Advancements!

The main point of this post is "repainting". The whole camo pattern has received a second coating, part of the previous spitting has been covered and some new has occurred. Of course. If I say something to defend myself, this looks better than what I did on my first airbrushed model, the Sturmpanzer IV. I think I've learned something, even if this is my second ever freehanded camo scheme.

The signs of personal development

I'll drop in a couple of pics from the main directions, so you may see the difference to the previous round. The most notable improvement is the rear of the tank that finally has all of the three colours of the scheme on it. Cough.

Tracks are installed and the big kitty's on the move

Yeah, I forgot to mention that I also installed the tracks after the second round of painting. I've finally learned how these floppy tracks are installed without a hitch. You glue all wheels except the drive sprocket (and maybe the first road wheel, if needed) on their places. When the set of wheels has been cured, put the drive sprocket to one end of the looped track and pass the other end of the loop around the already attached idler wheel and road wheels. If the first road wheel was unglued, it's attached now. Finally a bit of glue is applied to the connector of the drive sprocket and stretching the track a bit by pulling the sprocket to the fron, locked to its rightful place.
Ta-da.
Rinse and repeat on the other side whenever you dare.

And now what?

Just for the fun of it, I took a couple of pics with the remaining main pieces just hanging on their final-ish places. It's to show how it might look and if it's a good idea to begin with.

This potentially confusing final pic the point is those filter frames of the engine's air intake vents. I didn't get to cut the adhesive strips to attach the filter mesh, that's why the frames are alone. Originally my idea was to keep them plain green ut they ended up sticking out a bit so I added a couple of grey stipes on them. The result looks a lot better.

Final words

I don't know if there's anything mentionable to paint anymore. Of course the insignia and unit markings are to be painted, but that's small beans. Mess-making - also known as weathering is also to be done, but that's the final step :)

Somehow I don't doubt that these words will come to bite me in the ass - yet again...

The stripes of the Royal Tiger

What does a normal, young male do when he gets out of his workplace on a Friday afternoon in good time and there's nothing special planned for the weekend? I don't know about the rest of them but I rushed home like a madman and started my compressor the first thing after I had got my shoes off. Then I started painting the primed tank with a nice coat of Moss Green. Hey, you've got to use the time you have as well as you can, right?

Confusing contrastlesness

When the tank was finally completely green, including all the random pieces, it was time to start making a mess. Obviously. The shape is to be broken, say the people who know something about these things. So, from my two options I chose the Sand Brown (what a weird name, to me it looks a lot more like Chocolate Brown) because I reasoned that if I start with these brown splotches and areas here and there, it's so easy to paint the borders with the sandy color (the container says just Grey).
Ok. That's what I started doing over a couple of rounds. While the paint was still damp, I was admiring my handiwork. Things were progressing nicely indeed.

But what happened then?

Before this afternoon's stripings I was juggling the pieces around in my hands and wondering, how tiny the contrast is when the paints have dried. Not that was a problem, because the tank wasn't going to be painted like a children's coloring book ("Color the boxes that have number 1 with color a"), but something completely different. If the green, brown and grey were mixed, intersecting and all that, it'd just look more natural.

After the inspection I took out the grey paint and started spraying with a noticeably smaller opening. My severe lack of skill led to the paint pooling a bit in a couple of places. Yes, I know, I was spraying way too close to the model sometimes. The end result isn't even close to the scheme of the Finnish Army, but had it been a German with OKH's standard colors, it'd been right at home.

Ptooie

Maybe I had thinned the paint wrong, set the pressure wrong (too high?) or both, the airbrush still spits a bit. You can tell from the pics. It doesn't look bad at all from a small distance but up close... oh my no. It looks obscene to me.

Would you buy it if I claimed that I was going for a movement effect?

I didn't imagine I'd get it done on the first go, so I was prepared for a fixing round or a few. The next step may be that I add some stripes to the rear of the tank, the rear that I completely forgot after spraying the right mudflap a bit. Maybe. Otherwise I'll go for the green and brown areas that could be fixed where the grey went in a funny pattern or covering too large an area.

I forgot to add stripes to the rear. Oopsis.

 

Let's see how the fixing goes. Does it go nicely or do I just ruin what I have achieved? Maybe I crash like a tank that's driving blindly into a thick forest. But hey, who cares if the tank weighs 70+ tons? Brum brum brummmmmmm 8)

It doesn't actually look bad from this angle...

