My new airbrush cleaning jar

A multifunctional jar

In the turn of '18/19 the Yule Goat or his henchfolk brought me a jar for cleaning up my airbrush. The 3-in-1 on the box meant that in addition to the self explanatory part the pot also had an airbrush holder that was handier than keeping the damn thing between my teeth while taking a rushed photo or refilling the paint container a tiny bit more. And the third feature? The lid had a three-compartment bottom molded in, which could be used for mixing paints, when the lid was set upside down. That's something I didn't try out so I couldn't comment on its usefulness.

That black thing on top was the airbrush holder. In front of it (to the right) one could maybe notice a hole, that was an exhaust opening (a round filter apparently of cotton was inserted on the inside of it). For the cleaning up process about 3cm of water was to be added into the container itself.

Testing, testing

When priming the Lambda-class shuttle I tried out 66,666...% of the features offered by the cleaning jar, as I guess I somehow said already. The holder was handy and sturdier than I had thought originally. Cleaning up the airbrush was much cleaner, considering the surroundings, and also less smelly than without this thingamagick.

Perhaps the wonderfulness of the cleaning pot would be much more apparent on a different building/painting process or its phase, where I was using small, quick batches of numerous different paints. I'd know better after doing that myself, so maybe I'd remember to comment on that later on in the future.

Reprimage

Pointless or not

It was more or less based on a coin toss if it made any sense to reprime this huge model white before going repainting in shades of everlightening greys. Still I decided to do it because I had found so much unpainted surface to begin with, added more with my greeblies and sandings. That made it more appealing than laziness. Besides, painting over white would show much more clearly what I'd done and what I had not.

Round one

All in all this fresh coat of primer took three sessions over three evenings. The pics show some work in progress moments from different angles. I wasn't aiming for a perfect coating, mostly because my airbrush nozzle was not designed for vast surfaces (especially over time, but I guess I could've used some retardant to make that a bit easier). For that sort of stuff I'd need a different nozzle altogether. Anyway, I had to admit that the shuttle looked better white than grey.

Preparing for the repriming

Cockpit work

There wasn't much to do but to clean some corners around viewport. Most likely no one would notice anything, as I didn't really say anything based on the photos afterwards...

At this point I just cut off tiny bits of masking tape and covered the installation points of the two seats. Just to allow for easier gluing later on.

The landing gear

Obviously I had no recollection how the landing gear bay doors were installed, where the attachment points were not to mention how tightly I had glued them on. Luckily already a tiny bit of poking with the point of the hobby knife revealed the weak points and the hatches came off very easily and cleanly.

I cleaned the injector marks from the hatches where I had left them so many years ago. Dry-fitting the doors made me think if they'd like some tiny cables running around, but most likely I wasn't going to do anything of the sort. They'd only be visible if one took the model in their hands and made an effort to see everything everywhere.

My largest foreseeable headache in this change I had decided to make were the landing gear feet, that I had practically just torn off with some violence. Maybe a couple of bits of paperclips as "bones" bones would improve the structural integrity so that the damn thing wouldn't just fall on its belly after a random delay.

More greeblies

Remaking up my mind

Of course I could not leave the folding wings as they were, now that my main wing was all-over filled with junk. I jumped back to my thousand boxes (this may be exaggerating a bit, they should be called hundred boxes at best at this stage still) and chose the longest and narrowest bits I could find (I'd been again very happy to use KwK halves if they only fit), as long as they were again doubled, for maintaining symmetricality.

Again my apologies for forgetting to take WIP photos in my excitement of crafting something. Mostly my filler greeblies ended up being parts of tow cables and something I guessed to be the hanging structure of some armored skirts (Schürzen). These last bits would've been so much more interesting, had I not had to cut off their attachment bits (you know those bandaid-like things to hold pipes on some flat surfaces), but as the space real estate was limited, I just had to go all hacky.

In the end the side wings did not end up being full 1:1 copies of each other but they had a couple of tiny differences between them. Maybe that'd add some to the general interestingness of the model. I just was pretty bugged because I really couldn't hide some silly pieces there that could've been fun to see if anyone noticed or recognized them. Well, I did at least one, but a couple more couldn't have hurt.

Hmmmmmmmmm

Treasures!

And what did I find from one of my spare pieces box, buried under ancient and dried up superglue tubes and who knows what else? The original landing gear of the Shuttle I thought I had thrown away!

Back in the day I finalized the Shuttle in the flight mode, because in my opinion it was infinitely cooler and more stylish that way. I still hold this belief. Since that I have lost the original stand and also I've lost the space I could've once had for displaying a model of this size. In a way it'd maybe make more sense to cut off the closed landing gear bay doors, reinstall these and then glue the wings into the "landed mode" as well, because they could not fold down anymore anyway.

