Panzer IV surface texture

Trying out uncle Night Shift's methods

The occasionally mentioned work Slack's miniature painting channel had a colleague asking about my T-34 turret, if I had made the cast texture using Night Shift's method and they said they'd used it on some concrete floor basing on WH40k bits and that the method was pretty simple.

That encouraged me to try out these two methods for creating the steel texture.

 

Method 1: liquid cement and a stiff brush

Because all new experiments and such should always be tried out in an invisible or easily hidden place, I started from the turret's left front corner. I had an old and mistreated brush that I was going to throw away. It had its chance to serve the last time before being released.

I used the brush to spread the Tamiya's thin cement like paint and left it for a short bit to do its thing to the plastic. Then I stabbed the plastic with the brush pretty randomly. Softened by the glue, the plastic deformed gently. This effect looked pretty neat so I continued around the turret's vertical bits.

From the turret I proceeded to the hull full of tools and did what the space allowed me. In the first photo the surface was just softened by the glue, in the second photo there were some markings caused by the brush-stabbings for comparison. I also processed the Panzerwanne's sides even if they really weren't going to be much seen in the final model.

Excitedly I also did this on the front- and rear armour plates. The vertical or vertical-ish surfaces like the decks I didn't touch.

This final photo showed some brown tint on the rear armour and that was caused by impurities on my ancient paintbrush that started affecting my operation only in the end. I thought that this'd dry mat after drying by the next day, but I was wrong. The glue-affected bits remained glossy which was a bit confuseing, but didn't affect the end result.

Method 2: putty diluted with liquid cement

I truly could've left it here and be happy, but while prototyping I wanted to try the next stage as well. As I didn't currently own any of Tamiya putty that mr. Kovac recommended, but Mr Hobby's Mr White Putty that I have never liked too much as it started kicking quickly and immediately after getting exposed to air. I trusted that diluting it with the thin cement the drying time would be somehow slower.

Using my old jar lid as a mixing palette I used some putty and quickly mixed glue into it. As the putty was so eager to kick, I used more glue than I expected to need, so I could get it into a paintlike consitency to be brush-appliable.

Dried glue-putty effect

Sanded-down glue-putty effect

In the front of the tank I did my best to avoid going over the edges, so the result was more cautious than what a bit more experienced user would've achieved. Had I been more eager and daring, I might have used this on the radio operator's machine gun mount and more on the driver's periscope shield. On the first try I thought it was better to take it easy.

Working on the right side of the tank I was cautious of the antenna system and trusted in the method 1's texturing worked nicely enough on its own.

The left side had lots of junk attached, so I mostly concentrated on the areas where applying the glue-putty goo was safe.

None of these showed that after a bit of a break to let the stuff cure I sanded down all of these freshly textured sufaces with a sanding sponge. As it was now it looked pretty weird, but I had confidence in the power of paint making this make sense.

In the search of configuration A

Starting point

What we had was two ERMLasers in the Left Arm, another one in the forehead, and the Right Arm was practically an ERLLas (*) and not much else. On the Right Torso we also had an SSRM-6 launcher. None of this would stay in place.

According to the official paperwork nothing was going to remain in the Left Arm beyond the arm-hand bits themselves. On the Right Arm I would need to get a couple of different-sized lasers. From the head, just above the cockpit, I needed to chop off a bit more than a millimeter of tubing. On the shoulder side replacing the SSRM launcher and nothing with LRM-15 launchers wouldn't otherwise be a problem of any sort, except that the working area was so tiny that even my pin vise was way too large to get fifteen decently enough spaced holes drilled in, no matter what. Instead, I could cheat and glue on armoured doors, a bit like the ones in Catapults.

At least the Jump Jet count was the same (for the 7 hex leaps) as in Prime, so the danger of making the backside ugly as well was lesssened.

Chop chop

In my quest of making the pose nicer I rotated the Right Arm upward to make my mini look like it was aiming at something instead of just posing around. Then I chopped off the tip of the head laser and filed the resulting mess down a bit. The worst remaining offenders would melt away or at least get toned down with a drop of liquid cement.

When I cut off the RA double lasers, there wasn't that much meat left on the Arm itself, so I thought at least I was supposed to scratch some kind of panel lines there. Thanks to the torque applied by the snippers the arm had gotten quite loose, so I just plucked it off for easier handling.

From the Right Arm I just cruelly cut the Laser's barrel. I didn't start mutilating the arm any more than that, so all the little subcontainers and whatnots remained. Without any of the original details the new arm would've been a sad sight.

