sandwich them all together to create a much better looking part. Below you can see what I ended up with, as it is being glued to one half of the fuselage.

Once I got those parts all made, putting together the two sides of the fuselage went pretty quickly. Below you can see the two sides attached to the fuselage building jig, which holds everything straight and square while the cross pieces are glued in.

On the real plane, the top longerons (supposedly a real word) are spliced together behind the cockpit. I'm assuming this is because either a piece of wood that long was tricky to find, or perhaps the front of the plane needed wood of a different type that the tail did. Either way, my whole plane is made of basswood, and it's actually pretty easy to find a 16" long strip of wood, so I don't have to put in a real splice. Instead, the instructions had me wrap a section in thin nylon cord, to give the look of a spliced section.

At the tail of the fuselage, there are a number of additions that are meant to strengthen the structure around the tail skid. For my purposes, this just meant a couple thick strips on the sides and a few steel wires in between the top and bottom.

It was at this point that I found that I am going to need to start skipping sections of the instructions in order to facilitate the stain and polyurethane that I am putting on the model. I need to get as much of the wooden parts together, skip the addition of various metal parts, and still try to leave it all open enough that adding the metal parts later is easy. So, at this point I've skipped adding some of the engine mounting hardware because of the large photo-etch parts that that would require and have, instead, moved on to installing the cockpit flooring. Below you can see my efforts to get the two floors relatively level before fitting all the support beams underneath them.

Finally, here is the fuselage out of the building jig, and with the floor support beams in place. There is still lots of work to be done on the fuselage, but actually only a few more steps before I stain the whole thing and apply the polyurethane.

That's all I've got for now. Stay tuned for more action-packed model-building chronicles!!

Tail Completion & Fuselage Start

Nathan Fariss — 2011-04-24T17:22:21-07:00

Lots of pictures and not much typing on this post. Enjoy the show!

With the vertical stabilizer and rudder complete, I moved on to the horizontal stabilizer and elevator. The construction on this was very similar to that of the wings in that it is mostly laser-cut ribs and strip wood for strengthening and connecting. Here you can see the ribs with the lower cap strip and strengthening strips:

Here you can see the horizontal stabilizer going together on the plans sheet.

The leading edge on this piece is a steel rod, bent into shape after being heated up. The diagonal ribs are just strip wood cut and sanded into shape.

Once completed, this part can then be attached to the vertical stabilizer. Here you can see the connected pair drying after being stained.

Once the stain and polyurethane was on the parts, I added the little bits of copper tape, which are meant to simulate the metal bands that hold the leading edge to the ribs.

With that completed, the hinge slots were cut and the brass strips were cut for the fake hinges. Below you can see the elevators attached and the tiny fake hinges in place.

Before setting these parts aside, I did a little bit of rigging on the elevators and rudder, so that they are all ready to attach to the fuselage later on in the build.

With these parts done (for now), I was ready to move on to the next major step in the build...

The Fuselage!!

First and foremost, I had to put together a jig that will allow me to construct the fuselage in a square and true manner. The fit comes with a bunch of laser-cut parts that go together to form this jig, and below you can see it coming together.

The little dowels are so that the fuselage pieces can be attached with rubber bands later on. Also, the jig is glued down to that piece of foam board, so that it stays nice and straight through the process.

And finally, I've just soaked and bent the long pieces for one side of the fuselage frame. Here you can see it pinned down to the plans, with a few of the frame bits glued in (on the left side).

I've found that I'm not happy with the construction method for the three middle ribs. The pieces are supposed to have a mortise cut into each side of the rib, which is itself 1/16" thick. I've found that it is quite difficult to do this in a manner that doesn't look terrible. The wood tends to flake apart, or just look sloppy when I try to cut such a small amount out of it. Rather than keep trying or just settling for either non-mortised parts or sloppy-looking parts, I've decided to get some strips of very thin wood and attempt to build a sandwich-style rib, since I think cutting holes in thin wood will end up looking better than the carved-mortise version. I should end up with a part that looks just like it was carved out, except much cleaner and with much less hassle.

Tune in next time to see if my plan works ;)

Wing Skids and Tail Parts

Nathan Fariss — 2011-03-27T20:07:21-07:00

As the building continues, I've finally completed all the little details on the wings. There were lots of little metal fittings, bits of rigging, and wooden supports that go along with the wings that all needed to be built before I moved on. For example, you can see below, the supports that go between the upper and lower wings. These were made from laser cut basswood with cast metal fittings on each end. Unfortunately, the notches that the cast metal fit into were not laser cut into the parts, so these took quite a bit of carving, sanding and filing in order to shape the wooden parts correctly. Once the metal parts were fitted, then the wooden middle needed to be sanded round and the metal ends polished to a shine.

In this image, the parts are drying after having been stained to match the rest of the model.

Similarly, the below part is the support that goes between the upper center wing section and the top of the fuselage. A similar carving/sanding/filing technique was required on these in order to get the metal end fittings integrated.

Also on the list of odds and ends were the skids that go on the bottom of the lower wings. On the real plane these were installed to help prevent catching a wing tip on a messy landing. On the model, they are made from a bent piece of wood. Since this bend was somewhat extreme, given that it was a 1/16" x 1/16" piece of wood, I decided to try a few new techniques for prepping the wood for bending. I tried wrapping it in a wet paper towel and then microwaving that, but didn't really have any luck there. Finally I just settled on good old fashioned soaking of the wood for an hour or so each. Below you can see the wood parts pinned down to the plans as they dry.

And here are the skids installed on the bottom of the wing, prior to stain and polyurethane.

That pretty much wrapped up the miscellaneous wing parts (there were a few others, like the king posts on the upper wings, but I don't have photos of those), so I finally got to move along to some non-wing parts.

First on the list are the tail surfaces. I started with the vertical stabilizer and rudder. The vertical stabilizer was a quick build, since it was just strip wood, pinned over the plan and glued in place. The rudder was a little more complicated, but still fairly simple. Like the wings, the rudder has a trailing edge made of bent wire. I used the same technique as I had previously to make the wire easier to work with. This involved annealing the wire, using a cooking torch (like for making creme brulee) to get the wire red hot and then let it cool back down again. This makes it a bit softer after it cools and easier to work with.

Below you can see the bent wire pinned in place and shimmed off the plans just a bit (so that it is centered to the leading edge) with the first of the ribs glued in place.

I've just finished the rudder, which was also pretty much just simple strip wood, cut, sanded and glued in place. Below you can see the completed parts. They still need to be stained, polyurethaned and then fitted with a few metal parts, but that'll come later, once the elevator is done. I've got to wait until the elevator is done because the bottom of the vertical stabilizer needs to be sanded to fit the top of the elevator so they both need to be complete before I can do the final fitting and then stain, etc.

The finished parts:

And One Month Later....

Nathan Fariss — 2011-03-13T19:52:26-07:00

The wings are all rigged and nearly complete!

After a few weeks of tying tiny little copper fitting to short lengths of string, I managed to tie at least a few on to the model itself. I managed to come up with a fairly successful system where I tied all of the string to the little copper turnbuckles first and then tied them to the wing itself. I originally was doing one string at a time, tying the turnbuckle to the string and then the string to the model, but found this to be pretty slow going.

Here you can see a bunch of the pre-tied turnbuckles ready to go onto the lower wing panels. I have found that some of my ship-modeling skills have been helpful when it comes to knots and such.

