Thanks again guys for all the kind comments. The great thing about being involved on a forum like this is that it does encourage you to keep trying new things out - I wouldn't have put half the effort into recent builds if I wasn't posting here and getting feedback from other
obsessives modellers!
Clashcityrocker wrote: ↑March 18th, 2024, 9:35 am
Love the passenger with her handbag clutched on her lap
One of my grans used to sit like that in cars. She was the world's worst back seat driver... "Watch out at this roundabout, they dew come round there so fast". Mind you the first car she saw had a man walking in front of it with a flag - or so she claimed.
(She did reach 100 so maybe that was true?)
Softscience wrote: ↑March 18th, 2024, 6:12 pm
Do the Airfix rail figures come in that awful gummy plastic as their 1/76 military miniatures? How do you clean up mold lines on that stuff and then get paint to stay on them?
Mercifully no! These are Dapol repops of the old sets (I think) and the plastic is very like the modern airfix kit plastic. The moulds must have survived well as there was very little cleanup required. On dodgy plastic the best trick I've found is to give the figures a coat or two of Pledge/Klear and let it cure before attempting any trimming of flash etc. That way the knife actually cuts instead of just raising burrs. Also cut in a sawing motion with the sharpest blade you can get... The Pledge also helps paint to stay on. Still results may vary, as they say.
I completely gave up on HAT stuff for example, as the plastic was so horrible. (Come to think of it so was a lot of the sculpting.
)
The base - minus lamp post - got finished off yesterday. I sanded down the pavement and tidied up the kerb stones so they all look less like bits of roughly shaped putty! The whole lot then got a couple of coats of clear PVA to hold things together and fill in the worst of the gaps somewhat. I did mean to do the lamp post yesterday as well but sometimes you do want to see some progress on a kit so instead I got on with the Citroen...
It took a couple of goes at sanding and scraping to get the car roof and bonnet decently smooth, and I got a windscreen installed on the second attempt - the first one pinged off into oblivion from the tweezers just as I'd finished shaping it, of course.
The second one I made slightly smaller and superglued some thin stretched sprue around it to look more like the real thing. Headlamps went on and I punched out a couple of clear plastic discs for them. Then a thinned coat of black matt acrylic and I picked out the parts that will be silver in white as an undercoat. The wing mirrors will have to wait until the roof rack is done, as I'll be trying some Mike Grant type wrapping to keep the paintwork intact while I do that.
It does seem to have tidied up quite nicely for now.
The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
