Scratch Building in 1/144th Scale w/ William Adair: Episode 122

Welcome to Plastic Model Mojo, a podcast dedicated to scale modeling, as well as the news and events around the hobby. Let's join Mike and Kentucky Dave as they strive to be informative, entertaining and help you keep your modeling mojo alive Well folks, welcome to episode 122 of Plastic Model Mojo Dave, how are you doing Enjoying the cooler weather?

It's a little early. Yeah, we are experiencing unseasonably cool weather here for mid-August in Kentucky, but you know what? It keeps the grass from growing quite as much it keeps the yard work down. So that gives me a little more time to model, and Lord knows, I need a little more time to model. You know what? Actually, things are going pretty darn good in the model sphere. Modeling juice is flowing, things are going well on several fronts. Life outside of modeling is starting to settle down a little bit, getting some modeling reading done. I'm seeing the light at the end of a tunnel on at least one project and yeah, I've got to say my mojo is high. How about you?

Sometimes you just need to remind yourself just how much progress you can make with just small but regular steps.

Yes, yes, that in fact has been my experience the past week or so.

And while it may be needed sometimes, you know, for certain tasks large blocks of time are not always required. Right, and it's a win to not let the lack of these large blocks of time keep you from even approaching your workbench, which I'm guilty of sometimes.

That's absolutely been happening to me.

I'll talk a little bit more about some of this in the listener mail segment that's coming up. I'll talk a little bit more about some of this in the listener mail segment that's coming up. But well, because someone asked us a rather simple but most serious question that is in the spirit of this realization I've made over the last few weeks, or re-appreciated, or relearned or whatever you want to put on the front of it. Something deep down I'm sure I knew, but sometimes you just get in the habit of not doing stuff and that's kind of the opposite, opposite task, the opposite way you need to be approaching it. So I don't know, that's what's been up in my model sphere finally having that aha again for probably about the 400th time in my modeling career and moving something forward well, you know what is the the and you feel a little bit stupid sometimes that you're relearning things, you're rediscovering stuff.

You knew that you already knew, but you had kind of gotten away from it, and you suddenly come back to the realization that you know, I don't need a four-hour modeling stretch to get something done. Oh yeah, mike, do you have a modeling fluid on hand?

I do, dave. I'm enjoying some Buffalo Trace Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, and this was graciously provided. I do mean gracious because it was a liter bottle or a liter and a half.

Yep.

Rather large bottle provided by listener Andrew DeBoer. So Andrew appreciate it, sir. It's good, We'll get to that later. What about you?

Well, I've got a beer, also supplied by a listener, and it's one that I've actually had, because I went to the microbrewery in Madison, the Great Dane, and I had this exact beer. It's called Crop Circle Wheat and it was supplied by listener William Sweda, and I think that's how the last name is pronounced. If I'm wrong, william, reach out and let me know how badly I butchered it. So I'm looking forward to this because, like I said, I had it while we were in Madison and I enjoyed it. So I have zero doubt this is going to be a winner.

I'm sure it will. You know we're over the late emails we got to after Nats and all that's caught up. But man, they've been rolling in. Dave, we got a lot. We got a long segment tonight, folks, we got a lot of listener mail. All right, let's get to it. What I was alluding to a few minutes ago. He's been enjoying some of his local clubs, their IPMS club, their summer barbecue, and he went to his first AMPS meeting at that club. But now he's got life and stuff screwing up his participation and he says he doesn't have any idea how to manage his work schedule or his hobby life. How do you guys manage your frustration when life gets in the way of your hobby and how do you keep your mojo going? God, those are age-old questions.

Well, while you're stewing on that a second, let me just rewind a minute and say it's this part of it, is this appreciation that you don't need large blocks of time for actual modeling all of the time. You do sometimes, but that's a rock. You got to train yourself not to hide behind. On occasion, like I was alluding to earlier, I've learned again, again and again that coming down there and doing 25, 30, 35, 40, 40 minutes a night or every other night a few times a week, and I've really knocked out a bunch of work on my E16, paul, which we'll talk about in the Bench Top Halftime Report. But that really doesn't address your situation of needing to get out of the house and things to go to this other stuff. You got anything on that, dave?

