Launcher's photoetch crates

Enjoying flimsy metallic things

Session I

I had to start pretty much from scratch with the first crate. The main reason was that those crow's feet were poking in random directions so badly that I had to press them straight again with my tweezers. A bit like working on misbehaving Metal Earth Models bits but much worse.

Attempting to learn from my first failure I checked what youtube offered and based on that I started using a plastic ruler and an old exacto blade to make the bends. This was the closest I could get to the recommended minimum toolset of a metallic ruler and a razorblade. Whatever I had already done was pretty much bad, but the next ones at least felt like they got bent nicer.

Despite the minor improvements this narrower bit that was going to be holding the rocket's narrow engine was still pretty much horrible. Getting the pieces aligned was also quite weird. In the end I got some kind of a subassembly done, but certainly didn't look decent.

Sessions II - III

Giving completely up on the instructions I snipped off everything from the PE sprue to get the main crate out. I bent the external edges to as close to 90° as my tools allowed me to, and forcefully inserted the subassembly inside it. Then I added an amount of superglue to somehow seal the setup.

After this was out of the way I thought I'd try a different approach with the second rocket crate. I started by bending the main shape first and glued its edges shut. Again the fourth and last bend ended up the worst and I wasn't quite sure why that happened.

Maybe this was foreseeable: when the crate's gluing was cured, I started gluing the subassembly's rectangular bits straight into the crate itself. I expected this to allow me to get the short and L-bent double-T-shapes easier into place, and to make it look a bit healthier.

My first crate was so awful indeed, that I decided to not bother that building order again. Instead I committed to anything else but that, and the result was going to be what it was going to be. My expectation was that the other three would be somehow better anyway.

 

During my first three oath-filled sessions I didn't get any further than what the photo below showed. The superglue I started with was ok to get PE pieces onto plastic models just failed miserably here or had gone bad already. I bought some gel-like Loctite for the continuation, as it promised to be strong and to tolerate some amount of torque. Of course it was going to flash slower than the runny stuff, and I didn't own any zip kicker, so I bent the bits, applied glue, and left them cure overnight as I did my hobbyings in the late-ish evening.

 

Session IV

During one evening's hobby time I got the little walls somehow installed into the last two crates. I also added the long, lengthwise-installed L-shaped bits into the warhead section of the first crate. Installing those was pure horror, as I guess you had guessed already. In addition to the bits themselves were in an imperfect shape, the superglue used in quantities to hold anything in place.

Session V

One of the evenings I added the long beams into the front end of the second crate. My approach of pressing the bit against my cutting mat with the ruler, then bending the other half to right angles with the ancient exacto blade was unreliable. In case it didn't work on the first go I didn't get it angled, I found no way to fix it later without mangling the part. This time 75% of them succeeded acceptably, which was an improvement. I may have used 10x the amount of superglue actually needed, but like I said before, I was getting frustrated with attachments. These started looking like someone's first attempts at welding or something.

This was the first moment I felt like dry-fitting the other three crates on the launcher rack now, the first crate with a rocket loosely inserted. Maybe this was going to be something semiacceptable, after all.

Session VI

To start my session I just bent the remaining long L-irons, again only a part of them went ok, while others ended up being bad on one end. I glued my attempts one by one into the frames using ridiculous amounts of superglue to ensure some results.

According to the instructions there should've been 32 \_/ -shaped support bits glued to hold the long bits and the crate frame nicely and tightly together. This translated into two of those per L-bit. But the whole setup was in such an unreliable state that no piece was exactly where it was supposed to be, so adding some fixed-size supports into spaces that had, let's say somewhat dynamic spaces instead, made no sense.

Following this same train of thought to misery I didn't go and add the same amount of even smaller tiny bits into the rocket engine end of the crates. They'd all been at wrong angles at best, some would've been outside the crates, or otherwise just crapped up. I decided to save time and especially my nerves by ignoring at least 64 detail pieces from my rocket launcher.

Perhaps I should've tried to 3d print these crates at work or something. I just didn't remember immediately if we had resin or filament printers there, as that would've had an impact on the result.

 

All four crates were quite mishapen but I had some hope for painting to help hiding my numerous uselessness-caused crimes. We'd find out soon enough when the priming (with black) was done.

Blood Spirit Alpha - jewelry

A familiar effect

I had done a number of these rounds lately, so maybe it made no sense to re-explain all of the stuff with my energy weapons this time. The canopies required some thinking as I wasn't entirely sure what would work nicely against yellowish and red. Being a limited-skilled internaut, I checked a colour wheel and felt that a green with a hint of blue would be the best option here.