Once I had all of the rigging in the wings complete, then it was time to add various other copper and white metal fittings. This gave me the opportunity to use a new toy I purchased at the beginning of this project. It is a 'Hold and Fold' photo-etch workstation from the nice folks at The Small Shop. As you can see in the photo, it is a billet aluminum clamp-like device that let's me clamp a bit of photo-etched metal down (very precisely) and then fold it using that great big razor blade. I got to use it a bit today to crease some of the rigging plate things that go on to the wings and will eventually be clamped between the wing and the posts that connect the two wings.

Once I had all of the rigging in the wings complete, then it was time to add various other copper and white metal fittings. This gave me the opportunity to use a new toy I purchased at the beginning of this project. It is a 'Hold and Fold' photo-etch workstation from the nice folks at The Small Shop. As you can see in the photo, it is a billet aluminum clamp-like device that let's me clamp a bit of photo-etched metal down (very precisely) and then fold it using that great big razor blade. I got to use it a bit today to crease some of the rigging plate things that go on to the wings and will eventually be clamped between the wing and the posts that connect the two wings.

I also spent a bit of time filing, sanding and polishing a few cast white metal parts which were put together to become the little pulleys that control the ailerons. I've still got two more to add, but here are the tops ones in place:

That's all for now! With the wings nearly complete, I'll soon be moving on to the tail parts. Until next time.

Wing Staining & Rigging

Nathan Fariss — 2011-02-12T17:12:47-08:00

Work on the wings continues...

Since the last post, I've finished the staining of the wing panels and then put a few coats of a semi-gloss water-based polyurethane. This is to seal up the wood as well as to add some depth to the finish. Overall, I am pretty happy with the way the finish turned out and it makes a fantastic contract to the white metal and copper parts. Here is an image of one of the stained and finished lower wing panels:

It did take quite a while to get the stain and poly on there, since it all had to be brushed on by hand. I feel that the results were worth it, though.

The next step in the process was to add the adhesive copper tape strips to the ends of the ribs at the trailing edge. These are to simulate the bands of metal that clamped on the trailing edge on the real plane. This was pretty easy, since the copper tape is very malleable, and can be smoothed down with a fingernail and the edges burnished smooth with some tweezers.

Here is a photo of the aileron edge with tape applied. I really like the way the copper looks against the stained wood.

Next, I pulled out a few of the white metal parts and had a go at polishing them up a bit. They come with a fairly matte finish and with some imperfections in the casting. I bit of work with various sanding sticks and they shine up nicely. Here you can see the aileron control horns attached to the ailerons, and also the fake hinges (made of strip brass) sticking off of the back of the parts.

Now, I am on to the rigging step, where all the turnbuckles and wires that maintain the internal wing structure are put into place. I'm finding that some of my experience on the Armed Virginia Sloop model is coming in handy, in that I can reuse some of the rigging techniques that I learned on that project. Here is a pic of the first part that has been completed:

This rigging stuff, while not too complicated, is a bit fiddly and generally slow-going. I'm expecting that I'll probably spend the next couple of weeks on this, and will have another update once that is complete. Stay tuned until then!

Wings Done!

Nathan Fariss — 2011-01-30T20:06:47-08:00

Another long lost update to the blog! Although this time I have a better excuse. I haven't updated before now because everything that I have been doing in between this and the last post has been pretty boring. Not that it's been boring to work on, per se, but rather it's almost the exact same tasks I've already blogged about, just more so. So rather than post about how I've sanded ANOTHER 40 ribs, I figured I'd just wait until there was something more interesting to see.

I've finally finished the main construction on the four wing panels. This includes most all of the wooden parts, and just a few metal bits. The only metal parts that are on there at the moment are either structural (like the trailing edge wire) or would be too tricky to install later in the construction process (like the little eyelets in the middle areas). So with that taken care of, I can finally apply the stain and polyurethane to the wings in preparation for further construction. Below you can see the completed wing panels.

Once the stain and poly are applied, I'll be able to rig the internal wires on the wings and apply various other braces and supports. Here is a snapshot of the wing panels hung up to dry after being stained.

Stay tuned for more action-packed adventure!

Long Lost Update...

Nathan Fariss — 2010-11-09T21:15:34-08:00

At long last, I'm updating the blog again. In the interim, I spent a week in Hawaii, played through Fallout: New Vegas, and have just been busy with life in general. But last weekend, I finally got back to working on the model again. Here is where things stand thus far...

I've finished the wood work on one of the upper wing panels. This includes both the wing panel and the aileron. While the panal isn't DONE yet, it's reached the point that I'll need to stain and seal it, so I decided it would probably be best if I built all the wing panels and THEN did the staining and sealing. Once that is done, there are a variety of metal and string parts that go on the wings as well.

As you can see in the various photos here, I'm making slow but steady progress.

Starting on the next wing panel, I'm taking a bit from what I learned from the first and making sure I have much of the sanding and fitting done beforehand. This means that I've got to do all the monotonous filing first, but it should make assembly go much faster overall.

Here is a photo of a before and after wing rib. You can see how I'm also sanding off the blackening on the edges of the cutouts. This blackening is from the laser cutting of the parts, and I feel that removing it will add a bit to the scale fidelity of the model. The drawback is that it's a royal pain in the butt, and some of these wing ribs are pretty fragile and are easily broken while sanding. Hooray for super glue!

Stay tuned for further adventures in modeling!

Curtis Jenny Progress

Nathan Fariss — 2010-09-11T08:05:34-07:00

Here is a little update on what I've been up to. I've started a new project. This time it is a wooden/metal kit instead of plastic. It is a World War I era biplane, and will end up as a static display (non flying) model with all the internal details visible.

This one is both similar and quite different from the wooden ship that I previously built. This project has generally the same raw materials: laser-cut wood, stock strip wood, cast white metal, etc. The big difference this time around is that I'm not following a course on the projects construction. This just means that I have to follow the somewhat rough instructions that come with the model itself and do much more deciphering of the sheet plans. This isn't a bad thing, just a different challenge.

So, I've decided to start with one of the top wing panels, in order to go through most of it's construction, and learn what I can in the process. In theory, this should confine all my screw-ups to just one wing panel, making for less fixing later and smoother/faster construction of the other three panels. With that said, here are some photos of my progress thus far:

Initial wing ribs layout.

Photo-etched fittings for later wire rigging.

Bending the wing tip rib.

More wing tip construction.

With the thin plywood leading edge cap strip.

Progress has been a bit slow so far, as I've not had as much free time as I would like. But, stay tuned for more progress, some wood stain color tests and further adventures in modeling!

GT-R Complete & Photos

Nathan Fariss — 2010-08-08T10:07:34-07:00

I've wrapped up the build of the Tamiya GT-R kit. By the time I was finishing up this kit, I was remembering why is was that I tried a wooden kit in the first place. I get worn out on all the painting, the frustrations of various paint types not agreeing with one another, and the fragility of decals. Although at least with this project, I took away a few valuable lessons that I can keep in mind for future similar projects. Here are a few tidbits to remember:

- If it is going to be shiny, use lacquer. Tamiya's gloss acrylics just never behave when airbrushed.
- Don't use the microSOL (aka Decal Melter) until the decal is in it's final place and already partly dry.
- If some of it will be painted over, remove the underlying chrome plating first, otherwise, the paint will just chip off, despite using primer.
- Give the aforementioned lacquer PLENTY of time to dry before putting masking tape on it. Probably should wait 24 hours before trying.
- One should probably order a second set of decals for a project like this, as some are sure to be damaged. Alternately, perhaps one could scan them, and buy a self-print decal sheet so one could make replacements (although I'm not sure about the quality difference here)
- Third party racing harness kits, while pretty cool, might not be worth the effort unless the car is an open wheel type.

