Airbus assembly

Airbus factory

A plane that was made out of a couple of silly pieces was indeed pretty simple to assemble. The plastic felt a bit flimsy to me, though. The cockpit area was built out of a few little pieces and that got sealed into the hull. I then glued the passenger windows in with white glue as it has worked nicely for transparents. When the hull halves were cured I glued the wings in, and added the rudder in place as well.

Both of the engines were built out of four pieces: the disc with the turbine blades, its rear end, and the two halves of the casing. I didn't glue them in place yet, I'd do that when I had the landing gear firmly set.

Getting the landing gear was surprisingly bothersome and I blamed the plastic type for it. Somehow this material just didn't want to cooperate with my glue (mr Surfacer S), and that caused tooth grinding. When the landing gear was in and cured, I then glued the engines in place.

I did not have any weights to hide inside the nose (the instructions told to use ten grams, and I was absolutely unprepared for this sort of nonsense), even the old fishing-related lead balls I had had were gone for decades at this point. Perhaps I could hide a black-paited screw behind the pilot's and copilot's seats if nothing else came up.

 

Apart from the cockpit window the plane was practically built. You could tell from the photos that there were some gaps, and I had to do something about them.

Puttying

I squeezed Vallejo's liquid putty where I decieded it was needed, and then blended the stuff with a damp paintbrush. When the goo was dry, I sanded the excesses away.

Maybe that was it for me, and I could hand it over to be painted? I thought I could recommend the Project Assistant I to start with the cockpit so we could glue the final transparent piece in its place. Their inspiration was fleeting, so it was pretty likely that I wouldn't be sharing the progress on this project quite as reliably as I did with my own builds.

Project VII/26

Another subcontracting project

The Project Assistant I wanted to paint an airplane. The options she had in mind were either a passenger jet or a large German plane, "as long as the German one didn't have any nazi markings". We popped by Tieto-Nikkari on the way from work one day and she chose Revell's Airbus A321-200 and left the 747s in either Lufthansa or Iron Maiden livery for a potential sequel.

Again the plan was that I'd build it and she'd take care of the painting. "Can I use your airbrush?" "I guess it's ok." I was curious to see what this ended up like, the previous models, an ISD and an a-52 felt to me like they were incomplete but I was told they were ready. What kind of a paintjob this one got was to be seen.

 

A day trip for some reference photos

Parola Armour museum

During the summer half of 2023 the Parola tank museum had a special showpiece, a King Tiger that was on loan from the Bovington's museum. I tried to ask a couple of friends in separate cases if any of them were interested in a silly trip but no one had a matching schedule with mine. So I took this day trip all by myself, especially the Project Assistants I nor II, not to mention my partner, were interested in admiring blocks of steel in engine oil -smelling halls.

On an evilly early Saturday morning in August I drove north to Parola and the parking lot was jam-packed already thirty minutes after the opening of the museum. Following that the first hall that was the King Tiger's temporary home was also pretty damn busy. I had dragged our DSLR camera with me, so I took only a few photos with either of my cell phones, because the big one was much better for references?

What happened with my numerous photos was that I moved them on my desktop, but delayed with my actual backups a bit too long and an OS update wiped my data drive along with the OS-dedicated drive. My recovery attempts were futile and I was a bit annoyed with myself and the OS provider. These tank photos were the only ones I hadn't paranoidly copied to many different disks in many places.

Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B

The rare display piece was the Henschel's second prototype hull, Versuchs-Fahrgestell No. V2, with the older turret. The tank itself had few extra pieces on it, such as side skirts, mud flaps, tools, or most of the exhaust pipe pieces either. Seeing a Königstiger with my own foul eyes was awe-inspiring and it was extra amusing as the tank was positioned just about next to a tiny Vickers-Armstrong -made tankette that was pretty much the size of a wheel barrow.

The only photo of mine that remained of the biggest of kitties:

ô_õ

More important than photos was that I did get to ogle at the tank myself, at weird angles and just be generally baffled by the immense size of the tank. Just the drive sprockets were about the size of my torso and most likely somewhat heavier as well. It was impressive, if I had to choose one word. Now I just needed to find myself next to a live Tiger, and a Panther would be a cool bonus.

T-34/76 "Sotka", Ps 231-1

I was taking these T-34 photos for reference at a pretty fortunate time, as I hadn't started with the mine roller tank yet, but I knew I was going to take it up soon after. I was most excited to check the wear and tear on the tracks and what looked worn-out in which place.

StuG III Ausf. G, Ps 531-45

More than the many Soviet tanks in the museum I knew I was going to need (and want) more random, weird details on the German tanks. Looking at the effects of the road wheels and such was always useful, to begin with. Had I gotten very deep in this stuff, I might have tried to recognize the type of the tracks on this one, but I didn't know enough to say a thing.

