If you see my P-38 Lightning build log, you will see I too am a aviation freak...
Avro Anson Mk.1 - Plastic by Airfix in 1/48 Scale - Build by Smithy
You are doing a great job! The Eduard kits are very nice and include the PE parts for belts, instrument panel, etc., but they sell them separate if you want to dress up a normal kit. I assume you probably already know thisThis morning's work has been a plodding session tidying up some seams. Although the fit of the kit is very good I have still managed some minot misalignments, maybe 0.1mm or less but they would still be visible and there's no denying that a visible seam, especially facing upwards and catching the light completely ruins the appearance of a model. What's the point of drilling out gun barrels and weathering the paintwork when you can't hide the fact that it's plastic, badly glued together.
I find that it takes just as long to clean up the seams on a well engineered kit as on a limited-run job that fits like a cheap suit ("It fits where it touches, Sir.") This is because filling a 2.0mm gap is quick and easy, it's sorting out the last 0.00001mm that takes the time.
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This is underneath so slightly lower priority, but it's going to be sprayed silver dope which tends to show up the surface irregularities a lot. It's also got a nice fabric-over-stringer texture that I wanted to keep if possible. This is the scraper stage. I use scalpels with the cutting edges peened over like a cabinet scraper by drawing them over the back of another blade. You only need the tiniest hook for removing very thin shavings. Use the lightest pressure too and a blade with an appropriate curve.
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Switching to sandpaper I used a shaped rubber eraser as a sanding block. That's 600 grit for stock removal then 1200 for smoothing and then nylon tights/pantyhose for polishing.
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Where I managed to make some melted plastic extrude from the join there's no need for filler but I messed up here through lack of practice.
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Superglue is a fast and effective filler for small divots like these. You have to be careful sanding it back because it's harder than the surrounding plastic making a solid sanding pad of some sort essential if you want to avoid an ocean wave effect.
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I lost a lot of surface detail, notably three lines of rivets, so I put them back in with this tool from Trumpeter.
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My rivets are finer than the kit ones but I don't think it will be too obvious under primer and paint.
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Drat! More divots on the spine.
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And after the treatment. I've lost some of the stringer detail but I'll accept that, grudgingly, in order to keep up momentum.
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With the seams attended to, I popped inside and fitted a set of aftermarket lap straps. I believe that only the pilot was strapped in; the other two just held on tight!
I'm conflicted about aftermarket goodies. Sometimes I rail against them as de-skilling the hobby and providing an easy fix for the wealthy and other times I think that they can make a huge difference, as here, for little money and less time. Perhaps I only hate the stuff I can't afford, which is a deplorable attitude to take and I should be ashamed of myself.
[Oh these big pictures - I see so much that I could have improved. That rudder bar arrangement with all the clips and bearings might have been magnificent with some ally tape and careful painting.]
You are doing a great job! The Eduard kits are very nice and include the PE parts for belts, instrument panel, etc., but they sell them separate if you want to dress up a normal kit. I assume you probably already know this
I know this but many of our readers don't so thanks for filling in the gaps in my log. I could have mentioned where the belts came from myself but omitted to.
You are right, of course, those seatbelts are the pre-printed, photo-etched ones from Eduard, part of a cockpit enhancement kit for a Hawker Tempest Mk.V and so a few years later than the Anson but 'close enough for government work' as we used to say in the RAF. And don't they busy-up the cockpit very nicely?
Eduard used to sell packets of generic seatbelts by service and era, RAF, USAF etc. They possibly still do. I thought they were good value if you do a lot of this stuff and recommend them wholeheartedly.
If you see my P-38 Lightning build log, you will see I too am a aviation freak...
That's the greatest aviation understatement since Lindberg described his transatlantic flight as a 'hop'.
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I'm sliding down that slippery slope again. Today I ordered a monograph on the Anson. So much for carefree out-of-the-box, research-averse modelling. I imagine I'll soon be superdetailing, converting, collecting more and more plastic. And only a few months back I thought I was 'cured' of this hobby.
One more time around Piccadilly Circus......
Once more unto the breach dear friends, or fill up the wall with our English kits!