Anyhow, with this project completed, I spent a few minutes photographing but this car and the last project (WWII BMW r75 motorcycle). I recently purchased a new lens, which has some macro capabilities, and tried that out on this shoot. I am pretty pleased with the results. Here are a few images of the completed models:

The full galleries are online and can be seen in the completed models section of this web site.

Next up: Model Airways' Curtis 'Jenny' wooden plane. Stay tuned for more model adventures!

Model Desk Renovation & Tamiya GT-R

Nathan Fariss — 2010-07-05T17:18:34-07:00

Since the last post, I've done a few things to make my workspace a bit better.

First I built myself a little shelf, so that I could have better access to my various paints, glues and other toxic chemicals. I just picked up a small sheet of thin plywood at Home Depot as well as some little 1"x1"x12" blocks of pine. I worked up some quick plans, drew them out onto the plywood, busted out the jigsaw and started cutting. After some gluing, drilling, a few wood screws, and a couple coats of gray spray paint, I now have a nice little shelf for my desk (you can also see here the monitor for the cam/computer setup I mentioned in the previous post):

Next, after knocking over my bottle of high-power plastic cement, and melting all the lines off the middle of my cutting mat, I thought it might be a good idea to make sure that doesn't happen again. Especially since this was not the first time I had knocked this same bottle over. After rummaging around a bit, I found some nice wood I had left over from the base I made for the Panzer project (red oak, I think). I cut a couple squares of this, glued them together, and then, using a hole saw, drilled a hole just a bit bigger than the glue bottle. A couple coats of polyurethane, and now I've got a little block that keeps my glue bottle from falling over and doesn't look too terrible.

Before I jumped into another long-term wooden project, I decided to make one more plastic kit. I settled on the Tamiya Calsonic Impul GT-R kit that I bought a while back, thinking it would be fairly quick and easy, since it doesn't have an engine and only a rudimentary interior. I had intended to build it straight from the box, but I couldn't resist adding an third party racing harness kit. Here you can see the completed interior, as well as the mostly-built exterior shell:

I should wrap this project up in the next few weeks, and then I'll get some proper photographs of both this completed model and the motorcycle model that I finished before this one. Stay tuned!

A Sneak Preview

Nathan Fariss — 2010-06-19T08:22:08-07:00

Just a quick post to bring things up to date. Here's a quick look at upcoming projects.

This past week I received a kit for another wooden and metal model. This one is a WWI biplane, the Curtiss JN-4D 'Jenny'. I'm hoping that it'll be a challenging build, similar to the Sloop build, except with much more metal and photo-etch. I'm actually hoping to set up a time-lapse recording method for this build, using an old computer, and a webcam. But since I think this might take me a little bit to get set up and tested, I'm going to hold off on starting this build for a little while.

So, in the meantime, after wrapping up the motorcycle model (which I plan on doing today), I'll be putting this one together:

It should be a quick, fun build, since there isn't any engine. I was in the mood to make something shiny before I start on a longer build, so I figure I can crank through this one in a few weeks, and should be able to test out my time-lapse setup in the process :)

And there we have it. That's my modeling progress brought up to date. Party on.

And Moving Right Along....

Nathan Fariss — 2010-06-19T08:00:07-07:00

I didn't rest long after wrapping up the Panzer. I jumped right into another vehicle of the same era and same scale. This kit is a BMW R75, manufactured by Lions Roar. I'm not adding any after market parts to this one, but it comes with quite a bit of detail out of the box. It's got a variety of photo-etched parts for the wheel spokes, various engine bits and for a few other small details, like the padlocks on equipment boxes. The kit also comes with a sidecar and two versions of a little trailer.

The build was pretty straightforward, with the exception of things just being very very small. The motorcycle is the same scale as the last tank model I built, at 1/35 scale. This makes the whole bike only a few inches long. As you can see from the photos below, there is a pretty good amount of detail in the kit. Also, overall the quality of the kit modeling, while pretty good, was not quite as good as the Panzer kit (which was made by Dragon), so required a good deal more cleanup of mold seams, etc. With the parts being as tiny as they were, this cleanup occasionally resulted in broken parts. This also led me to be fairly certain that I like working on larger models :)

I'm currently working on wrapping this project up, with weathering powders, etc, but as it's not quite done, here are a few photos of the model as of last weekend. My hope for this one is to combine it with the Panzer for display, so that I can put them both on the same wooden base. This just means that I've got to be sure they generally match color-wise and look like they've been living in the same world.

Assembled in sections, engine masked for painting the body.

After a base coat of dark yellow.

Looooooong Overdue Update...

Nathan Fariss — 2010-06-19T07:28:07-07:00

So, yes, I realize I became one of those people that starts up a blog with all the intentions of keeping it updated, and then fell behind. But now I'm back and I've got a bunch of updates!

First and foremost, I've finished the Panzer III and have some photos of the finished project. I forgot to take photos of the outside, as I was putting everything together, so I really just have the images of the finished model. Everything on the outside was pretty straight forward, without all the complicated resin construction that the interior had.

The difficult bits of the exterior were really just the assembly of the individual-link plastic tracks and then the final assembly and weathering of the whole tank. I managed to get the tracks assembled by sticking the track links to a strip of thin masking tape, then draping that over the various wheels, and once in place, dabbing glue to where the tracks touch one another. I found that I could make each side in four or so sections, which still allowed me to take the tracks back off, paint them, and then, once the rest of the tank was painted, put the tracks back on again.

The painting was simply an airbrushed coat of dark yellow on most of the exterior, with a few of the detail parts picked out in other colors by hand. The road wheels were originally painted in German Grey, and then, using a plastic circle template as a mask, the centers were sprayed the same dark yellow as the rest of the tank. After the base coats were complete, I sprayed a slightly darker yellow into the nooks, crannies and corners to get a bit of shading. This was followed by a pass of drybrushing with a light tan to help pick out corners, details and texture.

Next came an extensive application of Mig Pigments. These are just colored powders, that get dusted onto the surface and then a bit of thinner is touched to the powder, and that helps it stick to the surface and flow into the texture of the surface and in between details. This serves to both further pick out detail when using a darker color pigment, and also to add dirt and grime when using lighter tones.

Once that was done, I cut a chunk of red oak for a base, put a few coats polyurethane on that and called it done! Since then, I have grown less happy with the base, feeling that it needed to better contrast with the model, so stay tuned for an update on that.

Here are a few images of the completed model, but see the completed models section of this web site for more.

Panzer III Interior Paint

Nathan Fariss — 2010-02-13T09:10:21-08:00

With the interior build pretty much complete, I moved on to added a bit of paint. From what I could gather, the Germans painted everything in a red primer and left it that way for non-crew areas and painted all the crew areas in a dull grey-green.

I began by airbrushing the whole interior with Mr Surfacer 1200 as a primer and to give it all a uniform color. Next I sprayed the red-brown color onto the engine compartment and onto the engine and radiator assemblies. I decided to leave the engine and radiator parts separate during the painting and weathering process to make things easier. Finally, I masked the engine area and sprayed the crew cabin in the grey green.