You know, life is compromises, particularly when you have family, children, and you do what you can. And now, this year, mike previously has alluded to the fact that we've gone to a ton of shows for us as compared to a normal year. It just worked out that way this year, but there are many years where we pass on things that we want to do. I missed, just to give you an example, due to some family obligations, I missed our last MMCL regular club meeting. And you don't beat yourself up for it. You try and stay connected to your fellow modelers in the club through other interactions, virtual, when you can't be there in person.

And then the other thing I would say and it kind of goes along with what Mike talked about with going and modeling and small blocks of time and all, and I've mentioned this before is that I'm terrible with time management.

They say the one thing that you can't buy more of is time, but you can be efficient with the use of the time that you do have. And I find myself wasting too much time, be it staring at my phone on social media or, you know, puttering around the house without accomplishing anything or putting off tasks that I need to get done. Time management's important and it's important with going out to the model meetings or whatever If you can arrange your schedule so that you can do this and this at this time and free up the block of time that you need. A lot of times that can be solved by time management, but not always. Sometimes you're just going to have to sacrifice, and you know what I love, my hobby and all but spending time with your kids is absolutely wonderful and you'll never regret it. So just don't be so hard on yourself.

Well, we don't know where you are in your life right now and or what your family size and situation is like, and Dave and I have had a bountiful model season this year and we've been really grateful for that. It's probably testament to the fact that our children are largely grown at this point. Yeah, we both have one out of high school. We both have one in high school, though mine's taken all his classes at the community college, which is there's a tuition stipend for us. As far as I'm concerned, he's in college too, because, by God, I'm paying for college. So maybe the financial side is going to get a little more disastrous. As the time pendulum swings in our favor, the finance one's going to swing the other way. What?

broke. Your wallet is going to become a list of college tuition bills and textbooks. Yeah, oh God.

Oh so, thomas, keep your chin up, man, and take the time when you can find it, yes, and just stay plugged into your modeling community. It won't, it won't be terrible, you'll get there, man, yep.

Absolutely.

Next up is Derek Shaw, and he's in Pensacola, florida.

Dave, oh God, that's heaven If I did not live in Louisville, kentucky. The only other place I would live on this planet is Pensacola, florida.

I'm more of a South Carolina low country fan myself, but I get it. I understand You'd be a docent at the museum and a greeter at Walmart. Probably the club he's a member of in Pensacola is the Panhandle Automotive Modelers Society PAMS, okay, and this club is mostly automotive I kind of gathered that and their slogan is anything with wheels. So they probably actually deal with a lot in that club. They meet the fourth Saturday in Pensacola at John's Models and that's one of Pensacola's one-stop shops for all your scale modeling needs.

Yes. You familiar with that one For the longest time, I mean like 60, 70 years. The model shop in Pensacola was a place called Bobi's B-O-B-E, apostrophe S, and it closed a number of years ago simply because the owners, of course, aged out and I was worried that Pensacola was not going to be well served. But yes, I've heard that John's had come along and now was the hobby shop in Pensacola to hit on your way to or from the beach or the museum, or both.

And they're not the only club in Pensacola. He wants to plug a show coming up, the Blue Angel Model Fest 2024, September 14th. So that's coming up here in three weeks.

Oh man, if I could get down there From the time of this recording.

Yeah, today's the 21st of August, so September 14th, 8.30am to 5pm at the Santa Rosa County Auditorium in Milton, florida, and it's put on by the IPMS Pensacola Modelers.

Oh gosh, if I could, I would love to steal Time to go down again.

You got shows to go to in our region. Man, you can't be dashing out on us, I know but I'm in Pensacola, go get a sunburn.

I have not been to Pensacola in a couple of years now and it's killing me. I got to get back.

Up next. Dave from Detail and Scale is a Rock Rosak. They got another new book, man, they're cranking these out. Yes, is a rock rosack. They got another new book, man, they're cranking these out. Yes, f80 shooting star, detail and scale yep, ready for your purchase, either print on demand or e-copy, and you can find that information at detail and scalecom. And f80 is a fun one, dave, it is. And Our first real deployed and operated jet fighter, yep.

And it would be. It's about time for us, in 72nd scale, to get a new modern tool F-80.

Well, I told Rock I wanted this book because I think, for the neophyte aircraft modeler who's sweating it to do a bare metal, that this is an ideal candidate if there's a decent kit out there. Yeah, just because the lines are simple and it's not very big.