In case I ever was going to make another tank with a modeled interior, and especially a StuG, it was a good idea to link to Andreas Lärka's collection here: http://www.andreaslarka.net/ps531045/ps531045.html

One of the most useful details here was the jack's wooden block and go me for taking a photo of it with the phone as well. I recognized being completely wrong with these pieces on models and had painted them so very wrong for years. These days I knew better.

57 ITPSV SU 57-2, Ps 461-nn

This turreted Sergei (the Finnish name for ZU-23-2, the twin-barreled 23mm AA cannon) on a tank chassis mostly offered me some more fun details of the life-lived tracks, the tow cable loops for upcoming chipping sessions, and the general forest-provided debris on different parts of the tank.

Panzer IV Ausf. J, Ps 221-nn

Of the J-model Panzer IV I didn't take many quick photos of, as it was such a rusty individual that I didn't see myself copying all that myself. For the upcoming projects I was most interested in its muzzle brake.

Some Soviet tracks

These photos I took only because these tracks showed so nicely how the contact surfaces of the tracks reflected light and how the bare metal showed at different angles. I think I spent a good fifteen, twenty minutes with the proper camera and my phone, most likely looking a bit silly, trying to capture the effect I saw so plainly with my own two eyes.

All in all the photos from my trip could've been much worse, these quick "easier to check from the phone than from the computer" shots saved a bit at least. The drive overwrite happened months ago now and I was still heavily annoyed by it.

A steaming deckful of systemic shocking

Steam Deck 256 GB

This Spring's Steam Sale had the Steam Deck's different versions slightly discounted. I asked my old friend, who had bought a Deck sometime earlier, what he thought of it and how had it worked for him. It was pretty clear at this point that I was going to order one, maybe I was just confirming my decision somehow.

Device

The postal services delivered my order pretty quickly (or I was so busy I didn't even notice the time between ordering and receiving) right in the early April. I was delighted with the transport case that relieved me of the awful "where the hell could this be stored safely?" process.

As a physical device it was a bit larger and heavier than a Nintendo Switch. The photos here didn't show that there were two pairs of formula 1 gearshift -triggers in addition to the normal double R/L corner triggers, just like in Steam Controller (I liked it as a controller, I just haven't played many games that were nicer with SC instead of keyboard+mouse combo).

Testing

During these couple of months I haven't used that much time with the new toy, but I've played a bit. I think I completed episodes 2-4 of Secret Agent HD on the deck while I only completed the first one on the desktop. In Noita aiming the magic wand with the thumb controller was a bit odd but despite that I did get halfway reliably to the Snowy Depths. Or as reliably as with the desktop...

My aforementioned desktop was at least 8 years old at this point, and only recently I had ended up in this situation where it didn't run the newer games that I was actually interested in playing. I guess there were a million things that it wasn't good enough for anymore, hadn't been in years, but none of that had crossed my table. Now I could ogle at the modern games if they behaved well with this sort of a console controller or not. The touchscreen, what little I tinkered with it, worked just nicely. I also hadn't yet taken the time to reboot to the GNU/Linux side of things and start fooling around. No rush.

System Shock remake

The early June email flow woke me up to the fact that the Kickstarter project I just backed in summer 2016, System Shock remake, had its final product released to the wild. Interestingly the project team's original and mildly optimistic release goal was 2017, which has obviously caused some keyboard-smashing rages in the well-known type of internauts. I was just content with the thing being done and that I could try out the game I paid 30 USD for. As anyone reading my nonsense here may have noticed, I hadn't been able to run out of things to do over the years.

I almost forgot that this KS project also included System Shock: Enhanced Edition that I found in my Steam library some years ago and that I hobbled through to compensate for the fact that I didn't get a grasp of the game in 1994, 1995 despite spending my allowance on the SVGA cd-rom version and all. Maybe it was too different from Doom for my liking at that point in life? I couldn't remember such details anymore. Another pretty likely explanation was that the family computer, a 486/SX66/4 (later /8 and even /16) just didn't run the shocker well enough.

No matter, I practically didn't play the original System Shock at all and the Enhanced Edition on the slightly more modern hardware mostly gave me a headache. The places I could somehow remember and recognize and the story was known, but I didn't think that was going to be a problem for my experience. Most likely my old colleague Matti – who I suspected having memorized each of the pixels – might have been even more excited than myself.

