More on the small scale!

Following the last post on the Revell 1/76 Panzer II Ausf. F I thought I would show the Revell Kfz. 70 Krupp Protze & 3,7cm Pak I built in 2013. similar to the Panzer kit it was built, painted and weathered in a few enjoyable evenings.

 

Size isn't everything!

 

I normally do things big! 'Make it large' as the fast food chains like to entice you. Its the same with models. put a 1/76th scale kit and a 1/35th or even a 1/25th in front of me and its almost certain I will go for the biggest scale. Why? I don't know. Maybe its the cost thing in that for not a lot more with some kits you get a model four times the size with more parts, more detail and a big presence. 

However, I have been known to build small kits and on looking back through some of my models I remember enjoying making them as they were relatively quick to build and to be frank although my eyes are not as good as they were, there is still a fair amount of detail. The model pictured at the start of this post is the Revell 1/76 Panzer II Ausf. F complete with a basic diorama setting. Back in about 2015 it cost me £5 from Hobby Craft (there was a branch near my office and after a bad morning I would walk there and see if there were any bargains - very stress relieving!) I recall I built, painted and weathered it in about four or five evenings and it was very enjoyable and it looks good - or I think it does! Size isn't always the most important thing!

On other fronts, work on damaging my back continues as the garden revamp continues but hopefully the end is in sight! Wall building at the moment dodging the belated April showers that have arrived in May!

When all this is finished it will hopefully be back to some full on model making!

Turning my back on model making or just getting a bad back?

More about the model in the picture above in a moment. I thought I needed to start with a image of a model just to prove that this blog is mainly about model making! The model may have turned its back to me but I haven't turned my back on modelling although the back does ache! 

The lack of any posts to this blog over the last week however does mean that model making activities are on the back burner at the moment. My life at the moment appears to be centered around a major garden revamp and cycling. I am up to 1762 miles this year which is good going for me. Garden wise, its not the biggest out their but big enough for me and Mrs W's needs and still provides a shed load of work at the moment. Yesterdays escapades in involved moving 7 Yorke stone slabs about 4 foot long, one foot wide and 4 inches deep. No way of weighing them but I guess somewhere about 75 to 100 kg. Move those around for a while and no need for a gym session! The day before digging a 25 foot long, 18 inch deep trench through clay to put a power cable into the Room of Doom. There is probably another 2 to 4 weeks of work left depending on weather, what hidden problems I find and how my back stands up to it all!

Now back to the model! It is a Italeri R620 Scania Atelier that I built back in 2010. The kit was probably the start of Italeri producing various customised versions of their Scania kit. The kit is inaccurate in a number of areas including having the wrong rear hubs but as there are a lot of Scania fans in Europe it has always been a good seller despite its short comings. 

I built the kit out of the box apart from putting a couple of airlines on. The bodywork was sprayed Humbrol metallic green with silver mixed into it. The issues with the kit were that some of the decals broke up on wetting so I ended up having to make do with what stayed intact. Whilst Italeri decals are nice and thin this does mean that they are prone to breaking up when they are wetted to separate them from the backing sheet. There are solutions that you can get to cover the decal before wetting it to strengthen it but I did not expect an issue with a kit that was only a year or so old. The other issue was trying to get the pivot pins in to connect the cab to chassis. I failed! I do remember it seeming to be an impossible task and I gave up before I damaged the model. At least the cab can be lifted straight off the chassis to see the engine! 

Pictures below taking me back to 2010 when my back didn't ache as much! Oh well back to more digging but I have not turned my back on model making!

Projects of Joy and Woe!

 A bit thin on blog entries at the moment. Not because things are not busy for me but more that not a lot of the business has included model making. There are times like that and I am lucky this year so far in that I have spent more time on model making in the first four months of the year than probably in the previous four years!

At the moment there is a large project of redoing the garden. I am not a highly skilled creative gardener and my results are more likely to feature in a guide on how not to do your garden rather than be showcased at the Chelsea Flower Show. However I enjoy it and that is what that matters and hence the Project of Joy! At the moment work is centered around some hard landscaping and laying paving blocks is taking much time up. I do find this sort of thing very therapeutic. There is something about bringing mortar and blocks together that fascinates me! I can understand why Winston Churchill enjoyed brick laying as a hobby and there is a lot of information about this aspect of his life here.. My work is probably a shadow of his but progress is being made. As an aside getting materials, especially cement is proving a problem. I am told that there was a fire at a large cement works which has caused major issues. I had to travel 60 plus miles to actually get a couple of bags!