Yeah, but we could use a new kit, a new F80 kit. There are a couple of kits out there that are fine, but they're long in the tooth and we could just use one.

Well, that's the new book for Detail and Scale, and we'll keep it on the down low, but Rock's also doing a solid, so let's thank Rock for that.

Yes, we are very appreciative. I sent him an email today.

Neil Hinkle from Jefferson County area in Tennessee, just outside Knoxville Yep, a new listener. He's trying to get current so he's burning through the back catalog, loves to hear about new techniques and try new perspectives on looking at different models and genres that he's learned through our podcast. So thank you for that, neil, and he's planning on going to the next show that happens to be in East Tennessee. Wherever that may be, I hope to see you guys there. Unfortunately I'll.

Well, the next show in East Tennessee is going to be the Appalachian Scale Modelers Association show in Greenville, tennessee, and that's, off the top of my head, is sometime in December or, sorry, sometime in September. So that's coming up I think it's the week after the second week in September. But you know you might check the IPMS events calendar on the IPMS USA website to to confirm that. Yeah, also, the Appalachian Scale Modelers Association has a has a Facebook page. That's got the information on it. I went to that last year. I can't make it this year because I'm going to be in that area Labor Day weekend, which is the week prior. So due to some family things outside of my control, like we just discussed, dave, I get to give a model show the skip that I've been to for the last two years.

And also if you want to stretch the definition of East Tennessee into Middle Tennessee. In November there's a show in Murfreesboro.

Which probably is not that much further from just outside Knoxville than Greenville is, because Greenville is a good hour away, and then Huntsville, alabama, is's coming up, uh real soon.

Yeah, they're like this weekend or the next.

Well, if it's this weekend it'll be too late by the time this podcast oh yeah, that's true. If it's not, you might check out huntsville, because that's really an easy drive as well. So, yeah, get to a show man.

It's big fun it is next up, dave mike slay and he's from worcester. Big fun. It is Next up Dave Mike Slay and he's from Worcester in the United Kingdom. He wants to say that our coverage of the United States National Convention has decided to make him commit to coming over and hopefully he'll be seeing us in 2025.

Oh, that would be fantastic. Hampton is a great. That would be fantastic. Hampton is a great, you know, if you're from outside the United States and you had to choose Hampton's a good one because you can fly in, you can go to Washington DC and see Udvar-Hazy, the National Air and Space Museum. Air and space museum there's.

There's just so much to see in that very compressed space between dc and uh hampton, oh yeah, and air service into the metro dc area is pretty good, yes, excellent. Actually it's a little busy, but uh, lots of flights is what I mean. And you know you're right there on the east coast. I mean, if you want to be any closer to the UK, you'd have to go to the show It'd have to be in like Banger Maine or something like that.

Yep.

Absolutely, but we look forward to your opportunity and hope hope you get to make it in 2025 and we'll be there and seek us out and find us. We should not be too hard to find and weidentally, dave he says small world he used to have family in Louisville, kentucky as well.

Oh, did he. Well, when we see you in Hampton, stop by the table and tell us all about it.

In closing says he's part of the West Midlands Police Scale Model Club here in the UK and on September 14th and 15th three of these guys from the club are going to be speed building through a 24th scale Airfix Spitfire, the brand new one.

Yep.

At Duxford Hangar number one, next to the Airfix stand. It's this new tool kit, and they're going to be doing it in Polish markings because this will be in conjunction with the Polish Heritage Flight, who operates a hurricane out of Duxford.

Yep, I saw something about it on Facebook.

And I think the OTB guys answered Mike's email as well recently. So if you're interested in that, please check out that event. And, mike, we hope to see you in the United States for the national convention. It's going to make you cry, mr Librarian, who's an occasional modeler.

Uh-oh, oh no.

John Lees says this was going to interest you more than me. Okay, and the Japanese aircraft builder? You are. Actually we're both building one right now. Yeah, it's true, you might beat me by the time it's all said and done.

We'll see.

He went to an estate sale recently and acquired a copy of Japanese Aircraft Interiors oh, great book For $45.

Good God, that's a good price. That is a good price.