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It's an addicting hobby, mixed with frustration and satisfaction.I'm sliding down that slippery slope again. Today I ordered a monograph on the Anson. So much for carefree out-of-the-box, research-averse modelling. I imagine I'll soon be superdetailing, converting, collecting more and more plastic. And only a few months back I thought I was 'cured' of this hobby.
One more time around Piccadilly Circus......
Indeed. The new Airfix Lysander is getting a lot of good press and their recent Bulldog tempts me too. English designed kits of unusual English subject matter at reasonable prices? What on Earth is happening?
It's an addicting hobby, mixed with frustration and satisfaction.
Very true. In the last three or four years frustration tipped the scales for me far too often. I think I was hamstrung by a combination of competitiveness and perfectionism which drained all the pleasure from the hobby.
My intended remedies are to only play with (not 'work on') my kits when I really want to; to only write here when I'm in the mood and to avoid spending time looking at other people's work with envy; to accept that I'll never be one of The Immortals of Modelling, and that simply being a bloke playing with his toys is enough. Finally, I plan to vary the pace and the genres, and even the hobbies, so as to avoid the bleakness of spending weeks of unrelieved boredom on something as repetitive as planking - I'll switch to something else whenever the long projects start to grind me down.
These are the good intentions with which I'm paving my road, perhaps it will lead me to some enjoyment of this thing of ours.
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Speaking of obscure kits…I found these for my WW2 collection…
That’s four of twelve I still have waiting for me to have the time! But I’m in no hurry.
That’s four of twelve I still have waiting for me to have the time! But I’m in no hurry.
I bounce around myself, in the middle of about three projects right now! A ship, airplane and car.
If I get bored with one, I switch to another.
Speaking of obscure kits…I found these for my WW2 collection…
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That’s four of twelve I still have waiting for me to have the time! But I’m in no hurry.
My word was ‘unusual’.
The P-36 looks familiar from ancient days but the rest are certainly obscure. I’m no fan of limited run or old kits so you haven’t aroused any envy for that lot.
Another side of Airfix that I do not like is their policy of squeezing yet another pressing from the moulds they were using in the sixties. They call them Classics. I call them old crap disguised in new boxes and sold under the cover of the good new stuff. Our generation know this and enjoy the nostalgia aspect but I suspect thousands of kids are put off the hobby by the crudeness and difficulty of the battered relics.
I bounce around myself, in the middle of about three projects right now! A ship, airplane and car.
If I get bored with one, I switch to another.
In progress right now I have an aircraft and a boat model, a historical investigation into 1940, considerable other reading for pleasure, a puppy dog to care for, guitar lessons, drawing, creative cookery. I think that’s it. Enough to push tedious things like redecorating the hallway right over the horizon of my life expectancy*.
*And I’m only 67!
Since already have 30 ww2 aircraft in my collection, I’m down to obscure choices to add!My word was ‘unusual’.
The P-36 looks familiar from ancient days but the rest are certainly obscure. I’m no fan of limited run or old kits so you haven’t aroused any envy for that lot.
Another side of Airfix that I do not like is their policy of squeezing yet another pressing from the moulds they were using in the sixties. They call them Classics. I call them old crap disguised in new boxes and sold under the cover of the good new stuff. Our generation know this and enjoy the nostalgia aspect but I suspect thousands of kids are put off the hobby by the crudeness and difficulty of the battered relics.
Well I do art as well, portraits and paintings, and I play guitar, I’m building a grandfather clock too , and I have too many other interests as well. I am not retired yet, still working 50 hrs a week and helping raise my granddaughter. So I spend many late nights working on models, because it’s the only time I have to do them. If I get carried away, I have sleep deprivation. But I figure I will sleep when I die!In progress right now I have an aircraft and a boat model, a historical investigation into 1940, considerable other reading for pleasure, a puppy dog to care for, guitar lessons, drawing, creative cookery. I think that’s it. Enough to push tedious things like redecorating the hallway right over the horizon of my life expectancy*.
*And I’m only 67!
