German WW2 Armor - Plastic kits plus trains cars n scifi

[nikbud]

Hi all, just thought I'd post a few pics of some of my plastic models - made before I got the wooden ship bug.

 

Part 1

 

SdKfz 173 Jagdpanther. Built stock from the Tamiya kit and airbrushed in enamels.

 

 

 

Kubelwagen Type82. Stock built from the Dragon kit, airbrushed in acrylics weathered with oil paints and artists chalks.

 

 

 

SdKfz 4/1 Panzerwerfer 42 Maultier.  Stock built, probably a Tamiya kit, airbrushed with acrylics heavily drybrushed with oils.

 

 

More in Part 2....

[popeye the sailor]

sweet looking models!   

[nikbud]

Part 2

 

Steyr Type 1500a/01 with20mmFlak38. Built stock from the Tamiya (Steyr) and Dragon (Flak) kits, Airbrushed in enamels, drybrushed in enamels with artist chalk weathering.

 

 

And my favourite;

SdKfz 163 Sturmgeschutz IV. Built from the Dragon kit with Eduard Brass accessory kit and scratch built rear deck enclosure. Airbrushed in acrylics, washed and drybrushed in artists oils and artist chalk weathering.

 

 

They are a bit dusty and not perfect but I hope you enjoyed looking! 

Cheers,

Paul

[nikbud]

8 minutes ago, Wallace said:

The dust makes them look authentic Paul 

Haha Thanks!

[ccoyle]

I built many Tamiya 1/35 scale armor kits back in the halcyon days of my youth. They all disappeared many, many moves ago.

[BETAQDAVE]

43 minutes ago, Wallace said:

The dust makes them look authentic Paul

I agree, makes it look an armored vehicle of the Africa Korps plucked right out of the desert!

[nikbud]

Thanks for all the likes and comments guys.

I've amended the title so I can add some other stuff over the next few days, I hope you'll like em

 

Cheers

paul

[Richmond]

Very nice work.

[pontiachedmark]

Gidday Paul.

Absolutely fantastic.

Mark.

[nikbud]

Thank you so much everyone for your comments and likes, they are all very much appreciated.

 

Cars part 1

 

My son is a racing car fan, so obviously when he was younger we had to have a Scalextric set. He had the usual WRC and F1 cars.

I hope you like these Scalextric cars;

 

Ferrari 250 P/LM. Built from a Monogram kit of the 1960's, painted in rattle-can auto paints and trimmed in Bare Metal Foil. The wheels, tyres and motor are all aftermarket parts.

 

 

 

My son wanted some Nascars, but couldn't find ones he liked so I purchased 4 beaten up Ford Taurus cars from ebay. The first two were resprayed and decals applied. Again Auto paints were used , the decals were obtained from a company in Australia, unfortunately I can't remember the name.

 

 

……….

[nikbud]

Cars part 2

 

My son was a big fan of the Pixar movie "Cars", but no-one made any of the characters in Scalextric form. So I used the other 2 Ford Taurus that I had......

 

Lightning McQueen

 

"Ole Stickers" was made by smoothing out the front end, cutting off the rear end and creating a new spoiler, and making the wheel arch shapes from putty. He is a bit longer than he should be but looks the part whizzing around the living room! 

 

 

Every hero needs a protagonist, so Chick Hicks was made by cutting down the original body to size and then using plasticard to build up the appropriate shape;

 

 

This shot gives you some idea of how the body was cut and shaped. I have no idea why I completely sprayed the interior...…

 

 

I hope you liked these cars, they are not "scale accurate" but were fun to build, and yes they are fun to "drive" around the track!

 

Up next, Anyone wanna see a choo-choo?

[nikbud]

Ok Mark, you twisted my arm......

 

A few years ago the Admiral (as this is concerning choo-choos, should she be renamed The Fat Controller??) bought me, for the princely sum of 5 British Pounds Sterling, a bashed up, OO gauge, late 19050's Triang LMS Princess Elizabeth Locomotive, and asked "will this go on your layout?". Not in its present state I thought, so I set about fixing it up. The motor needed replacing, the loco body had a screw hole in the front and a cracked cab roof, and the tender chassis was warped beyond use. I managed to find a motor and the loco body, but was unable to get a tender chassis without buying the whole tender and loco, so I made one out of plasticard and aftermarket axleboxes and etched brass. I also used more in-scale wheels for the for and aft trucks on the loco, and added handrails and appropriate pipework. I adjusted the loco/tender connection so they ran closer together.