Finally I got to the painting phase

Groundwork, it's not spectacular

Hah, for a change I begun with a pic of those pieces I've been talking about for a couple of weeks. To clarify this to those who can't read my mind and those who don't find my mind's workings as clear as I do: those pieces on the foreground are the armor parts that I cut down a bit, in the upper right corner you can see the Combat Engineering Equipment Boxes and on the top you find a bunch of those infamous wheels & co. All the unpainted core parts are naturally those places where the connecting bolts go, I haven't forgotten them. To be more exact: I'm not so demented yet that I'd paint even those even if I knew that they'd be completely blocked by the bolts, glued shut and that no one would ever see them. Ever.

Look into the horizon

Ok, so I finally grabbed myself by the neck and started priming the model. The turret and the hull were two obvious main stars in this phase. In addition to them I left the engine intake mesh screen frames (!) out, as well as those molded rope things. Somehow I managed to break one of them so this tank shall get along with only two.
I had decided that these pieces were clearly separate and that they'd be camo-painted separately from the rest of the tank, too. Or that's what my painter sargeant does, silence in the back!

Next to the rest of the junk you can see how the tank was earlier today. Or what you can see of it in this pic, anyway. Of course there's a bunch to be cleaned but most of the gaps in the paint cover is because my workspace is pretty badly lit and that there's no natural light to help me in the evenings. What a surprise at these latitudes in the winter. Anyway, things progress how and when they do, I'm not in a rush or anything :)

Damn, that flash makes the surfaces pretty ugly, they're a lot cooler when viewed with a plain eye and it looks a lot more like Panzergrau. Hmmmm... That doesn't sound bad, either, even though it would be completely historically unrealistic and I'm already doing something else.

But a Panzergrau King Tiger is not a bad or an ugly idea at all...

I spent a few moments last evening fooling around with those tracks, mostly I painted the "teeth" metallic and then drybrushed the wearable parts of the outsides. Perhaps I'll get carried away and muddify and dirtify them at a later point which would mean that I'd need to redo the metallification. I don't mind, if they look good to me, that's what matters.

Behind the watchful eye of the camera

After I had taken these few pictures to show you, I took it to myself to coat it all (or almost) with the Moss Green from the Lifecolor set. I got a big part done, but the rest will have to wait for the daytime during the weekend. After that I can start pondering on what kind of a camo I want to paint on it. And in the end we'll be wondering "what the hell is that and why doesn't it look like anything that I had imagined?"

But that's how it usually goes, it's a learning process and will stay that way until the very end, I imagine. I just hope that you can see some kind of improvement at some point, during these years :P

Advancing slowly

During the last days my project theme has (still) been this set of different wheels and finishing their painitng. Now they have cool steel surfaces, marks of wear and tear and all! At this point I won't touch them for a while, they'll just sit and wait for the hull's painting to be finished.

While I've been doing that I've also mutilated the skirt armor to fit in with the Combat Engineering Toolboxes. Before I get to apply the basecoat, I'll need to fill in the now useless holes (thanks to the CEToolboxes) and to clean up the rest of crap from the sides and top of the hull.

Then I get to paint the hull, turret and a couple of other pieces. Of course the basecoating needs a couple of iterations because the bottom and top parts are to be done in separate runs. Naturally. But that's fun and easy: just put the pieces in the painting box and let go.

The missing painting box

But I threw my old, slightly modified, large Dragon's Ju-88 A/4 painting box away when we moved! If my memory serves, I even thought that I won't need to haul it from one almost-city to another almost-city because I have three models with their boxes just waiting to be utilized. Fnarg.

Of course I haven't got to do that. I don't have a new painting box. So that's what I got to do before I can enjoy the purring of the compressor and the whizzing sound of the airbrush. Maybe tomorrow.

"Why do today anything that you can easily postpone until tomorrow?"

Those damn wheels

I've spent quite a while working on the road wheels (+ those other two pairs) indeed. This makes if even clearer: the next thing I'll work on is going to have less wheels, I'm about to get annoyed by these tiger-like setups. But if I put some real effort on them the result should be a lot better than if I do it as usual. That being, "I'll fill the gaps later"... yeah, right. This time I shall not be a lazy bugger with the most annoying details.

Tinkering

For some reason I was browsing through a pile of reference pics, I just don't have the faintest clue of what I wanted to find anymore. One of them, showing the front hull, reminded me of a cool detail that I had already forgotten. Again. The power cable for the searchlight. So I fixed the light and glued it in place. When the glue had set I dug out my roll of jekkulanka (no clue what it's supposed to be called in english, it's just metal wire used for random engineering things in the army). The stiffness of jekkis caused a bit of swearing because it was always bending the wrong way, but in the end I emerged victorious. Just a little bit of effort gives a neat - and to some, essential - detail.

