Project II/21

VW Type 1

Following the traditions over the years, Santa added more buildables to my work queue. This time it was a Metal Earth Models' Transformers series Bumblebee, not the golden one but a normal steel grey. I believed that this was maybe the only model where a non-steel colour would've fit perfectly.

Finished: Project I/21

Ministatue

Lord Megatron was a lot of fun to paint. Based on a quick search there's a bunch of these unpainted -series figures, some of them interesting such as Starscream, Optimus Prime, and Soundwave from the second wave. Where'd I put them all? Well, I've thrown old builds away occasionally, away from collecting dust and eating space.

Photos

The usual normal photos taken around the subj.. eh, leader, still in suboptimal backgrounds and lighting conditions. That was something that was to be fixed sooner rather than later.

Silly pics

Of course I had to take some less serious photos with all my three Megatrons. I mean, I had used MP-36 as my model for the painting!

Painting Megatron

Painting by the numbers

The default surface

I started by painting with the basic grey, because most of his body (or frame, him being a rohbut?) was going to be that. This was nicely paintable in one go, because there were enough !grey parts to hold him on while painting around.

The dark greys

Megatron's arms, the Fusion Cannon and most of his legs were to be painted dark grey. I took this stage as my next one, as my process seemed to be "the bottom-most layer first", not totally unexpectedly. With the feet themselves I made a bit of mess, and had to fix them later.

Blackness

Originally, as stated above, I was going to do the black parts with German Grey instead, but the contrast difference between that and the dark grey was so small that after the first parts I redid those with flat black instead. It proved to be the best choice, silly me had thought I knew better. In addition to both gun business ends, Megatron's pants, the scope's lense I also painted his mouth and robotic unibrow. Before these I had done his face with a lighter grey, to give it a proper difference from the rest of the body and the head.

Getting to the details

To complement the greyscale, Megatron had a few colourful spots on his abdomen: some blue, red and yellow bits. His eyes were also red and his upper arms had red bands, not to forget the red button on his Fusion Cannon. For some stupid reason I had some doubts about the upper arm reds in this scale, but as they worked fantastically in MP-36, I knew them to work here too.

Technically he was now done, except for the decal on his chest. I just wasn't ready to call him (or myself) done at this point.

More!

No, that wasn't enough. I wanted to improve the details according to my own madnes. As the first extra step I painted the eye-bit of the Fusion Cannon / scope's rear bit's edge to be more rubbery (VMA Tire Black) and redid the lens part with black. Megatron's gun mode's gun barrel's insides got a black layer and a follow-up with drybrushed Gunmetal.

Final stage

Of course I couldn't leave this just on normal paints, because they looked a bit too flat to me. The greys I washed with the grey wash and the yellow/red/blue bits I coated with the satin varnish to make them stand out a bit differently from the rest of the body. That gloss varnish I only applied to the scope's lens.

A decal

Obviously the more or less undisputed leader of the Decepticons had to have a roundel in the middle of their chest. So that's what I did: I applied one violet decal on Megatron's chest. This time I had no complaints about the decal work, for a change.

Project I/21

Wizkids unpainted

Last summer I got one of these pre-primed statue-like things for my birthday. As it indeed was already primed, I could just pick up a set of paints according to the back of the card and get going. Fun, easy and unproblematic, and not at all as time consuming as a five-turreted Soviet tank or an atomic cannon.

A pre-defined colour set

I thought I'd just choose a set of paints that were as close as possible to the suggested colours. Seven were supposedly enough, from start to finish. In top-down order I chose USAF Dark Grey as my darker grey, USAF Medium Grey as my lighter option, German Grey to use instead of flat black, Gore Red or somesuch, Medium Yellow and USAF Green (I thought maybe the USAF series were kind of matching contrast-wise) to represent red, yellow and green. The most difficult was blue, of which I had few to begin with: one of the Soviet Air Force's Greyish Blue that I had bought for the Su-27 project.

Megatron himself

In addition to Megatron the packet contained a baseplate, stickers and decals. Lord Megatron only absolutely required one Decepticon roundel on his chest, so I thought I had a positive problem of needing to find use cases for the rest of them.

Finished: Project IV/20

M65 280mm Motorized Heavy Gun

I've constantly talked, through the duration of this 145-photo and nobody knew how many hours long project, about the cannon as the M65 and the trucks just as trucks, when M65 was the identifier for the combo. Had I been smarter I'd been more factual and consistent, but here we ended up again. Then again, I've tried to keep the tags of 'Mumblings [since moment t in its lifecycle] from getting to fine-grained, so maybe just using one single project-specific tag was acceptable.

Cannon T161 on carriage T72

The nuke gun, atomic cannon, Atomic Annie, a dear child had many names. Not too many of these were built, just 20, of which #9 fired one 15kt W-9 shell  (diameter: 280mm; lenght: 1380mm; mass: 364kg) in the Upshot-Knothol operation's test Grable. I assumed that anyone reading posts like this already knew these things, and had the video clip playing in their mind's eye already.

In the real world the whole M65 weighed 42,5 tons in addition to my own mass, and had a total lenght of 11 meters and was about three meters wide. Unlimbering it took 12 minutes and getting it ready to run away ate fifteen full minutes. Not that those were to be taken anywhere near a danger zone, as the official range was 32km and the unofficial up to 56km.

I tried to find some more facts from an article I had found months ago, to flesh out this post, where the normal shells were also talked about. I just couldn't re-find it anymore.

M249 & M250

Obviously the trucks had different model number, the front one was a M249 4x4 Heavy Gun-Lifting Front Truck and the rear one was also aptly named: M250 4x4 Heavy Gun-Lifting Rear Truck. Simple enough.

They didn't really look like it, but they both weighed 16-17 tons, while their max speed was allegedly about 72km/h, most likely without the cannon slowing them down to reach those numbers. The full mass of the 26-meter-long M65 reached 78 tons, and that wasn't something you'd get up to those speeds too easily.

Final images

The model was so ridiculously long, that I didn't even attempt to play with some A4s - and I still hadn't invested in a light tent (not sure if this had fit in one of those, either), so these pics were taken on top of the dining table.

My one complaint about the instructions was that it was absolutely unclear how to get the cannon's barrel set up for transport, for all the steps only showed the firing mode. So my cannon was stuck into the firing mode and could not be safely unstuck to get it in the proper transport mode. In case someone was going to point this out for me: I know it's wrong ;)

A rocket for scale

At the very last moment I got the idea of taking a pair of photos of the M65 next to the Lego rocket. This was indeed hilariously long, fully assembled. I just thought that for scale a Lego Saturn V would work much better than a banana.