Tiger, Tiger Pz.Kpfw VI, they're grrreeeeeaaaaaatttttt...

Well I was supposed to have started this blog back on Fathers Day(UK), when I opened the box to the gift to myself, not like the kids would have bought me anything!

Anyways I treated myself to 1/35th scale Tiger tank (Mid Prod) from Tamiya,
Instruction booklet and sprue shots.

 I was just going to build the kit as is, then I discovered that in the 1/35th world there is a plethora of after market detailing add-ons to be had.  Over the last few weeks I've added to the base kit various turned metal, photo etch parts, and add on kit parts(extra figures and Tamiya's engine bay kit).

The instruction booklet  seems for the first half the is nothing but wheels, which is odd  as it's a Tank and they run on tracks!  There are 2 identical sprues of wheels and other bits that eventually gets you an A4 cutting mat chock full or round things!

At this point I fancied a break from all things round and built the lower hull, suspension arms/axles and the transmission housings.  The prototype I'm aiming for is Zimmerit coated version with Normandy '44  3 colour squiggle & blotch camo pattern.  The lower hull is 2 bits, the the main tub and the rear bulkhead.  I baulked at doing the hot screwdriver or masses of plastic putty and a special comb to make the Zimmerit, instead I opted for Tamiya's own special sticker/decal sheet.  You just need to cut around the the printed outlines on the sheet and apply to the kit.  These sticky shapes give you just one shot at getting them in the right place, like the proverbial sh*t to a blanket, you'll destroy them before they budge it seems.  You can the see here  therear bulkheads had it's Zim applied.

Whilst I had all the bits on the bench I thought it might be a good idea to dry fit the parts just to get an idea of  how it will all go together.

With the lower hull and the wheels complete it's time to break out the primer and paint.  I was torn whether do the primer in white or grey, settled on the Tamiya grey.

Once the undercoat/primer is complete its time to break out the colours, Dark Yellow(xf60){Dunkelgelb}, Dark Green(xf61){Dunkelgrun} and Red Brown(xf64){Rotbraun}.  Everything constructed so far got a base coat or 2 of  the Dark Yellow with the airbrush {scored a very local bargain on ebay at this point, AS196 compressor and air tank, the seller turned out to be just 2 streets away}, now I'm still trying to master the basics of the airbrush,  blotches and squiggles would be easy... yeah right!!!  Brush painting the black tyres on the wheels was a real chore, I can see the attraction of the wheel masks now.

I wasn't sure if regular poly cement would stick the painted parts together, so had the thick cyano on standby, but all was ok (nothings snapped off yet!,  give it time!!).

According to the instruction once you've got the wheels glued on, you make the tracks up by gluing individual plastic treads together, and before the glue sets hard your wrap them around the wheels and sprockets... F**k that, time to open the wallet and spend some dosh on metal tracks.  220 individual links of track and brass link pin wire from Friulmodel, the treads are smashing just need to ream the track pin holes with a .5mm drill.
Well I managed to snap my .5 and .55 drills, white metal is a sod to drill with a hand pin drill, ended using a .6mm for most of the holes.

Now in the box you get 2 packets of treads and the wire, so naturally I thought it was one packet of 110 treads per side, wrong  both packets are the same tread and you only need about 106 treads a side for good aesthetic looking track.

Well thats 2 tracks made up, just need to sand/grind off  some of the protruding pins in some places, wash, prime and paint them.  Well I'll leave that till next time...
Going to leave one pin in each track as  removable so I can pose the tank as having shed a track.

All Change...

Not done much model railways stuff  since the last blog update, and to be honest I've sort of lost interest in it all. With both British major manufactures announcing huge price hikes this year there's just not going to be the budget for it.  So for now I've cleared the layout down and packed all the stock into boxes and storage crates.

I've been concentrating more on the model kits and 3D computer modelling. The model kit stash has rather ballooned in the wake of packing up buying model railways bits.

Whilst cleaning out a cupboard I dug out a model Harrier kit that my step son's dad bought him a few years back, we started it before we moved out of the old house and into this current house, we had completed most of the actual build and had started on the painting.

Drew's Harrier GR7 from his Dad.

Drew's not shown any interest in the ever wanting to finish it, so as now that I've bought an airbrush I thought this would be an ideal guinea pig  kit to  learn on.