For my replacement parts I spent a bit of time in my bits boxes for things that looked potentially useful as laser cannons. The scale was a bit of a challenge, and the pieces I considered minuscule (like a 1:72 Apache's wing pod, or a same-scale Werfer-Granate 21) weren't that small next to the miniature but enormous. In the end I glued a fire extinguisher from a 1:35 Panzer as the ERSLas and used a short piece of a qtip to stand in as the MPLas. How would I get the jeweling painted in these? Badly, most likely.

To attach my LRM launcher doors on I had filed the Grenmongrel's shoulders a bit and cut ridiculously small pieces of 0,5mm styrene sheet into tinier rectangles until they fit decently for gluing. Of the cutoffs I cut even tinier bits to glue as greeblies onto the leading edges of the doors. Similarly I added tiny strips to stand in as hinges. There may be some tweaking in their future, but overall I accepted them.

My original guesses of the missile launcher surface area had been off by millimeters, so I had some excess styrene flakes on the cutting mat. I decided to use them in different shapes to add some three-dimensionality onto the mistreated left forearm.

While gluing these tiny bits Adam Savage's hint was worth its weight in chocolate: they were sillily easy to pick and set in place using the hobby knife's tip alone.

(*) Of course I forgot that the Right Arm also had an ERSlas that I didn't snip off earlier, most likely I was stuck in my previous mindset of UrbanMech's AC/10 non-weapon targeting laser living on top of the bigger weapon. Smarter people must have noticed my brainfart many photos earlier.

The important thing was that I fixed my mistake and now there was a correct amount of death rays and related objects. Did they look anything plausible, acceptable or tolerable? That was a different discussion altogheter and I ignored it to retain my sanity. To help me paint the lenses I used some Vallejo Water Texture (VWE:WT 26235 Still Water) in the custom-made barrels, expecting a concave and smooth plug near the end of each hole.

Impale it!

Wrapping the pylon up

Between these posts my pylon had gotten some filler on it and that had been mostly removed with a numb mind while the Project Assistants were watching cartoons. The usual.

I painted both the pylon and its baseplate flat black. After a reasonable curing time I masked off a margin of a couple of millimeters around the base. My graphical designs have never been critically acclaimed but even I knew that a margin was going to be a good idea for the base.

To be honest I couldn't remember how many years ago I bought some Citadel paints from the OhMyGame store in Myyrmanni before my dentist's appointment. The main items were the washes but I rounded my haul up with a little pot of a 'technical' paint (Citadel / Technical / Agrellan Earth) that I had never encountered before. Over the course of uncounted years I had occasionally remembered that and then immediately forgotten it again when I was doing some sort of weathering. Now it was to be tried for the first time, not on the tracks of a Panzer but the ground at the foot of a fake steel tower.

After the paint had dried a bit it started showing some disgustingly plausible half-dry mud that's been cracking in the summer sun. The shade of it was a bit sad but that's what I had bought and on purpose, even. To make it a bit less depressing I superglued a couple of autumn-era grass tufts.

When the paint had cured I tore the masking tapes off. My eyeballed margins had not been as uniform as my css rules had specified, but it was good enough for my bookshelf. I could've used the technical mud a bit more, but this was fine as well.

A swooshing moment

The moment of the model being finished has always been one of the most fun moments in each project. Of course I've spoiled most of this with my never-ending dry-fit pics over the duration of the project, even in this same post. Maybe these next pics would've been more impressive had they been unprecedented?

Back to the topic at hand, more or less: I've been thinking for a good while that I should buy a light tent. Cleaning up these pics of mine with Gimp, especially with the backgrounds of this apartment has been somewhat tedious, so my itch for buying more toys has just gotten worse. When this post was being written we had been a couple of weeks in the corona isolation, so running for random shoppings hasn't been too high on my priority queue. I also haven't wanted to order one blindly from the net, either. Not yet, at least.

Next to its "peers"

Like in the first post or so I felt like comparing two very different planes that had about fifty years between them. The only reason for putting these into the same photo was that they were both in the same scale and were counted as military planes. Looking at these two flying machines next to each other showed how tiny the Stuka was in comparison.

Ah hey, they both accidentally had white highlights! Funny.

Impale it?

Presentation control

My hasty decision to pull the landing gear of my Flanker in led to a problem with the presentation, especially as lying on its belly the model would put an unfair amount of stress on the flimsy missiles. Some sort of a custom polystyrene construct was the first idea that came to me, with my so-called skills we'd end up with a fittingly brutal-looking solution. The problem with that approach was, in my mind, the missiles, which I didn't want to knock off when setting the plane on.

The second idea I got was to do some sort of a metal rod as a stand, such as I made for the N/AW A-10 or the Imperial Incom T-65 prototype. This was much simpler to implement but it would require a sturdy place on the plane for the attachment. And a way to keep the orientation set so that the model wouldn't just fall off as easily as the poor warthog.