The most observant readers may have already spotted that the hexes got painted with the black primer. This way the supremely annoying smudges weren't there to capture my eyes and attention while doing something completely different.

Lensing and glazing

Like I said, I wasn't going to bore you with the same explanation of the same operation yet again. Who was going to reread it anyway? Below I have the photos of the jeweled, canopied and jump-jetted elements where they were done, as well as a gloss coated final shot.

Mist Lynx

The primary config of the Mist Lynx had no energy weapons, so I only needed to work on the cockpit viewports on it. This canopy was split into five tiny pieces, so perfection was not achieved today. I still managed to get some kind of an shady effect here, so maybe that was also progress of some sort.

I was most concerned about these small Jump Jets on this bouncer, but they worked out pretty nicely!

Kit Fox

Yeah, this viewportset was narrower than Beggar's Canyon, which made it problematic even with my 5/0 paintbrush and my shading attempts. As the first photo showed, the greens overflowed over and under to the Head and Center Torso. Both colours had to be fixed up afterwards.

The tools of violence managed to confuse me totally this time, as you could see from the photo. I just followed my list and as I was doing energy weapons, paid attention to the ERLLas and SPLas rows and failed to doublecheck their locations (Right Arm for both) , while the Left Arm's barrel was an LB 5-X. Somehow I really failed my perception check and didn't recognize the two sticks in the LA as lasers.

These photos showed that I cleaned up the excess greens. The viewport didn't show much unless you really knew what to look for.

A repainting session was coming up, grumble grumble. As a tiny bonus that came with that was that I could ponder if I wanted to add a yellowish lens on the sensor packet above the center pane. If there was space, that could prove to be a fun detail.

Stormcrow

This prime config was familiar from the previous project: each Arm had a large one paired with a medium, with a third medium beamer on the nose.

Ice Ferret

Just about the most impressive bi ton the Ice Ferret was the Left Arm's ER PPC. The ERSLas housed just above it was somehow a bit funnily shaped, painting it didn't feel smooth. In the end, in the photos, it looked fine, so maybe I was worried for nothing again.

Shadow Cat

These MPLas tubes on the Shadow Cat were really funnily shaped. My only actual issue with them was how fixing any overflow was a bit annoying. To counter that sillines the viewports succeeded rather nicely.

On the rear side the Jump Jet nozzles didn't get as nice an effect as I had managed before. I thought to maybe apply a thin white or whiteish wash into them before declaring the project finished. I even thought of using an oil wash, but that might be a bit overkill for two tiny droplets.

Just using a thinned down white Vallejo paint made them look better:

Gauss rifle's heat distortion effect attempt over dark grey

Roighty. This was the starting point: a pretty nicely worn dark grey barrel for the Gauss Rifle. My hypothesis was that the brown, violet and blue washes were not going to have much of an impact on this canvas. The only way to find out for sure was to try it out, and that'd inform me of what to do with the next Gauss Rifle coming my way - or what not to bother with ever again.

First step. A brown wash (Citadel: Agrax Earthshade) on most of the barrel:

Second step. A violet wash (Citadel: Druchii Violet) on a smaller area:

Third step. A blue wash (Citadel: Drakenhof Nightshade) on the last ~quarter:

 

After flashing it looked like this. No strong and easily noticeable effect.

In most of the approaches I've read of and seen the painter had highlighted the barrel's tip with something brightly metallic, like steel or chrome, to emphasize the clean-burned part. For a moment I considered that, even though I intended to steer clear of metallics in these. Maybe a cold grey would do the trick?

Kit Fox's unexpected plumbing renovation

On one evening I spent a moment to repaint the Kit Fox's weaponry. My first step was to redo all the openings black to cover up my mistake. The LB 5-X was done that easily.

As you may have guessed, painting the incredibly tiny Small Pulse Laser worried me the most, like you could see the tininess of the surface in the photo. That ER Large wasn't in the same scale as in all the other minis lately (that may have been one of the key cues that threw me off-track). Here in the photo below they both looked pretty fine after all.

Hexagonal edges

That last photo revealed what I had done on all of them, the hex edges got painted while waiting on something else. Now I just had to come up with a surface for them.

Heat distortion effect round 2

Curses, I could not leave the Shadow Cat's Gauss Rifle as it was. One of these WFH mornings I took a couple of minutes between my morning meetings to take a new look at the gun. On the first minibreak I painted a narrow band of Drakenhoff blue to the front part of the barrel.

After the next meeing I added a new band towards the base of the gun, using the Drukhii violet. Then, after the third morning meeting I added a band of Agrax brown.

While brewing coffee with my moka pot in the afternoon I took a quick look at it, and it did show some effect. It was pretty subtle, but that wasn't a bad thing. So now, was it worth to spend this effort on an effect that was visible at some angles and light? Of course it was!