Moving onto the Project Of Woe or as I will call it the POW, this is a tale that typifies my modelling! Back in 2016 I bought a Bachmann Baldwin in 009 gauge in War Department grey as used in World War 1. Great model so a couple of wagons to match were bought. 

Then the idea that being the time of the Centenary of WW1 it would be good to build a small layout with a WW1 theme. By about August 2018 I finally got round to starting the layout! No worries - a couple of months will see it done! Wind on to the present and there is the start of the layout and a series of problems that have dogged its progress.

First off I decided to build the baseboard out of foam board. Several sheets of foam board from The Range and a hot glue gun built a reasonable baseboard and WOW was it light in weight! Great! I started to lay the track and out came my stock of second hand 009 gauge points bought probably 20 years ago. Not sure if they were Peco or not but after a short while the sleeper bases just broke up. Having replaced them landscaping then commenced and with a coat of brown base paint the whole thing looked like this.

A nice simple layout with a passing loop and siding along with a slight hill to give some interest to the landscape. It was at this point that I suddenly became aware that foam board was not as stable as I thought and hot glue gun joints were not structurally very strong. What came about is that landscaping the top surface with plaster meant that as the plaster dried out and slightly shrunk it warped the baseboard - Oh Woe! I ended up with a banana shaped baseboard! I thought that I had a photo but can not find it. To cut a long story short two attempts with adding a wooden frame to which the base board was glued and bent back flat with some rather large G clamps were required to rectify the problem. Talking to someone who has success in using foam board baseboards has revealed that there are different qualities of foam board and you can get a much better and stronger joint between the foam board parts if you use the special cutter that gives a stepped joint. There are also a number of other tool s that are useful and some can be seen here 

Having got a flat baseboard again some scenic work has been undertaken and in an earlier series of posts I dealt with the various Shelf Queens that I finished and they are for this layout. At present it all looks very stark and apologies for the picture quality but it was not the best light to take photos when I did these.

It is going to be some time before I get back to this project but there is a basis of an interesting layout there so hopefully it will become a Project of Joy one day. In the meantime I have to go back to my garden work and today is moving some large Yorke paving slabs - Oh Joy!!!!!!

Switching the USA Switching Layout!

Last week was a bit of a modelling desert in as much as I had other things I had to get on with. It happens that way and model making is a hobby so it does take a back seat on occasions. However over the weekend I did manage to get some of my USA H0 stock out and have a bit of a play with my new layout. To some enthusiasts 'play' should be 'operate' but I make no pretentions to knowing what I am doing with USA railroads. This layout is very much about switching as the Americans call it but better known as shunting in the UK. You have a few freight cars on the layout and switch them into the various sidings and you can also build up a train of freight cars to be theoretically taken away if there was a line out of the layout to a fiddleyard. Its all very therapeutic and takes your mind off other things! I will go into more detail another time. 

The pictures below showing the stock on the layout will probably leave some knowledgeable USA modelers in despair or fits of laughter given that I suspect that there is a real mishmash of eras and regions that could never have been seen together. However I am doing it for the fun of it and I am getting a great deal of fun out of it. 

Loco wise I have a few USA engines but this layout suits the Alco S-2 Diesel switcher by Bachmann. This one is DCC sound chipped and I use a Bachmann EZ Command controller which is ideal for this layout. Anyway, enough of the talk lets see some pictures.

USA Switching Layout

How I wish I could claim to have built this layout! I can't though! However I do now own it following a purchase from a wonderful gentleman who built the layout during lockdown and I collected it today. I bought the layout on the basis of seeing some photographs and whilst I would normally recommend seeing in person before buying, the photographs were more than enough to satisfy my senses that the layout was built by someone who really knew what they were doing. Meeting said gentleman and seeing the layout for the first time proved my senses were more than right! There is some fantastic detail on this layout and it just oozes atmosphere of those small mid west places in the USA where the railroad dealt with the freight of a predominantly agricultural economy. Love the little cameos and the way the whole layout flows. Every time I go back to look I see something new.