 

So far I've been adventuring in the bottommost levels of the Citadel Station over the evenings of a couple of weeks. I've gotten beaten up or otherwise seriously injured often enough to make me limp back to the Medical Suite to cheese the autodoc and the recharging station. Despite my cautious approach I've managed to murder everyone from almost two and half floors now, having proceeded from the Medical level to the Research and Reactor levels. Some of the irradiated corridors I've avoided like the plague because just opening the door has made the hacker gag his guts out and the radiation damage has taken ages to fade away. Maybe I didn't need to be that paranoid, as getting the Isotope from the pretty hot room in Research wasn't that hurtful (I went in with full health and ran back to the autodoc straight after, of course).

The poor folks turned into cyborgs have been awful and they've lost heads and/or limbs in fights, just like in the good old Soldier of Fortune. Whenever I have managed to take it easy, the normal and few elite cyborgs have been pretty chatty so they've rarely been able to take me by surprise.

A few of the commenters I've seen have said that "this is how it looked in your memories" which wasn't quite correct as my memories came pretty freshly from SS:EE instead of polished by almost 30 years. It was very descriptive, I just found places much more recognizeable now, it was easier to get lost in the original.

Another work queue update

A surprise souvenir

To protect the innocent I've left out some details from this description 😅

A few weeks ago a colleague of mine encountered a model that caught their attention, and thought that I'd been pretty excited and talkative about tank models. Confusingly they brought a model kit and a matching set of paints as a souvenir.

I've always found the various mine-clearing addons on tanks pretty unusual-looking, so I was pretty curious to see how this one would turn out. Funny thing: I noticed that I had started thinking of how to paint and weather the mine rollers the best way, while looking at the box art.

First I needed to get the Jagdpanzer IV finished first, then do something quick for variety, before taking on this Soviet tank. I was told that these Zvezda paints were also water-soluble, so I could airbrush them on the model.

Miniproject III/20

A bicycle

I'd been pondering over the Spring, if it made any sense to buy the season ticket to the HSL city bikes this summer, as the need and especially my ability to use them were going to be many months worth of partial work commuting fewer. As a quick recap, last April-October I drove the city bikes to the nearest metro station and back, whenever there were any bikes available. Hadn't the nearest bike station to my home been always completely empty between eight in the morning and eight in the evening, I could've used those for random shopping trips and whatnot. But there rarely were bikes in any of the nearest six stations.

As a total Sunday cyclist and as someone who jumped on a bike for the first time in about fifteen years last April I didn't really need any kind of a Sci-Fi thing or any other high-end junk. I ordered a normal bike, which were nowadays called city bikes.

This sizeable box got dropped behind the door on a Wednesday afternoon and stood waiting at the entrance until Sunday mid-morning, when I finally had time to even think about the damn thing. Luckily the weather had sucked and I was, as said before, very busy with everything else, so this didn't get to bug me.

Before starting anything I leafed through the pdf manual so I'd have a clue what tools I should prepare to assemble my newest acquisition. Obviously this was no Ikea shelf, so there was no handy list of tools, but I boldly assumed that I'd need allen keys, wrenches and an assortment of screwdriver bits.

Working

Judging by the look of it and using some (hopefully) common sense it seemed that tools were not going to become an issue, which had been maybe my most noticeable worry. Assembling this was very straightforward and I could not really stretch that out to cover even a paragraph: attach the front wheel; attach the steering bar; attach the pedals and then drop in the seat; tighten up and call it a day.

A completed vehicle

This took about an hour of time. The only headscratcher was the filling of the tires, as I now learned that there were at least different valve types and this, obviously, wasn't the thing I considered normal. Luckily I had bought a multifunctional pump a few years ago that had outputs for at least two of these valve types, including this one they also used in car wheels (Schrader). Thanks to this I avoided walking my bike to the nearest fuel station to get started.

My brand new bicycle (or myself) wasn't up to the latest legistlation, as either of us needed front and rear lights if driving in anything but the bright daylight. While waiting for the Autumn I would have to invest to some sort of lights.

Hm, so what next?

Queue status, Q1/'20

Right. It was, according to the calendar, the first day of 2020, the workbench was empty, the 'mumblings TODO pile was a mess and the maker on vacation somewhere else. Last year's project saldo was an appalling two finished models from start to finish and some other badly documented themes.

I was thinking very hard what I wanted to do next, when I got back to the table. My two last models had been fliers, so a ground-based model would be good for my mind. Also the stencils I bought a bit over three years ago were still screaming for their first utilization. The stash had at least three Panzers, especially the Königstiger w/ interior was really, really interesting.

Of course there was the Atomic Annie with her movers, the sheer amusement factor of it was really cool. My main issue was that the Revell's matchbox-sized Tiger with infantry -kit was the only one that didn't look like a long project. Right now I felt like something quick and with a potentially funny, even playful paintjob.