Priming and basecoating in Russia

Ideologically correct shade of primer

Fun discovery, I had some white primer in a big bottle left, and I thought I'd use that instead of fooling with the small dropper bottles. This wouldn't run out in the middle of priming.

The goo was, of course, way too old now and airbrushing it didn't work at all. Damn. After a bit of a cleanup and tossing trash out I returned to the lately often-used red primer (VSP 70624 Pure Red). Despite my concerns I didn't run out of it, I even had some left for any patching up later on. Just in the end while spraying the turret from high above the airbrush started spitting out flakes, that I had to clean up later.

Blasting the mine rollers with air and paint was interesting to say the least. They spun like windmills in an Autumn storm. Maybe I should consider gluing them together and the axle with white glue or something before doing this again with green or dark grey.

My painting environment was a bit difficult this time, I did some of my painting in a bothersome shade, against the light. Still, the photos didn't reveal anything outrageous or missed major spots. Or I wasn't looking correctly.

Zvezda paints under test

So here we were, five tiny 16ml bottles of acrylic paints from the neighbouring country. My Russian skills were just about nonexistent, I only recognized the word Stahl for steel on the cap of 08. Google's translator was a bit better:

• 20: black
• 25: wood
• 08: blue-shaded steel (gunmetal?)
• 45: khaki
• 55: camouflage (dark green
  

I know I should've recognized the last repeating word in each cap: akr/i/l/ - acryl, but I wasn't thinking so far because I didn't recognize the final character with its sound, so I just gave up before thinking of thinking. Funny thing, I with a tiny amount of headscratching I would've actually recognized a new word.

The sixth and unmarked bottle contained glue, that I didn't need. Maybe that was a good thing, as it didn't have an applicator.

Before trying it out I shook the camo green heavily and thoroughly, then added a bit to the airbrush and mixed an amount of Vallejo's acrylic thinner. TL;DR: I didn't manage to thin the paint enough, what little came out of my airbrush was too thick and then the paint got way too thin and only came out in strange bursts. I started with the turret's bottom surface, it really didn't work out at all. The colour was surprisingly dark, in my mind the Russian Green was lighter than that, but maybe different manufacturers had their own opinions on the proper shade.

After that debacle I decided to thin it for paintbrushing and then just paint it by hand for the first time on a tank in a long, long while. The tracks and rollers I was still going to airbrush dark grey, no matter what.

As you could see, the thinning operation didn't work like I wanted to, at all. I really started considering shifting to Vallejo's Russian Green over this crap.

Thanks to everyday life being very busy for a long while I didn't get to paint in ages. When I finally found some time, I decided to stop wasting time in unknowns and just use what I knew to work without a fight.

Vallejo Model Air

Unsurprisingly I was a bit displeased with my issues with the modelmaker's own paints. But what could you do when your skills weren't enough to accommodate? Change the solution instead of swearing about it. Using the trial-error method the Zvezda's Green n°55 would've run out way before the painting was done and what would I have done then? Used Vallejo's paints, because those I had.

I blasted the tank with the Russian Green (VMA 71017), and the antenna and the mine rollers with Panzer Dark Grey (VMA 71056). For a bit of a variety in the shading I applied a bit of a lighter green (VMA 71022 Light Green RLM82) from a zenithal direction. The contrast between the paints was small so it didn't show up strongly.

While painting the mine rollers the green on the support structure suffered a bit but that wasn't a problem.

Below: a set of photos after the first new airbrushing session. There was a bit of red showing here and there, somewhere the dark grey had gone over the green. Most of the red wasn't harmful because the green paint may have been chipped off. The rest was heading toward a muddy future, so having a bit of the rust protecting layer showing wasn't a bad thing.

My gap-filling skills were clearly worse than useless, as you could tell from this photo. Like I was pondering earlier, the back end was going to be pretty muddy-gooey, because I had to hide my crimes.

Painting the turret didn't make me feel sad, of course it was a bit clean as it was. I was thinking of trying something new again, as soon as I could carve some (=lots of) time and references for it first.

The tracks got a predicted dark grey basecoat for the rust-mud-graphite weathering. All the wheels got painted green, and if there was some rust-protector red inside, it was fine here as well.

Maybe this was most of it now. Once again this postful of action had eaten a mindnumbing amount of time in the calendar, even though it was less than 45mins of airbrushing in total. Especially painting the tracks showed me that it was good that I had started wearing nitrile gloves while airbrushing, because otherwise my left hand would've been almost completely green-grey and that wasn't good for the skin. Ah, getting older, what a fantastic thing it was!