Next I spent a bit of time picking out a few details by hand and adding metallic spots on corners to simulate paint chips. Here you can see a little of that in progress:

I followed that with a bit of dry brushing using a lighter tone to help pick out the details and raised bits. Next I tried out a technique that is new to me: the use of pigments. Pigment is the raw color component of many paints (although in a non-toxic version). I ordered a few sets of Mig Pigments from an online hobby store (since I have never seen more than a few jars locally), and now I've got 12 shades of rust, dirt, smoke and ash to choose from.

The jist of the pigments is that you sort of just use a dry brush to apply a variety of colors here and there, and then wet everything down with a thinner and use that to blend between colors and get the solution into all the cracks and crevices. I started out with a wash of black to help add contrast and pick out the details, and then followed up with various dirt and rust colors. I generally found it very easy to work with and I am quite pleased with the results.

A few images of paint and weathering (with the pigments):

That pretty much wraps up the interior. There are a few odds and ends to take care of, like cementing the engine parts in place and connecting a few things with pipes. I'm sure there will also be a bit of work going into the upper hull build as well, but that is all for a later post.

Next: Onward with the construction!

Panzer III Interior Build

Nathan Fariss — 2010-02-13T08:50:21-08:00

So, it's been quite a while since I've updated so I've going to break this into two posts: one on the build and one about painting and weathering. First, the build:

I purchased resin interior and engine kits made by Verlinden. The interior kit was designed for a Tamiya version of the same tank, while the engine claimed it would fit both Tamiya and Dragon kits. When I got in there and slowly started piecing things together I discovered a few things:

First off, I'm not that crazy about working with large resin parts. There seems to be a ton of work to do just to get the part somewhere close to where it should be, since one needs to sand off a great deal of the overpour. There also seems to be a tendency of the large flat resin parts to warp a bit with the heat of sanding. I suppose these are things to learn about working with resin, and they will inform my future projects, but I just came away with the impression that resin is just plain less fun to work with compared to plastic or wood.

Next thing I learned was that the Tamiya version of the kit must not have all of the interior suspension parts that the Dragon kit does, as the resin parts had all of the same part cast into the floor of the interior. This gave me two options: cut away all the Dragon interior parts or cut away the resin parts. Since I thought the kit parts looked better than the resin parts, I opted for what was probably the hardest route, and decided to cut away the whole floor of the resin parts and replace it with a new version.

In retrospect, a closer inspection of some reference photos could have saved me some trouble. I started with the impression that the floor inside the tank was a metal mesh, similar to what one would find on catwalks and other industrial settings. So I cut away all the floor, and found some fine screen, with the intention of using the screen for the floor to simulate the grating. This would allow the fancy suspension bit to be seen through the floor just a little bit. Later on, in my quest for find proper paint colors, I ran across some photos of a restored Panzer and it had flooring made of diamond plate, which is quite opaque. So, instead of the screen idea and instead of trying to find some scale diamond plate, I took some styrene sheet, heated it with a cooking torch (like for making creme brulee) and pressed the screen from a cooking splatter guard into it to form a criss-cross pattern that is similar to diamond plate.

Finally, I learned that the interior and engine kits both came with a firewall to go between. Once all the parts for the interior and exterior are in place, without any firewalls, they take up pretty much the whole interior, leaving not enough room for EITHER firewall. So, what I ended up having to do is to build a new firewall from scratch from styrene. I tried to get the general shape from both of the resin parts and even clipped off a few of the resin details and added them to the new version. I also found that I had to cut quite a bit off of the bottom of the engine in order to get it to sit low enough in the chassis for the upper hull pieces to be able to attach. This, of course, caused all the pipes to mis-align, so there are still a few things that will need tweaking once paint is done and I am cementing things into the hull.

Some images of the built-up interior and engine:

And finally, with a coat of Mr Surfacer 1200 as a primer:

Next: some paint!

Next Project! Dragon Panzer III Ausf.N Tank

Nathan Fariss — 2009-12-13T20:21:21-08:00

And now for something completely different...

So, I've begun my next project. I picked a few plastic armor kits up last February, when I stumbled upon a new hobby shop (which has since become my main hobby shop), and found that they were having a sale. I had done a little bit of reading and looked for kits that came with individual-link tracks, and some photo-etched metal parts, in hopes of finding the kits challenging. The one that I am starting with is a German Panzer tank, of a fairly late revision, with markings from their African campaign. This kit is made by Dragon, and they look to have gone above and beyond when it comes to the quality of the plastic molding and overall level of detail.

I've also decided to try quite a few new things on this project. Since I haven't really done any sort of armor model since I was a little kid, I figured I could try lots of new things, based on recent reading and get much of the learning going all at once. First off, I am trying some new paints, primers, and glues. I've picked up some Mr Surfacer products for priming and filling, some Pro Weld plastic welder to replace the Testors cement I've always used, some Milliput epoxy putty, and various super glues, sanding devices, etc, all that I have not tried before. Later in the project, I also hope to experiment with some new airbrushing techniques, and to try out some weathering techniques using pigments and some artist oils.

Here is the kit that I am working with.

Here's an example of the instructions. They don't seem to be real big on the step-by-step sort of approach and instead seem to go for more of a put-all-this-stuff-together-at-once sorta thing.

I've started putting a few pieces together. Mostly this has just involved a great deal of sanding and a little filling. I've been trying out filling tiny seams with Mr Surfacer 500, which is somewhere in between primer and filler. It seems to be working pretty well so far, although I've only used it to smooth over some seams on the drive wheels.

Another in the list of new things I am trying on this kit is the addition of a third-party resin interior kit. The model did not come with any interior parts beyond a few gun parts that go inside the turret. But, the kit DOES allow for all of the hatches and portals to be assembled in an open position. So, with a little scrounging and some sanity checks on the Fine Scale Modeler forums, I decided on an interior kit and an engine bay kit, both from Verlinden. The interior kit adds the various crew-related parts as well as a floor, transmission tunnel and various other transmission parts. The engine bay adds the bits on the other side of the firewall, which is mostly just the engine and some fans and things.

Here is how they roughly fit into the lower hull piece.

The big catch here, is that these resin bits were not made for this Dragon kit, but rather for a Tamiya kit, which has less internal detail. As a result, there is some duplication in details between the lower hull part of the plastic kit and the detail in the resin kit. This means that this will take a bit of figuring and some quality time with the Dremel in order to get everything to play nicely with one another. Below is an image, with tiny red arrows, illustrating the duplicated details.

All in all, I am pretty excited about this project, as it is really nice to have a bit of a change of pace after all that time with wood and string and superglue. Stay tuned for further updates as this one progresses, hopefully at a slightly faster pace than the last project. If all goes well, I'm hoping to have this one completed in time to enter into the Hobby Expo 2010 on February 20th, in Petaluma.

Armed Virginia Sloop - And That's That

Nathan Fariss — 2009-12-06T20:21:20-08:00

After roughly ten months of work, cutting, sanding, gluing, painting, and tying, I think this one is finally done.

The past few weeks have mostly just been spent finishing the rigging. The final few steps were to add the anchors and clean up many of the tied-off strings. The swivel guns were finally glued in place and the thick anchor rope was formed into a coil on deck.

