FriedClams

Good to see you starting another project Patrick. I will be following your progress. Best of luck with the new build. Gary

Simply beautiful Siggi ! Perhaps a 60 gun ship shouldn’t be referred to as pretty, but she is. Gary

Beautiful job Eric, longship and base. I agree with Brian and Steven that the rustic base is a nice compliment to the model. I really like the tones of the two woods together and the way the walnut stands proud of the cherry is a great visual plus. And the chatter marks echo the thwarts. Very nice work. Gary

Four more to go - put your head down and slog your way through. Really nice work on the jackstay Keith and such a fine detail ! Gary

I'll be taking a seat in the back to watch your dual chopper builds Egilman. I appreciate the extra effort you've taken in presenting the historical story of these craft. I'm always amazed that these birds can actually fly when I stop and consider the remarkable physics and mechanics behind them. Like huge metallic dragonflies. Good luck with both. Gary

Ouch ! But a very nice recovery Druxey. Yes, but I don’t see how you could have anticipated the difficulties beforehand. Sometimes a thing just needs to be tried. I have no doubt she will be an absolute beauty in the end. Gary

Those new figures have really crisp details and your painting is top notch. I have never tried either Vallejo or Mig products, but they sure produce some nice results don’t they. Of course that is mostly due to the person holding the brush. You have a steady hand OC. And I agree with the others, that placing the farm at an angle has greater visual interest and appeal. Gary

Beautifully done Gary - she looks great! Congratulations on the completion of this very handsome model. Gary

Hello and thanks to all for the nice comments and for your past experiences with space heaters. When I was a young man I worked for a year as an electrician in a welding fabrication shop that was located in an old run-down mill building. That winter was freezing cold and it seemed colder inside that cavernous old structure than it did outside. But I can still remember how good it felt when those darned heaters would kick on and wash you in warmth - if only temporarily. Hello Popeye - thanks for the interest and fine comment. It will have a small compressor for tires but no air tools. In this time period (1920s to 40s) pneumatic tools were not yet widely used by mechanics - as far as I can tell. I just haven't seen them in historic photos, so I'll play it safe and keep them out. And thanks to everyone for the likes and for stopping in to take a look. A Floor and a Workbench. A small update. There will be more than one workbench in this shop, but here is the first one. The bench is put together from a number of materials. The top is a section off an old resin casting I had in my junk box that I cut down and then modified further. The frame and bottom is basswood and the items on the lower shelf are nondescript chunks of white-metal and styrene. It is brush painted in enamels and oil paint. There is nothing like black oil paint to make a thing look good and greasy. A wall mount book case of basswood is 5/8” wide by 1/2” tall. The books and papers/pamphlets are bits of styrene colored with permanent markers. The 35 gallon trash barrel is a solid white-metal piece. I drilled a hollow into the top and placed debris in it. Someone needs to dump the thing. All glued into position. The floor is 3/32” basswood. To simulate concrete, it is painted with gray craft acrylic and allowed to dry. PVA is then mixed with a couple drops of paint and brushed on all over – rather thick. Before it completely dried I jabbed at it with a cosmetic sponge to give it some texture and unevenness. The surface was then lightly sanded and a few concrete relief cuts were added. Oil drips are replicated with India ink mixed with water and the walking patterns and other general smudging is added with pigment powders. Scale tires with an aggressive tread were rolled through brown acrylic and transferred to the floor. Finally, a scale 6” base shoe is added to all walls. Thanks and stay well. Gary

Nice update Brian. Extremely clean and well executed work as we have all come to expect. It is reassuring to know that I am not alone in this. I have modeled myself into a corner more than once. And aren't 1-2-3 blocks the handiest things? Gary

An interesting build Bill and so nicely executed. Gary

Wonderful work Druxey and a very helpful tutorial. I must try your cellophane tape method as it seems perfectly suited to small models. Thanks for sharing your techniques. Gary

Thanks for visiting and for the the "likes". Space heater I wanted to show some method of heating the shop and there is a spot in the upper left corner of the diorama where I could place a hydronic space heater. Many old photos of repair garages show radiators hung on the walls as in this cropped 1929 image from the National Photo Co. Collection – Library of Congress. These radiators would be difficult to scratch in this scale and I didn't want to use up too much wall space, so I made up the unit below. It is entirely styrene except for the steam/water pipes coming out the side, which is blackened brass. It was brush painted in enamels and roughed up a bit. I glued it to the wall and ran conduit down to a switch for the fan. The roundish blob on the back of the unit is the fan motor and it connects to a junction box via a piece of solder. This post brings the log up to date with the model in real time. Thanks for stopping by. Stay well. Gary

I've been reading your log O.C. and I'm very impressed with your miniature painting ability - very nice indeed. I look forward to seeing how this all comes together (assuming of course someone can deliver your replacement case as a single intact piece.) This is an ambitious and very cool project. Gary