Well I do art as well, portraits and paintings, and I play guitar, I’m building a grandfather clock too , and I have too many other interests as well. I am not retired yet, still working 50 hrs a week and helping raise my granddaughter. So I spend many late nights working on models, because it’s the only time I have to do them. If I get carried away, I have sleep deprivation. But I figure I will sleep when I die!
ing is one of my hobbies. Now that it's frequently broken by old man's maladies I find that my sleep is sprinkled* with amazing dreams. I am often aware that I am dreaming and sometimes I'm able to decide what to do next. Last night's bedtime scan of SoS included a thread about LED lighting on models and then I read a few chapters of World War Z, a zombie/sci-fi novel. In the consequent dream I found myself being irritated by zombies who were in the way while I was working at wiring up some industrial type lighting in an old railway tunnel. Not a nightmare, more of a comedy. You simply can't rely on a zombie to hold a torch for you. Come to think of it, I worked with some similarly useless zombies before I retired.*Sprinkled. Gettit?
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I've been away from the Anson for three days. I've been avoiding it because the next obvious step was to glue the cabin roof on which will make any further work inside more or less impossible. I have picked up the pieces several times and adjusted the fit while asking myself if there was anything that needed doing before it was too late. There were two machine guns to be fitted to the inside of the fuselage frames but all the rest was done.
Then I spotted that there was one other important thing to attend to. When I sprayed the cockpit green, Tamiya paint on the inside of the fuselage I missed the windowsills on both sides. The windows are beautifully thin and the sills will be very visible so I needed a smooth even coating. But brush-painting Tamiya? Ew! The last time I tried that was about 25 years ago when I switched from enamels for the sake of my health, and the dogs too. I failed utterly.
Tamiya is a kind of acrylic lacquer which cannot be thinned with water alone; water turns it into porridge. Nor can it be brushed on without thinning like the enamels I was used to; it dried so fast that it stuck to the brush and glued it to the model. I didn't persist but decided that I'd only use Tamiya through the airbrush, where it's brilliant. It's super thin, well pigmented, can be applied direct to plastic and dries as hard as Chuck Norris. I'd do all my brush painting with the latex based Vallejo paint range instead.
Vallejo paint is water thinned, cheap, available everywhere, comes in a huge range of colours including some astonishingly vibrant hues and brushes almost as well as Humbrol enamels used to. It's even perfumed to smell nice so your mum/wife will let you use it in the house. It does require two coats most of the time and crucially for me it won't work on unprimed plastic.
The Anson windowsills weren't primed and brushing on a couple of coats of primer and then two layers of the somewhat thick Vallejo paint would have looked a mess and interfered with the fit of the windows, something I was a bit worried about because these windows are as big as the Crystal Palace and if they go awry, the model's going to look very sad indeed.
So it had to be Tamiya. I did some research at the University of YouTube and discovered that some people claim to brush the stuff without difficulty. I experimented and by golly, they are right. I thinned with 99% isopropyl alcohol about 50/50 and look what happened.
That finish is indistinguishable from the sprayed green paint behind it! It's a single thin coat, straight onto plastic, dried (if not cured) in a minute or two. Whoop de doop!
Now I know that it's possible, I intend to experiment with the various thinners that I use with Tamiya in the airbrush and find what work best for me on plastic, on primed surfaces and also on wood, for the boats. Fancy me wasting a quarter of a century being convinced that this paint was unbrushable!
Very pleased with myself (and Tamiya) I slammed the lid on the Anson.
I slammed it very carefully actually as there aren't many attachment points and the roof had a tendency to lift off the framing at the blue arrow. I didn't dare use mechanical clamps for fear of the delicate framing collapsing so this was one of those times when the good old hand-clamp had to manage. Isn't it strange how when one hand is exclusively dedicated to holding a model together your nose starts to run, you need the toilet, the postman requires a signature, you knock your coffee over a deskful of decals...
Eventually, I was able to delegate the holding to thin elastic bands while the glue fully sets - I think overnight, just to be sure. The blue arrows indicate a tiny misalignment and a tiny gap. Half my fault and half Airfix's because the roof was slightly warped but I failed to correct it completely. Oh well, it will clean up ok.
I sat back and congratulated myself.
And then remembered those machine guns.
Then I spotted that there was one other important thing to attend to. When I sprayed the cockpit green, Tamiya paint on the inside of the fuselage I missed the windowsills on both sides. The windows are beautifully thin and the sills will be very visible so I needed a smooth even coating. But brush-painting Tamiya? Ew! The last time I tried that was about 25 years ago when I switched from enamels for the sake of my health, and the dogs too. I failed utterly.