I have to say that this kit is not very good quality, the mouldings are worn and don't fit together all that well. The decal sheet is poorly printed and the instructions for where all the various decals go is abysmal.  Not that a few years in storage did the decal sheet a lot of good either, had some of them begin to break up when they were being applied.

I've yet to crack this spraying malarkey where matt and gloss coats are concerned, have to experiment more with the ratios of thinners and additives to the acrylic LifeColor Varnishes.

Though most of my new paints of late have been Tamiya Acrylics, I do really like the LifeColor range, the range of colour is probably only second to Vallejo.

LifeColor/AstroModel

The next kit I'm going to start in on is the Tamiya Mid Production Tiger Tank, I've bought a range of aftermarket upgrades for it, photo etch grills, metal main and machine gun barrels, zimmerit coating sheet and some other small detailing bits including extra crew figures.

Bombs Wrong - well only in larger scales!!!

I joined the Britmodeller forum the other week as they seem to be a very friendly and knowledgeable crowd of guys. http://www.britmodeller.com/

They even had an old thread on the subject of the Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs, which I resurrected in my search for more useful diagrams and data. One of the guys eventually pointed me in the direction of  the Hayne Dambusters manual, as this has lots of useful info not only Tallboy and Grand Slam, but the blockbuster "cookie" and Upkeep munitions. Haynes Dam Busters Manual

I bought the wrong book to begin with, I thought there would have been some info in the Haynes Lancaster manual, but alas not a word just lots of regular Lanc munition load outs. At least it was cheap as it was 2nd hand. Haynes Lancaster

Might have to buy a few more of the Haynes Military manuals, never know when you might need to service a Merlin 24, or check the tyre pressures.

Any ways armed with the new books I've gone back to "virtual" drawing board with Grand Slam Designs, my original CAD's were miles off,   fine for my scale of 1:144, but not so good as larger  scale scrutiny. 

A real Grand Slam warhead in a Sheffield Museum

My newly designed warhead

The original shape I drew up.

As can be seen in the above pics the new design is a much closer match shapewise.
Two main difference to note are the rear(bottom) of the warhead is now a lot smaller and rounded, the nose of  warhead is more elongated and has more subtle cure.  Strangely according to the official drawings the rear curvature and the nose are based on the same 92" radius, but without the point of the nose they don't look like the same curve to me.

Alas my original tail design is now too big in diameter at the point where it should connect to the warhead, so that is waiting to be redrawn.

Bombs away!

Well my Grand Slam and Tallboy resin prints from Shapeways have finally arrived.
Must say I'm quite pleased with how they came out in the end.

They will look a lot better after a wash, coat of primer,  WD green warhead and dull ali tails.

Now with a coat of  primer.

Sort of finished the basic colours,  oliver drab war head and aluminium tails.   

Your really need to clean the 3d prints well,  scrubbed mine with an old toothbrush and mild detergent, wasn't enough though the primer peeled off on the masking tape.  Next time it be a scrub with IPA or white spirit then primer.

Mars attacks

Ack ack.... ack ack ack!!

That is all....

Is that the Grim Reaper checking my sand clock already?

Well on Friday I went to the opticians and finally had the confirmation I'm getting old!
I now need glasses for reading and close up vision. I've only just started making model kits again in stupidly small scale, 1:144, test anyones eyesight that will.
Now all I need is something to cure my finger tremors when trying to do detail painting with multi zero'd brushes,  spider scratch is one term for it.
I was 46 yesterday (29th), being robbed of an hour by BST chang and running backup to the mrs as we had her parents over for Mothering Sunday lunch, tidy up, get the dinning room ready (ie remove all my modelling stuff to a place of safety),  I feel more like 86 today!
The Grand Slam and Tallboy 3d models are comming along nicely, learnt how to create assemblies in Inventor this week so I now have a Grand Slam Warhead comprised of a casing, back flange, studs and nuts for holding the flange in place, and ring of studs for holding the tail on.  This week i'll will try to add the fuse pockets and something that looks like the fuse itself.

A bigger bang for your Buck

Now i've been playing around on and off with Autodesk Inventor, trying to create CAD model of bits I want for my railway or models.
Now like all modeling you need good source material to work from, pictures, blueprints, sketches etc.
I'm not very artistic I can't draw freehand for toffee, the only picture I ever really liked that I did in art at school(cough 30 years ago!) was of BR Class 31, and that was more a tech drawing than freehand it was  3/4 view from the top.