It doesn't stop there, dave Uh-huh. He also picked up a copy of the I-400, japan's secret aircraft-carrying strike submarine. Another good book For $25. Ooh, yeah, nothing like a great book. Arguably a rare book at this point. Yes, either one of these, really yeah, our commanding price is way higher than that.

Yep.

So there you go, man.

They do both happen to be in my library.

I figured they were. Yeah but they're also-.

For these prices.

I can see Dave buying a second copy.

Yeah, exactly.

You got your legacy copy and your toilet reader.

I have actually done that, where you walk by and see something and it's like, even though I have that, that is too good a price, just to let it go.

Well, thanks, john, for sharing your book bargains, I'm sure. Congrats, congrats. Yes, oh, our Gundam listener out of Middle Tennessee, speaking of Middle Tennessee, jason Campbell.

Yeah.

This past Saturday, so I guess he sent this on the 19th Monday, the 19th, so that'd be the 17th Pre-pandemic. They had a Gundam build group that was meeting at Hobby Town in his particular location I'm not sure if that's the one in Knoxville or if he's in Murfreesboro or where exactly he is. At one time their largest pre-COVID crowd was 60 people on one of their build days.

Wow, that's impressive.

In a space where 30 was tight, so I bet that was fun.

That sounds like the dojo in Madison.

This past Saturday they had 20 folks attending the build and as many more had came by and asked questions and asked about joining the group for the next event and wanted information on their. I guess they have weekly Friday gatherings as well, so it sounds like Jason's. You know they had a bunch of entries at the Knoxville show. I was really impressed by that. So, and he's saying that their Hobby Town group was started in 2015 with five people and after 10 years they're up to 100 members now in their Discord server and their Facebook page has 200 members.

Yeah.

And the group has built enough support that their Hobby Town is now a Bandai flagship store.

All right, and that just goes to show. All it takes in the beginning is four or five guys or gals to get together and share a common interest in modeling, and it will take off from there.

Next on the docket for him is the Huntsville show coming up. Yeah, he says Saturday, which he sent this email on the 19th. So yeah, the Huntsville show is this weekend, so any information we give will be too late, but the Greenville show's in two weeks and he mentions that one as well. So if you get the Greenville show, folks go support those guys. They're trying to get something started there.

And Dave, finally, from the email side of things, mr Michael Karnaka from New York City. What's the question? His question, this episode is what was the last time that we were surprised by something in the hobby? And for context, he says today someone posted a series of pics regarding the liberation of a town in Northwest Europe. And now, thanks to one of those pics, his wonder of whether or not the Free Polish forces used the AEC armored car, for which there's a mini art kit. And now he knows they did because of these photographs and these surprises. So now I can do that vehicle in this AEC armored car with the Free Polish markings on it. So a small surprise, but he wants to know if we've experienced anything similar.

When you read the question, what immediately popped to mind for me wasn't a photograph or a historical thing. What popped to mind to me was at the Nationals in Madison discovering the laser-cut foam masking inserts for different model kits. Basically, they're laser-cut foam shapes where you can paint the wheel wells of an aircraft model and then you pop these things in and you don't have to try and tape mask a wheel. Well, and they surprised me because I had never thought about doing it any way other than the traditional take a bunch of strips of tape and spend an hour per wheel, well, taping little bits of tape and cutting little bits to fill in spots and all. And the moment I saw these things it was literally like a light bulb going off over your head, like man. Why didn't I think of that? That makes so much sense. Why hasn't somebody done it before now? And I'm sure it was all so out of left field and such a great idea. Once you actually saw it.

Well, for me it's not really translated to modeling because I tend to shy away from the obscure and one-off kind of things. But quite often in my military collecting kind of adjacent hobby I'll find pictures of Red Army soldiers carrying firearms or wearing equipment that has been supplied through Lend-Lease. That's kind of surprising. We all know about the aircraft and the trucks and the tanks and all that stuff, but occasionally you'll see a firearm or something that's you know the caliber of that weapon is unlike anything else in their inventory. So either all the ammunition sent over was issued to the unit that got those things and they used it all up and threw it away, or they didn't last very long and they threw it away or whatever.