Tamiya is a kind of acrylic lacquer which cannot be thinned with water alone; water turns it into porridge. Nor can it be brushed on without thinning like the enamels I was used to; it dried so fast that it stuck to the brush and glued it to the model. I didn't persist but decided that I'd only use Tamiya through the airbrush, where it's brilliant. It's super thin, well pigmented, can be applied direct to plastic and dries as hard as Chuck Norris. I'd do all my brush painting with the latex based Vallejo paint range instead.
Vallejo paint is water thinned, cheap, available everywhere, comes in a huge range of colours including some astonishingly vibrant hues and brushes almost as well as Humbrol enamels used to. It's even perfumed to smell nice so your mum/wife will let you use it in the house. It does require two coats most of the time and crucially for me it won't work on unprimed plastic.
The Anson windowsills weren't primed and brushing on a couple of coats of primer and then two layers of the somewhat thick Vallejo paint would have looked a mess and interfered with the fit of the windows, something I was a bit worried about because these windows are as big as the Crystal Palace and if they go awry, the model's going to look very sad indeed.
So it had to be Tamiya. I did some research at the University of YouTube and discovered that some people claim to brush the stuff without difficulty. I experimented and by golly, they are right. I thinned with 99% isopropyl alcohol about 50/50 and look what happened.
That finish is indistinguishable from the sprayed green paint behind it! It's a single thin coat, straight onto plastic, dried (if not cured) in a minute or two. Whoop de doop!
Now I know that it's possible, I intend to experiment with the various thinners that I use with Tamiya in the airbrush and find what work best for me on plastic, on primed surfaces and also on wood, for the boats. Fancy me wasting a quarter of a century being convinced that this paint was unbrushable!
Very pleased with myself (and Tamiya) I slammed the lid on the Anson.
I slammed it very carefully actually as there aren't many attachment points and the roof had a tendency to lift off the framing at the blue arrow. I didn't dare use mechanical clamps for fear of the delicate framing collapsing so this was one of those times when the good old hand-clamp had to manage. Isn't it strange how when one hand is exclusively dedicated to holding a model together your nose starts to run, you need the toilet, the postman requires a signature, you knock your coffee over a deskful of decals...
Eventually, I was able to delegate the holding to thin elastic bands while the glue fully sets - I think overnight, just to be sure. The blue arrows indicate a tiny misalignment and a tiny gap. Half my fault and half Airfix's because the roof was slightly warped but I failed to correct it completely. Oh well, it will clean up ok.
I sat back and congratulated myself.
And then remembered those machine guns.
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My Anson reference arrived today. I wasn't expecting much, judging the book by its rather uninspired cover but it's actually fabulous. There are around 500 photographs in there and all copiously captioned. Each photo is interesting with odd little details that could have been incorporated in the model if I had read the reference before I built it. Oh well, never mind. There are a couple of problems of course; I could easily lose myself in the reading and forget to finish the model and there's the small matter of spending all my money on the pile of equally interesting books behind the one I actually wanted. Such is on-line shopping, late at night...
The philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 – 1536) is quoted as saying, "When I have money, I buy books. If there is any money left over, I buy food." Good man Emo, good man!
p.s. See that book called Enough on my bookshelf? It doesn't apply to books.
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We all need that sort of therapy from time to time lest working with our hands and mind and building models becomes drudgery.
Airfix has come a long way in recent years. There new tool kits are very good and quickly approaching the quality of other modern kits. They are also re-issuing many of their older kits as "Vintage Classics" which are just their old kits in new wrappings. Their Hampden is one such example but then there is not much choice when it comes to some of these less popular subjects.
Your Anson is progressing nicely. Careful now, you are starting to second guess your build and wanting to slip over to the dark side and start adding more and more details trying to make it more "perfect".
cheers, Graham
My goodness Graham, you're right! Thanks for the timely warning.
Here's a thought - how about making it more 'interesting' instead of more perfect. A.bit of repaired battle damage perhaps, or the mud and dust that arises from operations from grass airfields?