 

The green body is the replacement and the white plasticard is the basic chassis components;

 

 

I rebuilt her up and sprayed her in Red, but I didn't like the shade of colour so I decided to weather her. Now technically speaking, AFAIK, the engine under the auspices of the LMS would have been kept reasonably clean, it was only under the days of British Rail that the engines became increasingly grubby, but I wanted an LMS engine so LMS she would stay.

 

I decided to try a 'new to me' method of weathering; This consisted of the use of artists oils only, dabbed on and blended, kind of Bob Ross style. A little artists chalk was used around the chassis area for dust and grime. Oh, and I used real coal!

 

I hope you like the effect;

 

 

 

Thanks for taking the time to look!

Cheers

Paul

[nikbud]

As its not bedtime here yet I thought I'd add one last model that I'm proud of, and indicates a couple of techniques that I hadn't used before.

 

Roger

 

Roger is a Battle Droid, he was built from the AMT kit. He came with a 'Stap' (think flying Segway with guns) but he wouldn't fit right so it was taken away from him.

 

He was airbrushed in enamels using the technique of 'pre-shading'. For those who don't know this comprises of a base coat of light grey auto primer, and then, before the top coat, a dark colour (usually black) is roughly airbrushed along edges, panel lines etc. This combined with a thin top coat creates a colour shift across the panel etc. I used a dark metallic grey for the pre-shading, the effect is very subtle and unfortunately doesn't come across very well in photos, but it is there honest!.

The other technique I used was liquid rubber. This was applied with a brush or cocktail stick along edges after the pre-shading, after the liquid rubber had dried the top coat was added. Once the top coat is dry, I rubbed my finger where the liquid rubber was. It peeled of leaving a chipped paint look. I think I overdid it a bit.... please let me know what you think. As I used enamels for the airbrushing I had to use acrylics for the washes which is why the washes appear a bit coarse. I find it much easier to use oils for washes, the take much longer to dry and are easier to blend in.

 

 

The 'Passport Shot'

 

 

Roger in his "I'm On The Naughty Step" pose;

 

And, "at the end of a long photoshoot, I'm pooped!"

 

 

 

Again thanks for looking and I hope you enjoyed what you saw. If you have any questions/comments/criticisms, please feel free!!

 

Cheers

Paul

[nikbud]

3 minutes ago, Wallace said:

Very nice Paul. You certainly have a knack with painting/ageing. Nice job mate. Oh, by the way, you can tell you are a ship builder at heart. Look at what you wrote here:

Fore and aft......on a train? Made me smile. 

I never even noticed that!! 🤣🤣

[lmagna]

One of mine is the LM/250 except mine is the #21 winner of the 1965 Le Mans driven by The crazy American Mastan Gregory and Austrian veteran Jochen Rindt.

 

It was a NART entry and Mastan pushed the living daylights out of the car and no one thought it would hold together through the night, including Rindt who was in his trailer when Masten came in for driver change. They not only held together for the full 24 hours when none of the Ford Gt 40 or factory Ferraris made it, but they won first place in both over all and the GT class. It was the fifth win in a row in as many years for Ferrari but also the last, they have never won at Le Mans since.

 

Nice job on your "Cars" conversions. i would have never figured out the Lightning McQueen was even a conversion' Also I really like your "Roger". He does seem very lonely though.

 

Great work all around.

[nikbud]

 

5 hours ago, lmagna said:

they have never won at Le Mans since.

Lou, Thank you for the kind words and the info, I always assumed that the Ferraris were winning up till about the 80's or so.

I do have to make a correction, the Car is in fact a 330 P/LM, I have no idea where I got 250 from. From my hazy memory the P in P/LM stood for prototype and I don't think this 330 ever raced in anger, but she certainly can shift on our track!

[lmagna]

After 1965 it was the ford GT 40 years ending in one of the closest races in Le Mans history when Jacky Ickx won in 1969 with the same car that had won in 1968! Then the Porsche 917, (Remember the Steve McQueen movie Le Mans) ran away with the show for the next couple of years. Then finally France got what they had been working for years on when the Matra 670s finally got everything together and won over the next three years. Then here comes Jacky Ickx, again driving for the blue and orange painted Gulf Oil Sponsored J.W. Automotive Engineering 3.0L Mirage. Even though it was listed as a Ford it really was a revamped F-1 Ford Cosworth engine and chassis and had little in common with it's Ford GT40 based predecessors. But this was the end for Gulf Oil, JW Automotive and Ford at Le Mans. None of them have won at Le Mans since.

