Jagdpanzering 6

Sixth session

Propelled by the good feeling from the earlier test I kept poking the armour plate joints. I still left these without the glue-softening, as I thought I'd first treat them all mechanically first and play with the chemicals in the end.

With the previous session's bits well cured I glued the roof plate into the casemate itself. It fit in very nicely.

Next up was the front armour plate of the casemate. No problems there, either, which was a bit unexpected. Some engineering tools needed new holes drilled in, their places were pretty nicely marked onto the other side.

Between all the other little things I finished up by gluing the prybar-like thing and the fire extinguisher onto the right front fender.

Trying out something very new to me

So this is what happened

For many years now I've been thinking, not very seriously, for something that had just gotten stronger in the last months. For example, Adam Savage's tested.com channel in Youtube has occasionally had videos where he has done weathering with oil paints (among other products). At some point last summer I joined the #miniature-painting channel in the company Slack, where some colleagues have been showing off some oil paint weathering/blending stuff on their WH40K items. Other skillful modelers with their videos haven't been too harmful (or helpful, depending on your point of view) with this theme.

I noticed that I had been talking out loud about this, caught myself looking at the oil paint tubes at a local bookstore half-seriously, or checking for people's comments in a Finnish modeling site about different brands, and finally I found myself ddg'ing for some local stores (physical and online) and their Abteilung 502 offering. I really, really would've loved to go to a store near my office, or ordered something from a local-ish store. But. But the useful-looking colour sets were either out of stock, or had an offensively long waiting time, or didn't exist in their catalogues at all. So I had to look further away. Funnily enough the offering of (the German) Amazon was quite limited, they of course listed a huge variety even if they had none to actually sell.

Cojones, I thought, and ordered them from the makers themselves, AK Interactive located in Northern Spain. My shopping cart ended up containing some Odourless Thinner (ABT111), a Mapping Technique Lights and Shadows set (ABT303, containing ABT002 Sepia; ABT035 Buff; ABT050 Olive Green; ABT092 Ocher; ABT155 Light Sand; ABT170 Light Grey), a Vehicle Weathering and Effects set (ABT302, containing ABT001 Snow White; ABT080 Brown Wash; ABT093 Earth; ABT125 Light Mud; ABT130 Dark Mud; ABT160 Engine Grease), and two rust colours (). To go with them I also ordered three new synthetic paintbrushes, I also wanted a metallic palette but those they didn't want to sell at that point.

The palette I found from Hobby Point's web catalogue, though they didn't have any of the smaller ones (with fewer of sub-bowls or whatever those were called) I preferred when I asked, so I left my contact info and set to wait for a later delivery. The same evening I got an sms telling they had found one last larger palette and put it aside for me. That was nice.

I ordered the paints on a Friday two weeks ago. The palette (and an 8B graphite pencil) I fetched yesterday, and in the early evening the courier brought the packet to our door (they knocked at the door while we were eating dinner, I got up and to the door immediately and the dude was already marching away, having gotten about ten meters away). At least he turned around to bring the box instead of sending the traditional "we tried to deliver but you weren't home" message.

So yeah, that's what was going on this time. I wasn't expecting my first attempt (the currently WIP Jagdpanzer IV Ausf f) anything mindblowing but just some first steps in learning something new.

Why did I order this amount of paint just to try a method out? Well, I thought that if I was going to try this I would try it properly and just one single colour wouldn't give me enough data. I could've gone even more overboard with paints but I thought this'd be a good start, and that these paints would last me a good long while.

Contact point problems

Cotent warning: wounded fingers

My atopic-psoriatic fingers haven't quite enjoyed the early winter's temperatures and all the snowwork that has been required. This wasn't anything new, I've suffered cracked fingers over years now, now I just happened to have a couple of fingertips bleeding from both hands at the same time for a while (up to weeks), or otherwise in some inconvenient and uncomfortable state. If just tapping the keyboard for work and fun was sometimes so painful that I had to skip using my index fingers for example, doing some scale modeling wasn't really any more enjoyable.

This has been the main reason for my Jagdpanzer's progress being somewhat slower than what I had intended. Over the years you may have seen glimpses of my digits in better or worse condition, depending on the time of the year. Just to document it for my own later checking I took a photo a couple of days ago when they were pretty bothersome again.

Anyway, as I don't really use blogspot.com to check the 'Mumblings but check the output in an RSS reader, I didn't have a clue how the jump break I added before the photo. If my foul memory served, in the feed those things cut the post content there and add a "do you want to know more?" link. There was only one way to find out and that wasn't going to include reading documentation.

Jagdpanzering 5

Fifth session

Dry-fitting the wheelery

This is how far we got before the first dry-fit photo was shared. And this was just a quick check to see if the wheel and sprocket collection stayed in place and half-aligned to begin with.

Casemate roof

The casemate's roof got a couple of larger hatches. I decided to glue them shut because the insides of the vehicle were just empty. Again, I was also pretty baffled by the previous owner's paint marks.