The second option, to recycling

On my plane's underbelly there was maybe one small area where the stand attachment could have gone, but the front-middle missile was inconveniently blocking it. The stability of a plane freely floating on a much-bent thick wire left quite a bit to be desired. I also didn't want to make a massive "holding fork" that I did for the space fighter proto. This made me decide that this was as far as I was going to spend on thinking about this option.

Option one again

I had been spinning a workable form in my head for a bunch of evenings and finally came up with something that I felt was decent. After a few thorough pass-throughs I even found my polystyrene sheets, so I was pretty much ready to start.

Absolutely no amount of Adam Savage's Tested channel's One Day Builds were not going to turn me into an expert. That in mind I set my expectations exceptionally low for myself. This wasn't going to be ornamental. The first word I had used about this was brutal and I thought that it was a plausible prediction.

I - From scratch

Maybe ten years ago I had toyed with the idea of making a Haunebu Gerät and I had even bought some sheets in a couple of thicknesses for it. My original attempt was just as successful as the idea sounded like, all that was left was the remains of a couple of uglily mangled sheets of plastic, while the others were left untouched. I started prototyping with the end of one of the mistreated ones, my idea being that I wouldn't at least start by ruining fresh sheets of material.

To begin with I measured a length of plastic that'd be the part where the plane was going to lie on. After a few slashes of an x-acto knife I had a piece that looked like a weird, italics and serifed symbol 1 from a funny angle. For my stand I'd need two copies of this exact shape.

The copy was done by using the first piece as a stencil and just slicing the lines into another mostly ruined part. Of course they didn't stay perfectly put while I was working on them, nor was my knife usage near exemplary, so instead of a twin I got a sibling of sorts.

These support parts were to be attached together at such a distance where the plane could just be dropped on, engines ending hugging the structure between them. The maximum width was to be almost as wide as the space between the engines, to avoid any shaking around, but not so tight that the paints would get scraped off.

I measured the approximate width first and cut four support pieces to flesh out the pylon. My idea wasn't to make this a solid-walled piece because that would've looked too bulky. These four may not have been enough, but this (the next two photos) was as far as I got in my first session.

The long flat part would've benefited from, thematically, a couple of round-ended rectangles. Acknowledging my status as a total beginner I did not even dream of trying to do anything fancy and decorated. A very bare-bones construct was going to be just good enough for the 'Mumblings.

II - A baseplate and fine-tuning

When my construct's gluings had cured I had to try it out. As a whole it was leaning a bit too much right (from the pilot's viewpoint), which was ok considering the attitude of the plane, but not for the structural stability. I cut a square baseplate for my pylon and glued a small spacer between it and the pylon's bottom to straighten the setup a bit. The craftsmanship was still... ugly.

The plane's position was otherwise ok but I felt it was a bit too level with the horizon, I wanted it to be doing a banking turn. A quick fix was also an ugly one: I sliced off a chunk of the left rear corner of the pylon's top (well described, eh?). In the photo below the adjustment was still in progress.

To add some little details I drilled a pair of holes to the upper and lower ends of the pylon, and carved them a bit wider with the old x-acto knife. This way I could push a narrow polystyrene rod through each to add another kind of "support beam" to my construction.

I didn't take photos of puttying, sanding and filing all these horrors away. Next I had to start thinking if this should be flat black or maybe the sky blue had more merits.

Attitude test

In its new and improved stance the plane looked much, much better. I've always liked the shape of the Flanker and this model really benefited from this dynamic-ish display pose.

Undercarriage IV

The right landing gear

After I had updated my superglue bottle to a fresh one I attacked the second landing gear bay. This time the glue solidified noticeably faster, which wasn't really a surprise. Of course the landing gear
pieces were unequal compared to each other, so my aftermarket pistons were going to be of different sizes. I followed the same routine, so instead of repeating myself for a change I just decided to share the results below.

My shuttle was still not standing straight. Though, being cockpitless it was noticeably rear-heavy, so it wouldn't have stood straight in any case but kept falling on its back.

The landing gear bay doors

After getting those done I stopped to ponder for a good while whether or not I should attach the bay doors or not. Not gluing them on dependent on me greebling their surroundings or doing something else noteworthy. Ultimately the painting of the landing gear bays  weighed more than the outsides of the doors, so I glued them in. At this point I still had time and the space to add some random decorative cables or something else, should the inspiration strike.

At this point I glued the rotating wings solidly in place. I was noticeably less distressed by it while gluing it than what I had excepted. I mean, I was sealing something off against my original and strong decision - and a general approach of mine to keep things adjustable as far as possible.

Bonus feature: the windshield

Something made me look at it again and I realized that the windshield was obscenely dirty. I washed it gently with dishwashing solution and the difference was indeed amazing. Now, should I go and paint its outer frame edges rubbery, after all?