On top of the shelf she's been sitting with her wings folded up anyway for so long, and as said, it would never fit anywhere even with a new stand/base. And my offspring would not let her be, either.

Hmmmm....

Greebling

In regard this topic I decided to boldly assume that whoever ended up reading this post would be well aware of what greebling was, why and where it more or less originated.

Extra cables

My model already had some haphazardly laid out cables and their friends modeled onto the external front-bottom part of the cockpit. That wasn't quite three-dimensional enough for my state of mind, so I cut short pieces of excess multithread towcable from a tank model I had built many a year ago. I just tried to lay them out somehow, so that they'd bring some depth but still show the old detailings in the gaps.

I considered twisting one of those so that a loop of it would hang down slightly visibly, but it was a bit too messy for Imperial tech crews, I felt, and I surely wasn't going to turn this beauty into a space terrorist shuttle! There are lines that aren't to be crossed ;)

Fired up by kitbash-greebling

At long last I had a justification for hamstering the old sprues and other random extra pieces! Though in all honesty, this was the second time, as I did use some of these in my TIE/I stand a couple of years* ago.

*) wow, it was almost four full years already...

The main wing

What I started with was choosing a random assortment of long and narrow pieces, such as those sets of sticks that were used to (I assumed) calibrate tank cannons, pieces of gun barrel cleaning rods and such. Also included were individual pipes and odd rods and I'd been more than excited to hide parts of torsion bar suspension systems, tank jacks, gun barrel travel locks and who knows what else I had, but the vast majority of interesting and generic-enough bits were just way too big to fit between the wing plates. And that was a crying shame.

I think I filled the last, low front corner of the main wing with a section of a long crowbar.

Folding wings

I really didn't put as much effort on the folding wings as on the main wing, because I wanted them to be symmetrical and also less interesting, in a way. This limit obviously narrowed my options down quite a bit, as my thousand boxes didn't contain an unlimited amount of small pieces, even fewer  identical twins. That made me decide I'd only greeblefill the front parts of the side wings, unless I just stumbled upon something cool enough. The reverse sides of the wings I decided to ignore with the same excuse.

Most of this greeblage was brought to you, maybe slightly surprisingly, a part of a tow cable of a German tank, without its strenghtened attachment loops. Taken out of context and painted "wrong" they might not even be recognizeable.

The next evening: over and around

I got hungrier while eating, so now I suddendly wanted to fill up the main wing all around. The top part was mostly filled and more by a single piece, that I had the insight to cut into and then bend to cover the rear edge and a bit of the top-back part of the wing. What remained I filled with random junk, eg. two pivoting handles that I glued together. I really didn't even remember what in the Empire they were originally representing.




This was somewhat slow work, but surprisingly fun to do. I surprised myself completely by actually starting down this path because my very original vision did not really include anything like this, just a simple repainting (with mandatory pre-cleanup).

Fixing some issues

Adding some installation space for the main viewport

My restauration process started officially when I filed excess material off the area where the windshield was to be installed. It did not end up sitting in perfectly, but the situation was greatly improved. The future repainting of the cockpit interior was facilitated somewhat when I accidentally knocked off the two benches.

Put-put-puttying

For a long while in the real world I worked on everything but my model, for whatever reason. Maybe the end of winter / almost beginning of spring just didn't get my muses singing. One random day I went and dug out my tools and related paraphernalia.

I applied Tamiya's white tube-putty pretty damn liberally around the places I wanted to even out. One thing I found out just before starting was the panel in the main wing, which made me a bit cautious about fixing it, thanks to its prominent location. Despite myself I decided to go for it anyway, in hopes of good results.

What had annoyed me the most over these years were the insane gaps in the sides of the air/spaceframe, which I had partially made worse myself over a decade ago, while carving up the openings so that the wings could be articulated as designed. Some things I had apparently tried to clean up back in the day, with apparently abysmal success rate.

The final essential fixable area was where the frame and the rear piece with the engine outlets joined. I had left both gaps and unpainted surfaces there. This time I'd make it glorious.

Then some sanding with a bit of filing

After a good night's sleep and a day's work I sat down with sanding paper and started with my biggest worry, the main wing. I didn't really sand it so heavily that all the paint disappeared, as I was worried about losing the protruding surface shapes (had I got the tools and the experience, I'd turned carved the panel lines out instead of having these bumplines).

Then came the sides of the Shuttle. I grinded away a good amount of the putty lumps but again didn't go as far as removing all the paint in the region. Maybe I was a bit paranoid when I just wanted to clean up my mess without delusions of master modeler grandeur.

Worst of the worst were located in the lower rear part that I also attacked with a file, those things being sturdier and better-shaped. Maybe it'd look like a donkey's butt after getting painted, or more likely it'd be better than my original attempt. What the final photo showed might still get some touching up later on.