Overall this has been a very rewarding project, and I've learned an enormous amount about both working with wood on a small scale and about sailing ships themselves. But now I'm definitely ready for some non-wood projects! I've got a bit of a stockpile of plastic kits that I've built up over the past year, so keep an eye out for future updates on those.

Now, for some photos:

AVS - Rigging Update

Nathan Fariss — 2009-11-01T20:21:20-08:00

Just a quick update on my progress so far. Not a whole lot has changed since the last post. I've been fairly busy, but managed to get some more strings tied to the ship. Disclaimer: I left my camera at work on Friday, so these photos are just taken with my phone, and not touched by Photoshop, so they aren't quite as clean.

Anyway, I'm pretty much really all done with the standing rigging (with the exception of the ratlines on the shrouds, which I'll add later). Now, I'm mostly adding the lines that would run the sails up and down. I've also found that careful application of a lighter to the strings, since they are synthetic, tightens them up nicely once everything is all tied and glued.

With that, here are a few photos of the new bits:

Armed Virginia Sloop - Masts and Rigging

Nathan Fariss — 2009-10-25T19:40:16-07:00

Finally, a long overdue update on the ship. I moved on from the bowsprit and formed the main mast, the topmast, the booms, and the yards. I settled on a technique for thinning the dowels that seemed to work pretty well: Since I didn't have a lathe, I put the dowels into my electric drill (being careful not to put them in TOO tight, since that leaves dents in the wood), and then set the drill up to the highest speed and just held sandpaper against it. This would be fairly painful using my bare hands, but I happened to have some of those silicon oven mitts, which let you hold very hot things (I had gotten them for smoking ribs). So, using the gloves, and holding 150 grit sandpaper against the spinning dowels, they were fairly quickly down to the proper diameter and taper.

After that, it was just a matter of building the trestle tree (where the main mast meets the top mast) and adding various extra bits and nubs to the yards and masts.

Below you can see the bases of the booms, with card stock wrapped around, painted and then with polyurethane on it, to simulate the iron bands that were on the real ships. You can also see the sail hoop things on the mast. Since my ship won't have sails on it, they just sit there on the mast. I took this opportunity to try out "Black It" metal blackening solution, which is supposed to chemically blacken various metals. In my case it really just turned them sort of rust colored. Although, since that looks fairly natural in the context, I decided to go with it.

With all of the various wooden parts of the rigging complete, I moved on to the strings. The practicum that I am following had me start with the bowsprit rigging and then prep almost all of the rigging on the lower mast before actually gluing the mast in place. Below you can see the completed bowsprit rigging, as well as the partially-rigged lower mast and trestle tree. On the main mast, on a few of the strings have actually been connected to the ship itself, so many of them are hanging loose in a disorderly fashion, which explains their fairly messy appearance in the photos.

Ship trivia of the day: Currently I am mostly just dealing with what is called the 'standing rigging', which are the ropes that generally do not move when the sails go up and down, but instead serve to hold the various masts, etc in place. These ropes were usually coated with tar, to waterproof them, and so, on my model, are made from the black string.

Here are a few photos of the upper rigging meeting the ship.

Finally, the ship in its current state. Standing rigging in progress, with mast and bowsprit attached. The rigging is moving along at a good pace so far, so I am hoping to increase the frequency of my updates on it :)

Armed Virginia Sloop - Odds and Ends

Nathan Fariss — 2009-09-27T20:43:15-07:00

I was off on vacation for a week, so the updates lagged a bit behind. But, now I am back and have had a little time to work on the ship.

I don't really have any great insights to share this time around, so just a quick post to update my progress and show a few photos of where I am at the moment.

First off, I had to wrap up a few remaining deck fixtures. This included the little stairs to the top deck/roof, lots of little cleats, attaching all the bases for the swivel cannons, the swivel cannons themselves, various holes being drilled for future attachments, etc. Also, I added the channels, chainplates and deadeyes (those wings and round things sticking off the sides of the ship) in preparation for adding the masts and rigging.

Next, since the ship is mostly just getting rigging stuff added from this point on, I built the real base, which is a model of the launching ways. This was built all from 1/4" basswood stock, cut to size, stained, and then glued into place. There was a little bit of fiddly work, getting all the proper angles cut into the upright support parts, but nothing too tough :)

Finally, I've started work on the masts. First up was the bowsprit (big one) and the jibboom (little one). The bowsprit was fashioned from a 3/8" dowel which has to be slimmed down by using a combination of sanding drums in a dremel, and sanding the dowel while it is spinning in a drill. This was mostly quite a bit of experimentation, and I can't say that either method really worked all that well, but it got the job done. Anyhow, that's where I am now, with the bowsprit temporarily installed. Next up are various little fittings on the bowsprit, and then moving on to the main mast.

Armed Virginia Sloop - Getting Crowded On Deck

Nathan Fariss — 2009-09-07T22:00:15-07:00

Another small update today. This mostly consists of various deck furniture and fittings. First up are the boom crutches:

(very exciting, I know)

In the next photo, you can see the smokestack for the galley, the riding bitt (little rope rack thing in the left-middle, there) and the catheads (little arms that stick off the front. No cats harmed in the making of this model).

Then, the more complicated stuff: The ships wheel, the water pumps and the binnacle. The ships wheel and pumps seems fairly self evident, but if you are like me, you probably thought something like, "Binnacle? Is that like a barnacle? Perhaps the pinnacle of all barnacles, a sort of super-barnacle?" Turns out a binnacle is that little cabinet thing in front of the ships wheel that houses, among other things, the ships compass, which is supposed to be behind the little window.

The only noteworthy thing here is that I tried out using my drill as a makeshift lathe in order to turn a dowel into a pulley for the ships wheel (left side, where the string loops around). It seems to have worked decently, but I wouldn't recommend it for precision work.

That's where I am now. More updates to follow as I progress!

Armed Virginia Sloop - Now Armed!

Nathan Fariss — 2009-09-02T21:48:15-07:00

First off, I've gotten the rudder attached. This wasn't too tough, but I thought that I would share a little trick I used. The course I am following didn't make any mention of the little bolt heads that secure the straps to the rudder and to the ship. The plans make a brief mention of using cut off bits of wire for these bolt heads. I figured that even if I managed to cut off that small of a piece of wire without it flying across the room and disappearing, then trying to get that tiny bit super glued to the rudder was going to be practically impossible. So, instead, I borrowed a jar of acrylic medium (thick), and dipped a T pin into it and dabbed little bits of the gel onto the metal straps. This left nice little dots on there, which were just the right size. Once dry, a little brush with fine sandpaper to take the points off the dabs, and then I painted over both the metal strap and the gel and it all turned out pretty well, if I may say so.

Once the rudder was all done, I set about rigging, and attaching the cannons to the ship. The rigging was extra fiddly, as it required some very small knots be tied and some fairly springy rope be coiled. I am now proud to say that I can precisely tie an hangman's knot that is only a few millimeters long. Should anyone need to hang any traitorous insects, I can be of assistance.

This step had one goof and one trick.

The goof: turns out I rigged the cannons backwards when it came to the little block-and-tackle things on the sides. The blocks with two holes were supposed to be towards the outside of the ship, resulting in the rope exiting the rigging near the railing of the ship and making much more sense, if you think about how one would haul on the rope to run the cannon out. But since I didn't discover this until I had already rigged all the cannons, I decided it wasn't too big a deal.

