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Showing posts with label Fluff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fluff. Show all posts

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Hobbies in Hong Kong


I spent last week in Hong Kong for work. In between appointments I was able to walk around. Normally while traveling I spend as little time shopping as possible, however, since a lot of hobby kits are shipped out of Hong Kong, I thought this would be a good time to poke around.


The nice people at the hotel provided me with this swell phone, type in the magic words and "Badda-Boom-Badda-Bing".


This was one of the early ones I found. This one was OK, I bought an old Fujimi 1/32 Canter truck. And a Hasegawa steamroller.

On my second trip out I found Continental Hobbies:



This view is misleading, in fact this is a pretty raw neighborhood. Here is the view taken from the shop corner:


A few blocks away are the outdoor markets. Various organs in piles, luggage, watches, vegetables and money changers. I don't think I want to see a watch ever again.


A view looking into the Continental. Looks promising. You never know in Hong Kong...I stepped into a lot of interesting places. 


Turned out to be the hobby store I was looking for. Inventory is literally stowed up in the open ceiling. No old stuff, everything from the last few years. Prices were about 25% - 50% lower than average retail in the US, but no shipping. This shop carried mostly armor and aircraft.


I spoke with the owner, he said he had been there for 50 years.


I bought a lot, here is a shot of my packing once home. For the other kits, I cut the parts off the sprues with my nail clippers and combined them in these boxes. The Saturn is a Lego kit I bought at the last minute and carried onto the plane home.


Here's the real haul: 1/35 Mini Art Household Crockery & Glass, Hasegawa 1/35 Hitachi Vibratory Combined Roller ZC50C-5, 1/32 ICM Polikarpov I-153, 1/35 Hobbyboss Soviet MBV-2 Armored Train, Trumpeter Mini Razor Saw and 1/35 Mini art Soviet Train Tracks.


I even had time to snap a few ref pics of trucks...


Enjoy!
   

Sunday, December 16, 2018

"Objectifies Women & Glorifies War"

"Airplane Woman #6" Ro Annis 2000
Modeling is on the down low right now, I am spending a lot of time writing game stuff for the other blog and some events coming up. This was on the list for repair, so I finally did that. I used to do more art stuff back in the last century. So, here is something I did. Just thought it would be interesting to post. This is a resin casting of an original I created out of plastic. Enjoy!

Oh, the title comes from my mom. That is what she said upon seeing these.



Friday, October 20, 2017

Mad, San & Cosmo: 3 New Gallery Pics

More pixels for your eyespheres...Enjoy!

Mad

San

Cosmo

Top is a scratch build of a Mad Max era vehicle called "Mach Fury". Middle is a vintage Hawk model of a San Francisco Streetcar. Built out of the box, I added the figures. Lastly, we have a 1/72 Bandai (GO BANDAI!) Cosmo Zero as piloted by Akira Yamamoto in Space Battleship Yamato 2199. Dig that cool aotake deck color!

Sunday, September 3, 2017

"...The new phone books are here!...The new phone books are here!"

I remember the older publication well. In fact it was a good reference back in the day.


On the left is my fresh copy of the newest iteration of this concept, "Out of this World Modeling". In truth, the older publication is laser focused on "Spaceships", the newer cuts a wider swath, Super Heroes, Anime and even Gundam.


It includes a nice range of subjects and definitely geared towards introducing the non sci-fi modeler into the fold of that other cooler side of the hobby.


Take a break from dissecting the exact hue of Dunkelgelb and hypothesize on blue squadron and it's role during battle of Yavin.


The nice folks at Kalmbach included my build of a BTL-A4, a prototypical Y-wing as painted by R. McQuarrie.  Enjoy!



Don't worry, Oscar G will be back in part 9 of his build of the DMB-87 in a few short days!

Friday, August 4, 2017

Omaha 2017 IPMS National Convention


Last weekend I joined other humans in the Midwest to celebrate the Joy that is the building of plastic models. Here follows is a scale representation:


Four of us made the 8 hour drive, we were not sure how we were going to get our purchases home. This is the advantage of being typically male, as a future problem "this would simply solve itself". Onward! (&BTW, it did).


These places for the masses look best in the morning after coffee. For about 6 minutes.


One of the "Sprue Brethren" schlepping unassembled plastic goodness.


The contest room on Friday.


Typical of the vendor wares.


Vendor display of Nazi plywood Horton in 1/32 scale.


One of my purchases. I have others in the series. Sure, laugh it up fuzzball.


This was a seminar that I visited on building real space craft. I gave a seminar myself on resin kits. Fun and well attended. Uh, this one. Mine? Huh.


The nice folks from FSM had an advance copy of "Out Of This World Modeling". SHAMELESS PLUG: I have a model featured in it, this will be out in the fall.


Had this at the Sack museum.


OK, here are some models:


Here is a white car, presumably driven by Romy.


Helicopter.


Robot Spy.


Eindecker.


Claude.


Submarine, Yellow.


Bloodsucker.


Our "Group Build", F-4 Viet Nam Phantoms. Mine is the gray one. (We got 3rd place!).