The starting point and some comments about it

A disaster zone

We could try to claim that this shuttle landed a bit too roughly into a difficult landing zone, maybe via a couple of sturdy trees. No, it didn't really look like that, as the detached pieces had all fallen off very cleanly without taking any damage.

As I mentioned before, the cockpit module had become detached, just like the shoulder cannons with their protective armour plates and the double-barreled laser cannon from the rear of the craft. The canopy glass had never been glued on in the first place, so nothing strange there. Except that... yeah, it didn't fit in perfectly.

TODO-listing

I had painted some little details by hand, back in the day. The reason for the cockpit interior being the same grey as the outside was, if my memory was to be trusted, because I only had very few shades of Humbrol's enamel paints. Lack of options, that is. I had apparently drybrushed some darker grey here and there on the outside.

[0]: sand more space for the transparent piece so it'd be flush against the airframe
[1]: repainting the cockpit interior

While documenting the underside of the cockpit part I was pondering if I should go down the sick path that I exposed myself to earlier, while searching for reference images with something like "Lambda class shuttle cockpit interior". The way I encountered those optical fiber cable setups with Arduino/RasPi setups and the Emperor alone knew what other awesome and time-consuming modifications... My sick mind was slowly churning some thoughts about adding some light greebling in some tactical places, like adding some cabling or somesuch into that front bin.

[2]: adding some three-dimensionality to the moulded details

The open-closeable ramp left a tiny opening between the cockpit and the main compartment, but still, maybe that area, from where Darth Vader disembarked in the Return of the Jedi, should be repainted too? Of course one couldn't see that without a flashlight in any case, and if it was going to be a dark one, what'd be the point? Of course the point would be that it would be done Properly, what else?

[3]: repainting the airlock-like chamber

This next photo showed the best in this series, how awfully the rotating twin laser cannons on the wings were: twisted and bent. If I was madder than what I am, I could've considered redoing them somehow, but that didn't sound too likely at this point in this model's life.

In my opinion the wings and the vast majority of the airframe were ok, my old paintjob just wasn't quite on the level I thought I expected from myself nowadays. Some of the next photos revealed that I had managed to skip some bits with my paintbrush altogether. Mostly these photos would also show how large the model was.

Here, for example, you could see unpainted plastic in the rear. Just like those hinges of the wings were just beyond description in the original model, so when I attacked them way over a decade ago with much less experience and much worse tools just to get the damn things installed - not to mention making them rotatable. The result of my craftsmanship was just that, foul. Maybe now I should do some puttying and sanding, wherever needed.

[4]: fixing the seams

This next photo would show clearly how the leading edge of the top wing was incredibly badly painted. I really couldn't remember how I did that. One of the restoration projects I ogled at had filled this gap with greeblies, too.

[5]: general repainting

Project II/19

A renovation project

Right, listen up! Now we'd be doing something completely new and different. A few time units ago I wrote some "oldies but goldies" posts of my old models that are mostly not alive or even kept around anymore. A notable exception was the Imperial Lambda-class shuttle Ondiv that had more or less survived four moves. During the last six years her cockpit had fallen off and the last surviving shoulder gun protector had also gotten detached. The other bits had fallen much earlier.

At least I had managed to keep the loose pieces safe and I didn't have to start thinking of how to replace them from scratch. While pondering on what I'd do to this SHU I found pretty impressive Arduino-based optic cable setups that I almost gave up.

Some folks had filled up the gaps between the wing plates but I didn't think I was going to go that way. Just regluing and gently repainting on the other hand, was clearly on my schedule. I thought I'd just airbrush the whole spacecraft white so that the original grey would remain as a basecoat to give some more shade to the end product. The insides of the cockpit would need to be fully redone, because my original approach had been "full grey in and out", the new interior would be closer to black.

While reading through one of the many restoration project articles I found (google-translated from French to something understandable) I remembered how foul the wing rotator pieces were and how ill-fitting they were. Also the canopy didn't really sit snugly anywhere at all, so most likely I would end up filing and sanding here and there anyway. In any case I wanted to leave the glass pane clear, nor did I want to add the length-wise running tiny white or grey panel strips that some people / models used.

Finished: Project I/19

Soundwave

"Laserbeak - prepare for flight. Course heading: northeast. Operation: observation."
 

 If you remembered just about nothing about the Transformers or Soundwave, his voice ought to have stuck. With his Condor minion perched on his shoulder Soundwave looked like he was sending Laserbeak to spy on the baddies, a target or whaverer he wanted observed.

"Megatron, Laserbeak has returned. He has found a source of energy."

Silliness

Now that I had a larger and pretty damn poseable large version of the character portrayed by the metallic status, why wouldn't I have taken some silly photos of them together? Of course this led me to want a Masterpiece Megatron to go with my MEM Megatron... Well, I've wanted an MP-36 since I heard of it, but now I wanted it even more!