The trick: The course I am following suggested forming the rope coils (on the deck next to each cannon) by soaking the string in a mixture of Elmer's glue and water and then then using a wet paintbrush to form the ring of rope. I think my string may have been a different type (polyester instead of cotton), since it didn't really seem to soak up the glue mixture and become more pliable. Instead it mostly just spread glue all around the deck of the ship as I tried to get it to stay in place. Eventually, I gave up on that method and decided to instead form the coils by wrapping the string around the handle of a paintbrush (carefully overlapping, so that it built up some thickness and held itself in place) and the putting a dab of superglue (fast) on at the end to hold the coil together. Then, before the glue complete hardened, I slipped the coil off the brush handle and glued it down to the deck with another dab of superglue (slow). This seemed to do the trick, and aside from gluing my fingers together and to the rope a few times, it turned out pretty well.

That's it for now. Next up are a few more pieces of random deck furniture, the little railing guns and various rigging fittings.

Armed Virginia Sloop - quick update

Nathan Fariss — 2009-08-16T21:43:15-07:00

After a few weeks of turmoil, I'm beginning to get a bit of time here and there to work on the models again. This update shows the completed (sorta) cannons and the beginnings of the rudder. I added the 'sorta' to the cannons, as they still have a good deal of rigging work that will be done later in order to actually attach them to the ship itself. The rudder I just started today and should go pretty quick, since it is just a bit of simple sanding, carving and then cutting some bits of metal.

Armed Virginia Sloop - All Decking Complete

Nathan Fariss — 2009-07-26T20:44:14-07:00

Just a quick update to show the completed decking. At long last all the of frame and structure of the ship is covered. The next step is to start building the cannons, but I've got lots going on over the next week or two, so there may not be a worthwhile update here for a few weeks :)

Armed Virginia Sloop - Decking

Nathan Fariss — 2009-07-19T19:40:00-07:00

Just a few images here of the in-progress deck planking. The main decking is done, and is soon to be followed by the mid deck planking. The black lines between planks here are meant to simulate the tar that was used on ships to waterproof the deck. In my model I just used a sharpie to color the edges of the planks before assembling them :) The various deck items from the previous post are shown below, although they are not actually glued into place yet.

Armed Virginia Sloop - Deck Objects

Nathan Fariss — 2009-07-05T20:45:00-07:00

A few days of cutting, sanding and gluing has brought forth an assortment of tiny little items:

There is a penny in the photo for size comparison, but needless to say, I had to learn to use two pairs of tweezers simultaneously in combination with a magnifying lamp. The grating on the smallest bit was assembled from some machine-cut comb-looking parts, so wasn't quite as tricky as it may look. I'm pretty happy with how the various brass bits turned out, although I found it quite difficult to satisfactorily file the ends of the brass wire that was used to simulate hinge pins. The files that I have are simply too coarse to smooth the ends of the wire, which get sort of smashed down by the wire cutters.

These are all of the deck buildings, though, so next step is main deck planking, and then cannons!

Armed Virginia Sloop - Planking Complete

Nathan Fariss — 2009-07-03T16:54:00-07:00

I've wrapped up the hull planking at long last. All in all, it was not too difficult overall, once I understood what the general goals were. It was a bit tedious, after a while, but I think the end result is very pleasing. Here are a few images of the unsanded and unfinished planking. In the second image, you can see where I goofed the planking pattern a bit.

Next I spent some time sanding the planking all smooth, starting with 150-grit sandpaper and then moving to 280 and then 320. Then, a coat of sanding sealer, some more sanding, and finally three coats of satin polyurethane.

Today, I spent time drilling and cutting and sanding the oar sweeps (diagonal holes in the sides). These were a little tricky, since the center hole is only 3/32" and I had to resort to the tiny bits (#62, I think) to drill through for the diagonal parts. Once the holes were drilled, I cut in between the holes with a tiny saw, and then made a thin sanding strip with some planking glued to sandpaper. I used that little sander to even out the interior of the holes. Then I painted the interior of each hole red, and then put polyurethane over everything that got painted or sanded, in order to have a nice uniform finish over everything. Finally, I decided to built a quick little working stand for the ship, since most of the work from this point on it on the deck. I just cut up some balsa that I had laying about and built a little stand, using the dremel to quickly get the stand to conform to the shape of the hull. There are some little felt circles in between the stand and hull, to avoid scrapes over time.

The kit comes with wood to build a stand, but since that wood is basswood, I was a little wary of building that stand now, since I think the basswood would get pretty beat up over time. I figure that this little balsa stand should do the trick for the time being and I don't have to worry too much about it getting broken. Anyhow, this is where the model stands at the moment:

Armed Virginia Sloop - continued

Nathan Fariss — 2009-06-28T21:53:59-07:00

I've been steadily plugging away on this model, mostly on planking-related tasks. I decided to do a little bit of painting, somewhat for accent/contrast, and somewhat to cover areas that would look bad if not painted (inside the gunports).

Here you can see the insides of the railing things painted the appropriate red color. I discovered, once I had the sides built up and the railings installed, that the back deck sides on my model were a bit taller than they are supposed to be. This meant that the sides up there, on my model, were only as thick as the outside basswood planking and looked pretty weird. So I spent a bit of time adding a few layers of wood to give those back walls thickness. It seems to have turned out okay, and I'm hoping it won't cause any issues later on in the build.

Once that was complete, I moved on to installing some of the main thicker planks on the upper outside of the hull and then adding the thin walnut finish planking to the upper areas.

From that point it was just a matter of planking the rest of the lower hull. It took me a little while to get the hang of how things go, but this task isn't too tough. It does get a bit tedious though, since it is really just a great deal of measuring and trimming plank after plank. Below you can see some of the masking tape guidelines that I used in order to help me control the flow of the planks around the hull.

I found that once I masked off a new line (based off of plank width), I could then go back and eyeball rough divisions of the intermediate space. So, for example, if the space between the tape and the finished planks required five full-width planks to cover it at the widest spot, then I would then move along the length of the ship and make marks that divided the space into five sections. If I did this every two inches or so, I found that I could then simply lay down an uncut 4" plank, see where it needed to be width-wise and then trim as needed. Then it was just a simple matter of cutting, gluing and, in some cases, soaking and bending, all of the planks required to fill the space. To the right, you can see the hull, a bit further along, with the markings for the last section in place.

That said, I discovered today that I still managed to goof up the planking on one side of the hull. It's nothing too major, but my planking pattern is off on every third plank, so that instead of a nice even distribution of plank ends, they are a bit offset. Since I was already about two thirds of the way done on that side, I decided I could live with it :)

Finally, here is where I stand at the moment. One side of the hull is planked, and the other side is about two thirds of the way complete. Once I finish the other side, I'll sand it all smooth, and then hit it with some sanding sealer, and polyurethane. Once I am happy with the exterior finish, it'll be time to move on to constructing some of the deck structures. I will be quite happy to be able to take a break from planking at that point (I'll still have to plank the main deck later). Overall, I am very happy with how things are progressing, although it seems that, when I ordered this kit in the first place, I grossly underestimated the amount of time required to complete it. At this rate, I'll be lucky if I have completed the kit before a year has elapsed since the kit first came into my possession. But it is a fun project and definitely the challenge I was hoping for!