Now i've been looking at WW2's wonder weapons, and have a few of them in kit form to make, Germany's large Railway gun, America's Atomic Bombs.  In the World of 1:144 there doesn't seem to be much of a selection of British Wonder Weapons, I did find this one https://www.shapeways.com/model/844351/1-144-panjandrum.html, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-MBgkSijcc
great for scaring the odd dog it would seem....

To that end I decided to have a look at the RAF's munitions,  some of the Upkeep Prototypes were quite interesting shapes, especially the the giant golf ball!  Would the Lancaster crews have had to broadcast on their radio's "Fore" to Germans below as they dropped it??  Barnes Wallis the designer of the Upkeep bomb had originally proposed to make a huge 6 engined Victory Bomber to carry a 10 tonne earthquake bomb to shatter the dams from high altitude.  The bomber never came to be but the 10 tonne bomb eventually did.

The 22000lb (10 tonne) Grand Slam Bomb was eventually carried by a heavily stripped Lancaster B1(Special), all armour and armament removed except for the tail gun.  They only dropped 42 of these most notably on the Bielefeld Viaduct raid where along with its smaller sibling the 12000lb Tall Boy Bomb, another Barnes Wallis design, manage to shake down 100 yards of the viaduct.  The Tall Boy was able to drop from an almost unmodified Lancaster,  it just had to have bulged bomb door to accommodate the bomb in the bay.  Four Tall Boys eventually did for the Tirpitz, three direct hits and near miss, and over she rolled in the Tromso Fjord.  The Tirpitz had already survived two previous raids with Tall Boys, in the first raid one went clean through the bow deck and out of the keel before exploding, in the second raid her one rudder was disabled and severe flooding caused by near misses.

Well thats the preamble, no back to the point.....
I found a nice diagram of a Tall Boy bomb with some key dimensions on it to work on  a little learning project on Inventor CAD package.  Dimensioned Tall Boy Bomb (the diagram is about 1:25ish)

Drawing the the actually bomb body was quite easy, a simple profile sketch that then gets rotated to make the solid body shape.  I was intending on drawing the bomb at the final intended scale of  1:144 directly,  I'd already drawn up a table of the dimensions derived from the diagram with a vernier, but as it's good CAD tool I drew it full scale.(This would prove a problem later!!!)
Drawing the fins was a nightmare, I couldn't get the CAD package to draw them as I wanted, Inventor has feature call Loft that lets you extrude for one shape to another, much watching of  YouTube video tutorials ensued and I figured it out, you needed 3 sketches of the aerofoil shape to make it work, the tip, root(in my case bomb center line) and another one in between the two.  Now once you have one fin you get the CAD tool to produce 3 more to complete the circular pattern.
Right, forgot to off set the fit so quick manipulation of the three aerofoil sketches and everything recalculated and then redrew itself.
Now heres where I cocked up taking the full scale CAD model down to 1:144.... Curse you decimal points!!!!
1/144 = 0.006944444444...
So using the Inventors Derive tool, I selected my finished model and typed in the scaling factor....
Great everything looked ok still.
Now come the next big thing, lets see if I can get a 3d print of it from one of the on line 3d fabricators.
I upload it and got a warning back your item is too small to print....
Hold on an minute it should be about 44mm long and 7mm in diameter that miles bigger than their minimums.
Gah, found a mistakes in what I'd done,  I'd used 0.0006944 as the scaling factor so now the bomb was 10 times smaller, hence why no print!!
By chance while looking for more dimension for the Grand Slam I found another modeller stating all you need to do is multiply a Tallboy by 1.2 and you end up with near enough a Grand Slam, actually it needed to be 1.23 to within a millimeter or 5 on the full scale drawing, by the time its 1:144'd you'd never know!!
So folk's  if you want some small model large bombs they can be found here
Tallboy http://shpws.me/rknf
Grand Slam http://shpws.me/rkGV
Hopefully in early April  I will receive my initial prototype prints.....

Finished Rendered Bomb Model

Wire Frame Model

A single tail fin

The Tallboy's profile sketch.