If things go this way I'll end up trying how the airplane modelers feel when they add the break line cables, dozens of different cables and wiring for the engines and even those wires that go behind the dashboard. Behind the dashboard, inside the hull where no one will ever see anything anyway. But the cables are there, where they're supposed to be. So there!
I guess that's why they do those things. Or because they're insane. I'm not sure yet. Whatever the reason, they do some impressive stuff.

The archived treasures

While I was hunting for my jekkulanka roll I was going through the bits box, just in case I saw something interesting. Surprisingly I came across some 122H63 (a Soviet howitzer, D-30) ammo crates. That model I had built almost a decade ago. Those crates weren't tiny and they could actually fit on the rear-side part. With a bit of fooling around I think I found a nice place for them.

Untouched for almost a decade.

I guess they'd work nicely as the containers for combat engineering equipment, such as shovels, crowbars and whatnot. In them all the random stuff would be also nicely out of way and could stay a bit cleaner than on the deck. If my faded memories serve me well, keeping stuff clean was the #1 priority, neat order being the #2.
At least I'd believe that :P

Slaving on the hull

After the turret was assembled, the lower hull with its endless amount of wheels followed. I mean, there's an obscene number of them, we'll see later if I manage to take it easy or if I repeat some of my earlier Tiger-series related mistakes. The first task is to attach those "torsion bar suspension" pieces (no, I don't know much if anything about different suspension systems).

When you skip the slow tasks...

I spent one afternoon cleaning up those road wheels of flash and other crap. While working on them I decided that nothing else should be done to them at this point, because I couldn't attach them anywhere anyway. That's because - as everyone knows - if you attach the road wheels and the tracks before the lower hull is painted, there'll be awful gaps here and there. And I didn't have the paints I ordered so I couldn't even paint the wheels at this point.

That's how I do these things, anyway. There's less swearing and fewer "how the hell do I fix that now?" moments. So I skipped a couple of parts in the instructions and kept working on the hull parts. It's all pretty simple and straightforward.

My odd customizing idea

When I got to the tools I thought: what if all that junk went to a couple of engineering boxes (that's a fancy army word for a toolbox) instead of getting rusty and accumulating shit on the outside. There's a couple of neat places for toolboxes, such as next to the exhaust pipes. Maybe something could fit on the sides, depending on how it'd look.

It's a good idea to start with the part that says "boom"

The instructions started with the turret's assembly, so that's where I started as well. After these first steps I have to keep a close eye so I don't ruin my painting by blocking some places before I even get to take the airbrush out. A Wehrmacht officer was included in the kit but as he looked so german and not modifiable to represent a finn, I left him for a future model. The model itself is going to be a "pinned down" version with all its hatches closed.

Tank made famous by the Commando comics

When I was younger I read a lot of Commando (for action and adventure) comics because my father had a good collection of them at my grandparents. They were mostly from the seventies and eighties. I still remember several stories really well (I read all them many times) and one of my favourites was about a King Tiger tank. I found the cover of a finnish version, but not the english one.

Didn't find the english version of this cover, sorry

Damnit, where can I find these things? They're lots of fun to read and you even learn a couple of german words, too! Himmel!

The turret itself
So, because I decided to build the model with closed hatches the two first steps were pretty simple. Glue the hatches shut and then add the handles. For a while I pondered if I should add transparent plastic pieces in the viewports but I quickly decided to skip this idea. It was an easy decision because they'd been badly on the way while painting - or they'd require a very delicate masking. Those masks would've most likely either blocked some areas that needed to be painted or the masking tape would've torn some paint off... So: no. I don't have that bad case of AMS so far.
So far.

For some reason the rear hatch of the tower wasn't even buildable open, which confused me a bit. At least the King Tiger I built earlier (in 2002 if my memory serves me correctly) was built so that each hatch could be opened. Not that it matters because I wasn't going to do that, I was just wondering.

One of the main pieces to be built was obviously the 88 KwK. The barrel's halves joined each other pretty nicely and there wasn't much to be filed away. There was no coaxial mg anywhere, just the holes in the frontal armor of the turret. Then again, I can't remember if you could see that one at all to begin with... so maybe my wondering is pointless.

Modifications? What modifications?

I've been googling a lot for any sort of reference for what kind of modifications the finnish army made on its tanks. The StuG assault guns got some concrete, tree trunks and stowage bins added on them. T-34's donated by the soviets didn't get either concrete or logs as armor reinforcement, but I think some of them got additional containers somewhere. Perhaps the King Tiger would survive just nicely without any extra shielding, its armor is always sloped unlike the blocky StuG's. Adding a box or two might prove somewhat problematic, for these tanks don't have too much extra space on them.