Armed Virginia Sloop, pt 6

Nathan Fariss — 2009-06-14T20:18:56-07:00

Construction Continues.... The past few weeks have been super busy, and I've only just this weekend been able to devote some time to working on the ship.

Here you can see the ship all clamped up as I was gluing in the little basswood blocks where the sweep ports (oar-holes) go. Once that was all done, I found that I had to shim some of the ribs in order to get a uniform thickness everywhere. So, I spent some time shimming and trimming and sanding and cutting, and once satisfied, I was able to put the walnut planking on the inside.

AVS Update (finally)

Nathan Fariss — 2009-05-24T22:00:56-07:00

So, at long last, I am finally updating the blog on the progress of the Armed Virginia Sloop.

I have been make slow but steady progress on the ship over the past two months, and more recently I've tried to increase my pace a little bit, as I was getting discouraged by the lack of visible progress. Currently, I have finished the first layer of exterior planking on the hull and am just beginning the walnut layer on both the inside of the rails and on the outside. Here are some images from the past two months and a little bit about them:

This first one shows the installation of the waterways, which I had been hung up on for a while. These were fairly thick, laser-cut, walnut parts that required a pretty big bevel along their length. Since I thought this was going to be tricky to get right, I had stalled for a while on it (plus I was pretty busy in outside life as well). But, once I got down to it, it turned out to not be that big a deal and I only cut myself a few times with the x-acto knife ;)

This next image shows the rear cabiny thing pretty much all done. This was actually a multi-step process, consisting of first planking in basswood. This first step was my introduction to planking with soaked wood (for added flexibility), which turned out to be quite handy. Once the area was planked with the basswood, it got a good sanding, and then the window frames were installed. I had some left over window plastic from the last boat I built (the Chris Craft at the bottom), so I cut some small squares from that and glued those to the backs of all the window frames with some Testors clear parts cement. Next, the area was given a final planking with the walnut layer, which required some delicate cutting and fitting around the frame areas. To finish it off, the surface was sanded smooth and given a light coat of polyurethane to seal it up a bit.

Here is another view of the cabin area. You can also see the first few planks going on the side. This mostly involved a process of roughly measuring the planks, then soaking them in water for a bit, then attaching them with super glue. Once the wood had dried out a bit, things are trimmed and sanded to fit nicely.

There is a bit of a trick to this whole stern area, as many of the bits sort of rely on one another for positioning. The course that I am following (see link in sidebar) does a good job of differing from the kits instructions in order to make these interrelationships obvious. As a result, it sort of skips back and forth for a bit, adding a few planks, then some trim pieces, then more planks, etc.

Here is an image of the walnut trim corner pieces in place. These interact with the installed walnut planking, as well as the side planks in the way that it fits together. This step also required a bit of muscle (delicately) to bend my top rear planks out a bit. They had ended up curling in a bit, so that when i installed the straight trim pieces, they did not line up properly. With a little bit of super glue, some delicate but firm pressure, and some patience, I managed to bend the rear surface out a bit to align with the trim. This looked much better and generally filled life with happiness ;)

Skipping ahead a few weeks, the planking is well underway. This mostly involved steps of pinning, drawing guide lines along the planks, unpinning, careful cutting, soaking and then finally gluing in place, with a bit of trimming at one end for a proper fit. Not too tough, really, but pretty slow going. I think I averaged two to four planks on evenings that I was able to work on the ship. The image to the left is probably three to four weeks of slow work. Once I got this far though, I got excited about being almost done this stage, and pushed ahead a bit quicker. As a result, I am now all done with the basswood planking!

As you can see, in this image, The planking is complete and I've spent a bit of time sanding the whole hull and filling in a few gaps with green putty. Overall, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out

for being my first ship. There are a few areas that could be better (hence the need for the filler), but really nothing that is too bad. It was a bit tricky getting the planks to bend at the stern, as the planks were pretty wide (1/4") and the required bend was pretty extreme. But once all was sanded and filled, it seemed to work out just fine.

Next up is to begin the walnut planking on the interior of the railing. I believe this also involves a bit of cutting and fitting to a few pieces, but didn't look too complicated.

I'm hoping to be a little better about updates from here on, so keep an eye out for small posts as I progress!

Also, on a side note, be sure to go see Pixar's 'Up' this coming week, when it comes out! It's a great film!

Armed Virginia Sloop, pt4

Nathan Fariss — 2009-03-24T21:38:56-07:00

I haven't had much time recently to work on the ship, but I have managed to get the rear structure built and the front filler pieces cut and fit and sanded. Both ends took a good deal of shaping and sanding, and therefore took a bit longer than I was expecting.

I highly recommend getting a Dustbuster for your work area, if you don't already have one. I have found that having a little vacuum like that around allows me to really keep the amount of sawdust and wood shavings to a minimum. I'm hoping, in the long run, that this will save me a good deal of cleaning later. When I built the little speedboat (lower on the page), I ended up with a coating of fine sawdust all over everything in the room, which was a real task to clean up.

Here are a few photos of where I currently am. I am also goofing around with the picture layout thing. It's a bit clumsy to use.

Mega Model Railway in Germany

Nathan Fariss — 2009-03-23T14:36:56-07:00

I'm not really into the model railroad thing, but the shear scale of this one is impressive.

Miniatur Wunderland

Be sure to watch the video!

Armed Virginia Sloop, pt3

Nathan Fariss — 2009-03-15T21:29:55-07:00

At long last I have an update for this build. I've managed to get most of the frame of the hull assembled. The actual assembly was pretty quick (it's easy to glue things together), but once things were assembled, there was a great deal of sanding and fitting to do to make life easier inlater steps. Apparently, this is called 'fairing' the hull. It mostly consists of taking a scrap strip of wood and laying it along the outside of the hull so that one can see which ribs stick up higher or are lower than the rest. Then one must sand down the high ribs or glue on strips of wood for the low ribs. Then there is more sanding, a bit of sneezing (turns out my nose doesn't like saw dust very much), then a bit more fitting and sanding. There is also a great deal of accidental breakage of tiny wood parts, followed by loud cursing and then some reglueing of those parts.

This is also where the course that I am following differs a bit from the instructions that come with the kit. The course had me attach the sub decking (just a thin sheet of basswood) before framing the rear cabin, in order to give strength to the whole ship. While the instructions suggested putting little support pieces between the ribs to give it strength, and doesn't have me put on the subdeck until after all the rest of the framing is done. I can appreciate that the course method saves me quite a bit of time that would have otherwise been spent cutting little blocks of wood, but I like to think I made up for it in time spent glueing pieces of that thin deck back on after I managed to break them off while working on a different part of the hull. ;-)

All in all, I think I've got the hull faired and am ready to move on to framing up the rear cabin of the ship. There is probably a better term for that part of a ship, but I can't remember it at the moment :)

Anyhoo, here are some photos of where I am now:

Armed Virginia Sloop, pt 2

Nathan Fariss — 2009-03-03T21:56:55-08:00

I've gotten a little start on the ship. Mostly some cutting, sanding and fitting. I cut out the keel, and all the bulkheads, sanded their edges, and sanded the joints a bit until they all fit together. I've also received the practicum course mentioned below, and have been reading and following that.

I did some cutting and beveling on the center keel and have just started to actually attach some pieces together. You can see below, I've glued the walnut keel pieces to the edges of the basswood center keel. Next comes more cutting and carving and fitting, as I need to be sure that the groove into which all the planking will later fit is the proper size and angle before all the bulkheads get glued in place.