Hello Patrick, it's good to see a posting from you. This is really a very nice miniature - amazing mind boggling details (like the rest of your mini fleet). What is the scale - it seems even smaller than Sapphire and Genesis - could that be? Looks great! Gary

Thank you all for the wonderful comments and support - I really appreciate it. And thanks for the likes. Hello Ron - thanks for stopping by. Yes, as @Egilman has correctly stated they are 45 degree cuts. The short door wall is actually slid back a tiny bit at the joint so it won't be visible from the front. The drawing below is exaggerated but shows what I mean. Also, there is now a conduit hiding the joint. Mezzanine The back wall was pieced together from two chunks of brick material because I ran out of full slabs. But I was able to place the horizontal seam high enough up the wall to where I could place a mezzanine/loft there to cover it. I drew a tick mark strip to locate the platform joists and ledger board bolt heads. The basswood that makes up the frame is scale 2” x 10”. It was stained brown with a chalk/alcohol mix then over painted with white acrylic. After drying for about a half hour, I pulled some of the paint off with regular cellophane tape – stick the tape down, then pull it off like an old bandage. The ledger board was then glued to the wall with CA. The washer/nuts are injection molded from Grandt Line Products. This little chopper gadget makes quick work of producing 17 uniform joists. Using the tick mark strip as a guide, I glued all the joists into place along the rim joist and then glued everything to the ledger board and side walls. The platform surface grate is a blackened brass mesh from Clover House. The mesh size is scale 1.45” made from .0065” wire. The railing is plastic from Tichy Train Group. It's painted black enamel and dry brushed with Testors “steel” and then some pigment powders. Electrical conduit and boxes were added. The “conduit” is .014" brass rod and the boxes are bits of styrene. Holes were drilled into the boxes to land the rod. Boxes with a conduit out each side were drilled through and slipped onto the rod like beads. The next post will bring the project to its present state. Thanks for your interest in this model. Be well. Gary

What a fine subject for a model Druxey. Simple understated lines, yet so graceful and elegant. And thank you for explaining your process in developing the plug. The mystery and magic of art. I'll be sitting in back and following along quietly. And oh, the many uses of rubber cement! Gary

Thanks to everyone for the "likes" and for taking a look. Diorama Walls Now that the case is finished, I have the horizontal and vertical dimensions I need to fit the diorama precisely into the face frame rabbet. So the drawing was adjusted and the wall sections defined as shown below. The windows and door are also located and a storage mezzanine is added. The walls are made of brick that I cut from blank Hydrocal slabs. I purchased the material from New England Brownstone Co. and the stuff is unfinished, about 5/32” thick and in HO (1:87) scale. All the wall sections were cut to size – height and width. The material is cast in the American bond pattern and has a header row horizontally laid every 6 courses, so care was taken in how the wall sections were cut from the slabs so that these courses align with adjacent wall sections. The total height of the walls was also reduced to accommodate the combined thickness of the floor and ceiling. The rear wall had to be pieced together horizontally because I ran out of full slabs of brick. The seam will be covered by the mezzanine support plate. One of the convenient things about modeling in 1:87 is the availability of scratch building materials and detailing parts. I'm using this 39” x 92” masonry door w/transom from Grandt Line Products for the rear entrance. And for the three windows - 60” x 104” 20 pane tilt-out units from Tichy Train Group. These windows even come with laser cut glazing. Because masonry windows have no outer frame casing and must fit into the wall, the cutout openings have to be perfectly square and exact. One misstep which leaves the openings too large or off kilter, and the piece becomes scrap. I began the process by drawing templates for each wall section to assist in locating the cutouts. Carefully placing the wall sections over the templates, I used the outer tick marks and a straight edge to pencil the cutout intersections. The template cutouts are a tad small which allowed me to make adjustments with needle files and achieve a final precise fit. Once I was satisfied, I then cut grout lines around the inside perimeter of the openings. Creating these cutouts was time consuming and tedious beyond measure – razor saw and needle files – filing and test fitting – over and over . . . There are basically two camps when it comes to coloring raw plaster/Hydrocal – those who seal the plaster first and those that don't. There are pros and cons to each method, but here I didn't seal it. I used thinned gouache (not acrylic gouache) and pre-wet the plaster with plain water as I went. I like using gouache because it's dead flat and can be re-activated with water after it has already dried. This is great when I want to do more blending but makes a wash layer impossible. On this model I applied straight burnt sienna over the entire surface of the brick. I later went back and blended in tiny amounts of raw umber to random areas to provide some variation. For the grout I used very watery white and gray. I pre-wet the area where I wanted the grout color to run with “wet-water” and then I just touched a sharp pointed brush (soupy with grout color) to a grout line. In a flash the color raced to wherever the wet-water is/was. The dark areas of brick and grout are where I applied alcohol mixed with a little India ink. The window frames were air brushed a dark iron color (enamel) and dry brushed with silver. The window headers are basswood and simply glued to the face of the brick and painted with acrylics. Then glued together with PVA. Thanks for stopping by. Gary