Why did I buy this layout? Good question for someone who already has a host of projects on the go. I have a small collection of USA locos and freight cars (note that they are freight cars not wagons in the USA) built up over the years mainly because I have holidayed in the USA in the west and mid west in some real off the trail places and their railroads ( note not railways!) hold a fascination for me. I have never really been able to run them and on my bucket list was a layout just like this. Given all my other projects it was a no brainer to me when this came on the market that I could get a fabulous layout and actually run my stock rather than await some distant future when my other projects are complete ( if that point ever arrives!). 

I will be having a running session in the near future but in the meantime I have been looking, admiring and in my mind I am back in the mid west USA where I had some fantastic holidays! Here are some photos.

Get your Woody serviced here!

 

A somewhat unusual title to commence a blog entry even by my corny standards. However there is a story about this that does lead onto modelling matters!. Friday morning saw me take a break from butchering wood having achieved something that even Mrs Woody thought was 'nice'! I have got to the point where the floor and bookcases in Man Cave AKA The Room of Gloom are nearly finished. Much to my amazement the bookcases actually are of the same height, stand straight and stunningly have not collapsed once loaded with modelling magazines! More on this in another post but here are a couple of pictures of things so far.

Getting back to Friday, I do cycle most days and cycling on my own has always been that opportunity to unwind and think things through. A lot of problems have seen a solution created after a bike ride. However I do on occasions have the fortune to take a ride out with some company. Friday saw Mr Beecham arrive as my company for my ride. Mr Beecham is the artist who drew the various locomotives and T34 tank that featured in a post earlier this year. He is a very talented modeler and its a pleasure to see some of his models that he brings along to show me. I do take inspiration from his creations and it is always good to see and learn from other modelers approaches to building a kit. Annoyingly he is not only a talented modeler but a fairly quick cyclists too. I have cycled seriously for many years time trialing and road racing in my younger years and have about 200,000 miles on my legs which, if I were a car, I would probably have been scrapped by now! However getting old has meant I have slowed down and hills, especially these days, always seem steeper than they did 10 years ago. My hill climbing ability is perhaps also not assisted by the fact that I am a bit heavier, OK a fair amount heavier, than I was in my prime racing days. This leads to Mr Beecham leaving me behind on the hills. However not all is lost as although both our bikes are of a very similar equipment spec I can leave him behind on the descent where I am free wheeling and he is having to pedal to keep up. Gravity can indeed be your friend on occasions!

Moving onto getting this story back towards modelling matters we stopped for a bite to eat at a local place we know and ordered sausage breakfast cobs - ideal for the weight conscious cyclist but they are tasty! Whilst waiting for our drinks I spied that they had for sale various reproduction metal signs including the one at the head of this post - Get your Woody serviced here. Well being known as Woody made the decision to buy easy but there is a modelling connection which the sign suddenly brought back fond memories of. 

On a trip to the USA some years ago I happened to be in a Walmart or Target store and I saw the Revell 1/25 scale 48 Ford Woody kit in amongst their range of kits they stocked. That had to come home with me even though I do not build car kits. Prior to the Revell kit I have only built the Airfix 1/32 scale VW Beatle and the Tamiya 1/24 VW Karman Giah. Anyway once home in sat in my pile of unmade kits for several years and then for no reason that I remember I built it. It was probably 10 or so years ago as I was still using enamel paints in stead of acrylics. I do recall it was a bit of a pig to mask up for spraying and that the green was a Humbrol green with a small amount of silver mixed in to give a slight metallic finish. However it is safe on a shelf and I dusted it off and became re-acquainted with an old build and the history behind it. Looking at it closely again there are some parts that could be improved but its a record of my model making skills at the time so its a bit of my history! I still like it and that is all that matters and what's more the memories it brought flooding back are priceless! Strange how a set of circumstances comes together and gives a nice result!

As I am still dealing with The Room of Gloom other modelling activities are on a bit of a back burner at the moment. However I have managed to be creative in the green house which is slowly becoming green! Usually my gardening and planting of seeds ends up as a scale model of a desert or lunar landscape but this year things seem to be going right!

Not sure whether I will get some more done on the Room of Gloom tomorrow (Sunday) and on Monday I have to go and collect something model related but more on that once collection has been made!