On a side note, today I received the pegboard that I order a few weeks ago. So, I spent some time this evening organizing and generally pegging things up on my board. Really, the goal was just to get many of my tools up off the desk, giving me more work space.

This past weekend, I also spent a few minutes making myself a little foamcore shelf sort of thing that I could put all the plank wood on, to keep it out of the way and to keep it from getting broken. In the below photo, you can see the little shelf below the left side of the pegboard.

Next post will hopefully have the bulkheads in place, and the shape of the ship will actually be a bit more visible.

Model Shipways Armed Virginia Sloop

Nathan Fariss — 2009-02-26T20:49:55-08:00

So, my new kit arrived yesterday :-D

Just a little background: I chose this particular kit because the folks on the Drydock Models forums seemed to agree that this was one of a couple good starter boats. Reasons include good instructions, high kit quality, less scratch building, and the availability of kit-specific training materials.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Lauck Street Shipyard has a very detailed course on building this kit. It goes into an enormous amount of detail and aims to teach many of the tricks of the trade in regards to model ship building. If you are curious, they have the first section of many of the courses available to download and check out for free.

So there is a little background, which brings us up to the new kit. I spent last night picking through the parts and making sure everything was accounted for. After an hour or two of counting parts and measuring wood stock, it seemed everything was in order. There was a tiny bit of damage to one of the very thin laser-cut deck sheets, but it was something that was easily glued back on. I re-glued it last night and it seems to be good as new today, but will take a little sanding once installed later.

I'm now waiting for some organizational items to arrive, to help get my workspace cleaned up a little, and I'm also waiting for the aforementioned building course to arrive. But in the mean time, I have gotten the first section of the course, through which I can read and begin a bit of work. I've also purchased "How to Build First Rate Ship Models From Kits" by Ben Lankford (available from modelexpo-online.com), which I'll be reading as well. All in all, I'm hoping to learn a great deal while building this ship, so that I need much less assistance on the next one.

The box:

The box..... opened!

After all the counting and sorting and such:

Hobby Expo 2009

Nathan Fariss — 2009-02-21T22:20:00-08:00

I was up bright and early this morning in order to head north to Petaluma, California, and Hobby Expo 2009. I was hoping to see some well-built models, be introduced to some aspects of the hobby that I was not familiar with, and perhaps run across some hard-to-find items carried by vendors there.

I arrived around 10:30 in the morning and upon entering the building, wandered past a few folding tables stacked high with plastic model kits, and then found myself in the r/c room. There was a little course set up on the floor and a few tables for r/c rock crawlers (something I didn't even know existed), and a small race track for tiny r/c cars. There were a few r/c airplane tables, a table with some r/c tanks (I had run across these at Maker Fair, as well), and a 'robot' table. As I wandered in, there was a fellow heading outside to the pond to fly his electric plane, so I followed along.

The plane that was flying and one of the r/c plane tables:

After that I found my way into the main room, where there were a few central tables, with models on display, and a ring of vendors around the outside. Here are some images of the models that were on display.

Besides the main room, there was also a room with a few wooden ship models, some model railroads, and quite a few maquettes. I also ran across what appeared to be a room full of model terrain and people playing table-top war games with little tanks and people. I didn't hang around long in there, as I've never been big on table-top games.

All in all, the event was larger that I had been expecting, but still not particularly huge. There was a vendor selling resin car kits and photo-etched detail sheets that were pretty impressive. I believe he also sells them from his website here: www.mshobbies.com (also there is a link on the right side of this page, now). Most of the kits and parts he was selling were Japanese imports made by a company called Studio 27.

While I was checking out the model ships, I noticed the group exhibiting (Redwood Empire Model Shipwrights, I think), had their monthly meetings at a local hobby shop. Figuring that if the ship guys met there, the store might sell things that would be handy in my upcoming build, so I decided to go check it out. It turns out that this particular store had some of the best selection of any brick-and-morter hobby store that I have ever been to. If you are in the north bay, and are interested in a hobby store, be sure to check out Hobbytown USA in Petaluma (http://www.htupetaluma.com/). They were even having a sale on all plastic models (buy two, get the third free). I picked up two WWII German armor models (both of which were also discounted $20-25 each), both made by Dragon, and a WWII motorcycle model, along with various other odds and ends.

All three models have a pretty high level of detail, having some photoetched parts, very fine molding, etc. Here are a few images of the kits, although I'm planning on putting these aside for a while (probably until the summer, when I can open up the apartment for airbrushing, etc). I just couldn't pass up the great discounts at the hobby store :-)

The motorcycle:

First tank model (this one came with a little booklet telling me all about how awesome the quality of the kit was):

The other tank model. This one had an enormous amount of parts that formed a mountain of plastic on my desk, and were, frankly, a bit intimidating.

That's all from me for now. My next kit should arrive mid next week, so I'll post some pics when that arrives.

1930 Chris Craft Runabout in 1/24 scale

Nathan Fariss — 2009-02-19T21:15:00-08:00

Here are a few images of the last model I finished. This was the first model that I have ever done that had a finished wood construction. When I was a kid I had done a few of the little balsa airplanes that have a tissue out surface, but this boat was a totally different beast.

This kit is a Dumas Boats 1930 Chris Craft Runabout at 1/24 scale. The finished product is about 12" long. It's got a balsa frame and underplanking, with mahogany final planking.

Previous to this kit, almost all of the kits I have built have been plastic. This meant the emphasis was far and away on the painting and cleanup of the plastic. A little filler here, some shading and weathering there and the kits come out nice. This, on the other hand, was a good deal more about the construction, with hardly any painting at all. There was a great deal of shaping and sanding of the raw planks of wood, which, while making a saw-dusty mess of my office, made me feel much more like I had actually BUILT the model, rather than just assembled a kit. There was also a bit of metal cleanup and polishing on the white metal parts, and some working with materials I had not dealt with before (sheet adhesive aluminum).

Overall, I learned quite a bit and whet my appetite for further exploration into the ship building process. As a result, I decided to order up a new ship model (see previous post), with a good deal more complexity, and give that a try.

New model ordered, Model Expo 2009

Nathan Fariss — 2009-02-19T11:06:00-08:00

So I've ordered up a new model to start on: A Model Shipways 1:48 scale Armed Virginia Sloop. After finishing my first wooden model, I decided that I liked it, and that I should give something a little more complicated a try. I think I will also get the course on building this particular model from: http://www.lauckstreetshipyard.com Hopefully this will help me learn many of the tricks of the trade, without making a mess of things.

More info on the model, image source, etc can be had here:

http://www.modelexpo-online.com/product.asp?ITEMNO=MS2160

Also, this weekend is Hobby Expo 2009, up in Petaluma. I only just discovered this the other day, and having never been to one of these things myself, I figured I would go up and check it out. I'm hoping there will be someone there selling some of the Maschinen Krieger (sp?) kits, since they seem to be tricky to find these days.

First Post!

Nathan Fariss — 2009-01-09T19:17:59-08:00

Since I've suddenly gained a great deal of free time in my life, I decided maybe I would try writing a bit. I don't know that I am a particularly good writer, or that anyone would actually have any interest in reading what I write. But either way, I figured I'd at least set this blog up and see how that goes.

This post will also let me see how things look and get my template/style set up properly.