Decalation

A few decals

Despite all my grumbling I still used a few decals with this complex. The tow trucks got a String "U.S. ARMY M533" to their extreme ends, their doors and roofs got five-pointed stars. To the sides of the cannon's carriage I used similar String-based decals but the left one I cut into two because I just couldn't bring myself to fight a long decal over a bunch of molded-on bumps. For a change the decals behaved.

A cautionary tale

Striped bumpers

Let's be very clear about this: I've always liked using the caution stripes in numerous places (ever since I was involved in making Doom pwads), in my opinion they've been most at home in scifi weapons platforms, such as Battle- and OmniMechs. They weren't that prevalent in real world warmachines, which wasn't really surprising, these being large and high-contrast-y decorations practically screaming "BEWARE OF THIS THING HERE!". And all this is why I was a bit surprised to find these stripes in the decal sheet, but I filed that under "test stuff" and as something that wouldn't have been done that way in fighting conditions. In any case I wanted to paint them instead of getting frustrated and sweary with the spaghettifying decals.

First I masked the immediate neighbourhood of the bumpers and started painting. The bottom layer was a dark grey (VMA 71268 German Grey), over which I then applied an almost full coverage of plain flat black (VMA 71057). Somehow I expected that this'd give the dark shapes a bit more realistic look than pure black.

Intermediate result

After giving the paint the traditional 24 hours of drying time before smashing masking tape on the fresh surfaces I started fooling with the tape. I settled with about 2,5mm strips and made some slashes and some backslashes per bumper. As my yellow I used a Medium Yellow (VMA 71002). The uneven painting was the result of a partially too thick paint that I hadn't been able to stir up enough. In this case the result looked kind of realistic to me, at least much better than a decal!

More truck painting

Olivification, part 3

I painted the trucks excitedly, before the last layer of the replenished olive drab, I used a couple of other greens (USAF Olive Drab; one of the German Panzer greens) to cover a couple of underpainted sections. These weren't exactly what I wanted, so I toned those down with the instrucion-declared colour. The little    differences weren't something that I even wanted to undo, because I felt that even a tiny bit of life in these mostly monocoloured things was more than a good thing.

While airbrushing I also started working on the wheels (VMA 71315 Tyre Black). A number of the wheel hubs I masked off, some I didn't. I guess I had some kind of a thought process behind this, I just couldn't remember it while writing this.

I also blasted a bit of some desert-ish, light brown to the lower halves of the cannon and the vehicles. I didn't concentrate on that work much at this point, the plan here was just to test out the colour in preparation for the actual weathering session(s).

 

Olivifying the vehicles

The most boring paintjob ever?

As I've complained a few times, this flat olive green scheme wasn't the most exciting thing to paint. Even though I wasn't going to follow the instructions to the last detail, I didn't feel like doing a random US Army camo scheme from the sixties, either.

Then again, a three-tone NATO pattern wouldn't have been too far off, unless my memory failed again. Maybe the safest option was to keep it in boring monocolour, but tone down the designer's bright, large and clean steel / aluminium surfaces.

Green

I started by painting the wheel hubs first. The first in line were the tow truck front wheels and the spare wheel hub that were still unattached. What I didn't take pics of were the cabin roofs that I painted separately from the outside and the inside.

The bottoms of the vehicles were pretty simple to paint, the strange angles and of course the rear wheels were blocking the paintflow from certain angles, so I had to paint this way and that way sometimes. My goal was to get some kind of variety inside the flatness somehow. I decided not to strive for perfection on this first painting run, but to instead fix up any issues later on. Right now I wanted a good enough general coverage.

Top sides

After letting the previous paintjobs to air-dry overnight, I switched to the side where the sun was supposed to shine occasionally. Earlier I had already painted small parts of the front vehicle, so wouldn't have to fight those right now.

While working on the more visible parts of the vehicles I was starting to run low on paint, so I concentrated even more on the general coverage than I had planned to, with the cost of the opacity. With its more broken forms the first vehicle showed the results of this choice more clearly than the second one, which ended up looking somewhat better.

This last photo showed where my painting process ended when I ran out of paint. I had to take an intedetermined break because I didn't go by the office during the corona season that often (Hobby Point, my royal provider, was located pretty near), and I wasn't in such a rush that I had felt the need to order paints to be delivered home, either. Ordering almost always had the funny habit of leading to the infamous "oh, I need those too" effect...

You, esteemed reader, have hopefully not noticed a thing, thanks to my post buffer.

Builds done, minimen in their activities

A dude test

Now that I had the construction phase wrapped up, I set up the scaled-down dudes on and around the built pieces to show what kind of monstrous vehicles we were talking about here. I guessed that the pics had shown that especially the cannon was enormous, but I felt that the humans brought an essential amount of real-life scale to drive the point home.

Especially the nuclear shells were of a noticeable size.