Maybe I could cut a couple sections of the skirts away and put a box on those empty slots? You know, those things that cover the tracks partially. Oh well, we'll see if any of this makes any sense or if the camoflage pattern itself with markings is enough to make this tank look finnish.

Half-planned is almost done already

This year's first smaller than real world scale project is, as I think I've already stated, my acquirement from Model Expo 2011. I may have pondered on this idea back in the day, but now I*m more sure of it. We'll see if it works as well as I hope it does.

Project: SdKfz 182 mit Porsche Turm
Whatever one thinks of the name above and its accuracy, at least everybody knows what I'm talking about when I say "King Tiger with a Porsche turret". Somehow I like how the Porsche turret looks like and as I've already built a "normal" production version with a Henschel turret (Elvis), this one was an obvious choice. I seem to recall that Elvis isn't a pretty one, so I may have to redo it at some point with a bit more skill (I hope). And after this I can declare that I've built each main type of a Tiger tank at least once.

What if...
I've been building and painting german tanks just about always, though I've used those colours and patterns that I wanted to or felt like using. This time we'll be going to the always intriguing world of what-iffing.

Should the wings of history have beaten a bit differently, maybe we could've seen tanks a lot more gallant than captured T-34's on these latitudes. I can't say if those ~70-ton monsters would've fared well in the forests and whatnots in the Karelia or other places, but who cares about such details? In the alternate timeline I just pulled out of my nonexistent hat these Tigers that were delivered weren't in an awful hurry to the frontlines, so there was plenty of time to repaint them to the army's pattern over the Panzergrau or Dunkelgelb.

Maybe they would've modified these tanks a bit, too. They could've added some stowage bins and other useful things. A good example is the stuff they did to the StuGs: they got reinforced with concrete, logs and all that. I'm considering.

The flames of war
For some pretty strange reason I had problems finding the wartime color codes and patterns of the finnish army vehicles. I blame my tiredness and serious mocca-deprivedness of these problems ;) In the end I found myself in a Flames of War site that had just the images and texts I was more or less looking for. I guess those will get me somewhere and the rest of the net to the final stages of the build.

My paint problem was solved by Combat Models, or that's how it looks like right now. There's no similar set with Vallejo products, but maybe this will do just fine.

Project year '12 starts exceptionally

The year changed, so what?

My winter vacation is now depleted and the week #1 went jolly nicely with the "let's move to the next city"-project. That's why I set the last batch of posts on a timer a bunch of weeks ago. And this is what the last days have gone with: unloading, sorting and repositioning things. Luckily it's now done.

A sad excuse for a man-cave
At least I got some space for my modeling and stuff. Let's see if it's useful in the end. Of course I ended up in the corner :P As the whole apartment is still a huge "work in progress", time will tell what happens, how and when. I guess and hope I have some furniture to be built next week, but maybe it won't take all week?

Santa popped by

Nicely enough, santa popped by and dropped a bit more to build for a well-behaved project mumbler. And that something was mindwarmingly something new again, like the halftrack I got the previous year. To be more exact, I got an Italeri M10 "Achilles".

There's not much I can say of Italeri's kits because I don't think I've built much. All I can remember is the awful-ish sWS mit Panzerwerfer 42. But I'll give this one the benefit of the doubt. For a change the kit is also non-german so I get to panic about the paint schemes even more. Of course I could've decided to make this a captured vehicle, but I don't think I'll do that in the end.

Oh, and no small dudes are included in the kit, even though one could expect some of them, because there are people in the pic. Doesn't matter :)

Draconis Combine - the 5th Sword of Light

The 5th Sword of Light, also known as the Gold Dragon is a very old (founded in 2796) and traditional unit. It consists of four Batallions of three Companies each, so there's quite a few 'Mechs to be painted: 48 in total. The Draconis Combine is, along with the Lyran Alliance, one of my favourite countries in the Inner Sphere and I like the red scheme of the SoL units, so I guess I'll be painting more of them. Perhaps a couple of Lances, even, so I can field a full Company.

That means I need Catapults, Dragons and Crabs at least and while we're talking about the Combine, one just can't do without a Hatamoto-Chi! Perhaps a Naginata and some others could be added as missile launchers, but if we talk about all of the aforementioned 'Mechs in plural, I'm going to end up with a Batallionful... Not that I'm complaining but I need to get the Jade Falcons' 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster completed first. All those 72 Points :)