After the awards ceremony we grabbed our models and scattered like rats.


Thus endeth another scale modeling event. We return to regularly scheduled blogness in our next installment. Plastic is dead. Long live Plastic!

Friday, May 5, 2017

Oscar Goldman builds the DMB-87: PART 2

But First a Cold War Joke and after much laughing we will talk Datum Line:




In case your under 30, let me introduce myself, I'm Oscar Goldman and I'm scratchbuilding a DMB-87 in quarter inch scale. The "Snuka" is from the hit Japanese television show SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMAMMAMOMOTO 2199. (I always have to stop and think if its "Yamato" or Yamamoto", it's an occidental thing).


The orthographic plans are brought into Illy and carefully sized. I've been down this road before, so I am very careful to get everything properly scaled and all the layers with various views properly labeled. At some point you will end up with a lot of layers and they will all look the same. I know this is really dull and I sound like your mom. Fine. Make a mess, see if I care.


Here is a print out on 8 1/2x 11 paper, the lines are so I can cut the pages and register them. I end up printing out a lot of pages as I go along, doing it on standard sized cheap paper works well. The "Marquette" is made from foam core and is just a mental exercise to wrap my head head around how I'm going to build this thing. This ship has a lot of complex curves that all meet up in odd places. The wings and landing gear are pretty straight forward, they basically hang off the fuselage. The fuselage, however, has a lot of stuff: two frontal jowl rocket pods, chin scoop, cockpit, turret, six wing connections and two engines tucked underneath. There are flairs and bulges everywhere, a metal clad exhaust housing past the engine nozzles. The fuse terminates in a twin micro boom...


This is one of the reference pics, showing all the beautiful brain auguring complexity. When I'm looking at this I am trying to see how all the components are going to be located and hung off an imaginary datum line that runs through the design core. Sure, I could just whip out some oven baked clay and make a pattern, but how do all these remain symmetrical...proportional...straight... Believe it or not, this is fun for me. I'd rather make a Rubrics puzzle than solve one.


Here is an indication of what's going on inside my tiny brain. Everything relates to the fuselage, the core of the model. I draw a line that runs through the center, usually I refer to it as the "center line" or "zero line", the correct term is datum line.

Datum line: (engineering) A line which serves as a reference or base for the measurement of other quantities.

If this were a "studio" style model, the datum line usually doubles as the metal support armature. This model falls into the hobby kit world so will be created sans metal support armature. It's only 18 inches long, so we don't need to go crazy here anyway. (However, I am intending to cast in hard points of brass tubing as support so the model will not sag over time). Back to this illustration. Forget the surface detail, it's a distraction. Instead, think about the sub-assemblies. On the nose are two jowl rocket pods (see lines A and B, above). All that matters is how they get located onto the fuselage. Again, if you look at the animation pic from the show (above) do not be dazzled by the surface detail. Mentally break down the overall housing, the interior honeycomb holding the rockets, the forward rib extension and the lip around the opening. Now, imagine each part as emerging from a simple block of material. These blocks in turn are located to the fuselage via the datum line running through it's core.


From the start I'm thinking about the construction method of how this thing will get made. I can carve patterns from wood and vacu-form them to make shells. I can build up the under-structure using bulkheads and fill in the curved surfaces with epoxy. I can carve the whole thing out of styrene blocks. There are pros and cons to each. Vacu-forming will yield beautiful curved surfaces, but getting the parting line on this model will be challenging. Vacu-forms also shrink. It's also harder to nail the datum locators on the resulting shell. I seriously consider epoxy, but I'm worried about getting an even surface. Its also unclear if I can scribe panel lines. I settle on the styrene blocks. The thickest styrene I have is 1/4 inch, so multiple layers will have to be laminated together to get my shapes. However, these slabs will also serve as datum points for building. Styrene has the advantage of being easy to work with and the surface will accept detail lovingly. These drawings are meant to show how I think about the building inside out. The cockpit space is thought of as a void that will be walled around with styrene blocks. In block form centers can be located along the datum line, holes drilled to locate sub-assemblies and so on. The most complex part of this model are the engines. We will get to the details of this later, when it makes more sense.


I know enough bla bla and let's get building! Here are two slabs of 1/4 inch styrene, rough cut that will become the basis of the fuselage.


They are glued together with CA (super glue) instead of Weld-on liquid bonding solvent. This stuff can curl parts when it dries and shrinks.


This is a horizontal slice of the fuselage. I cut out half a top view template and draw a slightly over sized outline using the center line. This is a visual reference only at this point, a sort of high altitude map.


Using screws, I then attach a strip of MDF on the bottom on center. This will be a handle of sorts, a reference to center when I put this into the mill to create the actual center line.


Of course, using the "mill" these days is like using carbon paper or a dial telephone, everything is spit out at the touch of a button by printers. The MDF rail on the bottom (clamped into the vice) will define the center line. This makes things easier as I go back to locate various elements.


Find center, zero it out, use the mill bit to cut both sides the same from center.

Join me next time as we get all transcendental and create the void.