Excellent progress Ken! I agree with the others on the appeal of the low angle photos. Nice uniform oars as well. Gary

Splendid work yet again Valeriy. Your modeling inspires me to try harder and do better. It has never crossed my mind to make my own chain as you did in post #519 - now I must give it a go. Gary

She’s looking sweet Keith! Nice delicate work. Gary

Thanks to all for looking in and for the likes. Hello Keith. It feels good to be starting a new project and I'm happy that you'll be looking in. Yes it will be an American shop because – it's home. We need to have one of our good cousins on the far side of the pond build a U.K. version. You're right Roger, there were many old jalopies held together with bubble gum and baling wire decades after their manufacture, even into the fifties. Heck, I'm still running an old sun-faded Chevy PU that I bought nearly thirty years ago (teenage boys seem to love it and come up and tell me so – funny.) A silver-painted tractor tire as a flower planter – now that would look great on anyone's front lawn. Thank you Yves. I really don't have a lot of special techniques, but yes I will explain whatever I do. And of course I'll be happy to answer any questions you have. Good to have you following Mark. Thank you for the kind words PAPA. The Shadow Box Case The diorama is built as a separate module and simply fits into a rabbeted cutout in the face frame of the shadow box. The shadow box and how the diorama module fits into it looks like this. The shadow box is built first instead of last. I know that may seem backwards, but in the inverted logic of my world I find it easier to adjust the diorama module to fit the box rather than fitting the box to the module. This is because the module needs to fit into the box face-frame rabbet quite precisely – preferably to within a 32nd of an inch all around. I'm not that good with a table saw and my mitered corners are - rarely perfect. So I'll make the module fit the as-built shadow box. The box is made of 1/2” poplar and is simply glued and clamped together. A couple of small beech wood biscuits were also involved. The box was then sanded something like forever and then a coating of pre-stain wood conditioner was applied to help promote uniform stain absorption. Poplar is an easy wood to work with because it's soft and yet holds rather clean, crisp edges. But it sometimes has a greenish grain and it will absorb stain in an uneven splotchy way, so the wood conditioner is a must. The piece is then stained with Minwax Jacobean and finished with a couple of coats of semi-gloss poly. The diorama perimeter is next. Thanks for swinging by. Stay well. Gary

Hello fellow modelers. Several months ago I finished up an eighteen month modeling project of a New England fishing dragger. I am now in the beginning stages of gathering information on yet another fishing vessel that I will begin later this year. But it seems I must always have some project on the work bench, so in the meantime I have begun working on a small 1:87 diorama to fill the void. This is actually the third in a series of dioramas and like the two before it, it will fit into a wall mountable shadow box. In example of what I'm going to be building, here are a few photos of the first two dioramas that I made. In the first one, a Fordson tractor is poking out of a barn door. As you can see, it is not large. The diorama itself is 4-7/8” wide (124mm) by 2-1/4” high (57mm) and 2-1/2” deep (64mm). The second diorama shows the interior of a small boat building shop and is more detailed and ambitious than the first. It has the same physical dimensions. This next diorama will be wider at 7-3/8” (187mm) but the same height and depth as the others. The added width is needed to accommodate the subject matter and will make for a more interesting display when placed together with the first two. I envision a wall display arrangement something like shown below. Other dioramas will eventually be added as time and impulse allow. This diorama will depict the interior of an auto repair garage circa 1940. Clearly, the time period is dependent on the vehicles and at this point I haven't nailed that down. So it could end up being as early as the 1920s. Two vehicles (maybe three) will be in the shop along with repair shop stuff. In the first few posts I will fast forward through the work that has already been done (about 10%) and bring it to its current state. I expect this project to take several months to complete. These little dioramas have been enjoyable short term projects and a change of pace from subjects that float. They're perfect for when I feel like modeling in an offhand sort of way, which is to say - making it up as I go. Thanks for stopping by to take a look. Gary

I picked up an OptiVISOR two years ago after a decade of resistance and I'm glad that I finally did. Its use has led to the biggest improvement in my modeling than any other tool I own. I'm not exaggerating. And no more eye strain. I bought the set with four lens of varying strengths. I wear my reading glasses the whole time I'm modeling and flip the visor down over the top of the glasses only as needed. I disliked having it on my head at first, but now can't imagine working without them. Beware of inexpensive knock-offs (no, I don't own stock in the company.) The Tennessee is progressing nicely Keith. Enjoy your fresh air activities. Gary

Sweet work Vaddoc - the planking is looking great. Gary