Then it became the years of the porsche's until 1987 sweeping almost every year with only a few other manufactures winning. then until present the only other run of years of note have been by Audi, (13 years).

 

As for your Ferrari, i think you have a 250 GT LM or more commonly called just the 250LM standing for Le Mans. In reality they had 3.3L engines and should have been called 330LM but Ferrari insisted on calling them 250LMs so that they could run in the GT category instead of competing directly against the 330Ps. It is even a little more convoluted than that but I guess this is after all a ship forum and I don't want to get people upset by talking cars too much.

 

Still some great models no matter what you call them. 

 

 

Edited November 19, 2018 by lmagna

[nikbud]

Lou, Thank you so much for taking the time to write out all that info, I really appreciate it. My autistic son has a self-imposed bedtime of 2130 no matter what, except for the 24hr Le Mans - he can tell me every fact and figure over the last few years but not much about the history.

Cheers

Paul

[mtaylor]

As I recall, part of the reason Ford stopped winning was that they pulled out of sponsorship for many Ford teams, except maybe NASCAR.  The bean counters were running amok around that time and cutting costs where ever they could.   The downside is they lost some market share that racing was bringing to them.

[lmagna]

You are more than welcome Paul.

Most of all that stuff just sits in the top of my head spinning around with nowhere to go. I seldom get to talk about it. It is just another part of history that I fell in love with at an early age and never outgrew.  Pretty useless stuff really I suppose but like naval history I love it. Your son kind of has a one up on me when it comes to modern Le Mans. After 1970 for me the endurance racing world was completely overrun by big bucks, not that it had ever been cheap, and the racing scene started losing my interest for some reason. The rules kept changing to favor certain manufactures and almost eliminated the little guy altogether. The days of Jim Hall, Bruce McLaren. John Wyer and Eric Broadley and their like were pretty much gone So I went on to other subjects to fill my head with and don't normally keep current. I think I am somewhat the same with naval history. I am not all that much up to date on post WWII ships and actions. To me they are not really "history"

 

Mark 

You are pretty much right. Henry Ford entered the prototype racing world with little more than an open checkbook and a desire to beat Ferrari. By 1967 he was under tremendous pressure to get out of racing all together, mostly because of the cost to Ford. He did drop Ford from  the European prototype and F-1 racing but still supplied technical assistance to Ford powered vehicles. He stayed active in NASCAR and for a short time in Can Am. It had become a very expensive sport in a short time and he had been partly responsible. Also Ford and Ferrari had been so busy battling each other that they had not been watching Porsche all that close and out of the rearview mirror they suddenly came up and blasted everything wide open.

 

If you have any interest at all, one of the best reads out there is "Go Like Hell" by A.J. Baime. Not only a pretty good account but a well written read that keeps you awake even if like me you know what is coming. Out of my twenty or thirty books on Sports Prototype and Can Am racing it is one of my favorite books. 

[nikbud]

Thanks again for the info, its discussions like these that bring models to life.

I think its fair to say that most if not all motorsport has been "affected" by the vast amounts of money flooding around. I follow F1, and as you said the days of the privateer, and to a certain extent, off the wall innovation are long gone, no chance of ever seeing a six wheeler again!

[mtaylor]

Money has affected just about every sport and motorsports are no exception.  Here in the US Indy Car Racing used to be just basically the Indy 500 and some regional races up until around the late '60's then the big dollars and sponsorships came in.   The little guys who fought hard to race were pushed out.  I'm waxing nostalchic as I remember the Offenhauser's roar and the always feisty but never winning Granatelli Novi's and their 4 wheel drive.   The turbine cars, and then the Lotus entries. After that.. meh....

[lmagna]

It's kind of hard to experiment when the product is a two million dollar investment and the people who invested want a return on that investment. Even Ford, while he had and was willing to spend millions, wanted results and fired people to get them. He was not in it for the game. He wanted to win!

 

I know what you mean about the Indy 500 Mark. The Can Am series was started much the same way, but between making unnecessary rules and becoming too costly pretty much killed it's own sport.