Tow truck 2: same same

Building the second vehicle

The second vehicle I expected to be almost completely the same as the first one, so I calculated that I was going to be clearly quicker assembling it. Funnily the reality this was even quicker than I had thought, as I almost finished it in one sitting. My largest victories in building speed came from me having once gone through the hunting of pieces, so I knew what was needed; and of course from that fact that there were a truckful less pieces to iterate.

Power transfer

I obediently followed the instructions. This was again started from the single-wheeled end, I glued on the storage box and the fuel tank to flank the torque converter.

Cockpit

On the inside this truck's cockpit was 1:1 copy of the other one, so it was a very quick build. Only the outside had some little differences, for example the driving light set had been bolted shut with steel plates, or that's how it looked like. The complete glasslessness still bothered me.

Deck

Shock and horror! This time the first piece to be glued on the deck wasn't the cockpit but the engine compartment with an exhaust pipe that looked more like something the crew used to brew some moonshine in the night time. The cockpit was installed in front of this box, deck's massive openings had space for the axles running lenght-wise to this vehicle's torque converter. From that the show was the same as in the first vehicle, with the axles and such being installed earlier on.

Last details being installed onto this truck were the wing mirrors, the ladders and the extra details of the bumpers. Somehow I didn't find the left lamp of the cockpit: it wasn't loose in the box and it also wasn't in any of the sprues. Despite going through the obvious and obscure hideouts that piece remained awol.

Dry-fitting

As I have always done, I had to pose the built vehicles next to each other. Of course I forgot one of the wheelsets from the first picture, it'd been too fun otherwise.

I also tried out the forks, cautiously. The long-feeling trucks became even more space-consuming when they were ready to pick up the cannon and run away. I really didn't want to imagine how awful this process had been in real life, getting the cannon ready to transport.

Tow truck 1: the decking

The rest of the vehicle

Behind the cockpit wall I built a box that contained the engine, if nothing else. On its top side a mysterious donut didn't reveal its purpose, not yet at least. I was positively surprised by the grilles being actual grilles, not just bits with a bit of a criss-cross pattern on them, like the cannon's steps earlier.

The rear deck was going to get a winch. The cable reel was empty, which was a bit of a bummer from the detailing viewpoint. Hmh.

I installed the spare wheel lifter onto the deck and put both the winch and the cockpit roof for yet more dry-fitting for another look and feel test.

After that bit of silliness out of the way I glued on the front bumper and the flimsy-feeling wing mirrors. The bumper got a few extra bits and bobs attached. The same way the rear end got a piece that was decorated with hooks and loops for cables.

This round's final dry-fit pic was of a just about built vehicle. The lifting fork was almost the length of half a truck!

Father's day 2020 (Project V/2020)

A TIE Pilot's helmet

The father's day took place again and brought some Lego with it. I had seen a couple of photos of these helmet or bust sets before, but I wasn't sure if I had witnessed one with my own eyes. Not that it told much during this corona season, as I spent even less time in toy shops than before. The helmet was going to be stylish and at this point it was spread out into six bags of pieces.

Constrconstrconstrconstr

Of course I started building the same evening, and in my delusions of grandeur I thought I'd be done in one sitting. The first bagful of pieces resulted in a colourful core of the helmet.

The second bagful gave us the stand and the neck curve for the helmet. Some dedicated builders have been doing these round shapes just for fun, I found it pretty complex work.

While building the subassemblies I didn't guess that these were going to end up as the forehead and the lenses of the mask.

Interestingly the grimacing Stormtrooper-mouth was a bit difficult to keep in check, thanks to the angles and many hinged connections. It behaved decently in the end, even though I managed to drop those off a couple of times later on.

When I was wrapping up the first evening I had reached the end of the left ear/cheek/chin section. This was pretty slow work, but I wasn't rushing, because I wanted to enjoy building in peace. The pilot was missing her chin, while there were a couple of part bags left still.

Evening 2

On Monday evening I sat again to build. Taught by the left side, the right side went much quicker and easier, as these symmetrical builds tend to go. Again the biggest problem was the jaw-complex's final part that had to be installed much deeper (closer to the mouth) than what I imagined from the picture in the instructions. That's why I had gotten the mouthpiece fall off a few times while working on the left jaw.

The most beautiful printed radar dishes ever were to decorate the forehead of the pilot. I could want a few spares of these pieces, just to own a few.

Everybody here knew that the Imperial Navy's gorgeous TIE series ships did not, according to the old canon, contain life support so the pilots had pressure suits. At this point the jaw's air pipes looked a bit more like the insulators one can usually see next to high-voltage power lines.

Finished

After a bit more than two hours of tinkering the bust was finished. These shiny black pieces were impressive-looking, they just left me wondering if I had left too many fingerprints. Just like with the Metal Earth Models, an extra source of concern.

By the Emperor, it was magnificent!