But just just things like that kind of always surprised me because they're they're things you never heard of. When you, when you all right or have never seen. When you're looking at like us, canadian and british lynn lease material yeah, that's got. That kind of surprises me a lot. Actually, some, some, some things we supplied in great volume for a long time and there was other things we supplied very sparsely. Maybe they were in surplus. At the time it was being commandeered for Lend-Lease program and it was just sent because it was something to send. Maybe it didn't fit into their supply chain very well, but it was something to use for a little while. But just things like that really surprised me.

Well, next time you run across one of those, you'll have to post it on the dojo.

I'll try to do that. What's been going on Facebook Messenger, Dave?

Well, just like email, facebook Messenger's been hopping, so I'll go through these and I'll try and go through them fairly succinctly. Listener Stephen Williams reached out. He heard the last episode where I talked about the difficulties I had with masking and painting white and the bleed through that I had, and he reached out and just made some suggestions, all of which are good suggestions. Things like if you're going to paint white, paint white first if you possibly can when painting a masked item. If you can paint the white first and then cover it them, if you can paint the white first and then cover it, just simply because white is such a difficult color to get opacity on. But we just had a nice back and forth exchange about different things and different techniques and it was just very kind of him, having heard me on the podcast, mentioned the difficulty I had to reach out and chime in with his tips and suggestions. And that just goes to reaffirm what I've said, that modelers in general are just a really pretty good group of guys and gals.

Next we've got Scott Daniel from the UK, who listens to our podcast while walking his dog. He did not mention the dog's breed. So, scott, send us a picture or, better yet post it in the dojo. But he's heard me sing the praises of the Tamiya Zero in 72nd scale and he couldn't decide which one to buy, so he ended up purchasing all of them. So I think Tamiya-san owes me a check. I'll be looking in the mail for that anytime for my commission. And Scott, you're going to enjoy building those kits. You really will. They are fall together fantastic.

And Dave's trying to buy them all, at least all the ones in North America.

Yes, that is right, All of them. I am trying to corner the market, although I'm down two because I sent two to Steve Hustad, so I'm actually my inventory went down for the first time in a long time. Actually, my inventory went down for the first time in a long time. Also, from the UK, neil Gilborn sent my. I think I may have discovered heaven. Neil sent photographs of a place called Domino Model Cigars and Spirits. Oh man, and it turns out this place is in Belgium and it is exactly what it sounds like. It's a three-story shop, and on one floor you got a hobby shop, on the next floor you got a cigar emporium, and on the next floor you got a cigar emporium, and on the next floor you got a liquor shop.

And oh, my gosh, this place looks like heaven and it got like a, a lounge on the top, on the roof and no, it's I actually he sent pictures.

it's got a, a steeple-type roof, a highly sloped roof, but yeah, no, that would be perfect if there was a modeling cigar and drink lounge on the roof. But, man, I salute Belgian ingenuity for coming up with that one. And he sent some not only photos but video. And he sent some not only photos but video. And it looks like if I ever get anywhere close to Europe, anywhere close to Belgium, I'm going to have to go by that place just to say I've been, sounds fun.

It does. Mark Copeland reached out to me because he wanted to make sure I was aware that, edouard, he wanted to make sure I was aware that Edward you know they've released their P-51D kit did a Royal class and I picked up some Overtrees at the Nationals and Mark picked up a bunch of them himself because obviously he's a big 8th Air Force guy and he's got a whole bunch of P-51s he wants to do Sky and he's got a whole bunch of P-51s he wants to do and apparently Edward has done a 3D-printed drop-in fully detailed wheel wells for the Edward P-51 kit in 72nd scale and from the CAD renderings they show it's gorgeous and Mark DMed me to say that he'd be purchasing about a dozen of them. So I have no doubt that's correct either, having seen what he bought at the Nationals. Our friend Christian Gurney you and I actually had discussed this GasPatch has released a new 72nd scale ME163. And Christian actually ordered it and got it in the mail. His copy came from Greece and I don't know if GasPatch is located in Greece or if he just happened to buy from a supplier from Greece. And I don't know if Gas Patch is located in Greece or if he just happened to buy from a supplier in Greece, but he has promised us future photos of the kits. What's in the kit? Because I got to tell you I am super curious, and so was he so curious he had to go out and buy it right away. I might join him. Yeah, me too, even though I've got one in my ME-163, in my case, paul Gloucester, the quokka. He sent me a picture of his pool, so I sent him a picture of my pool, me a picture of his pool, so I sent him a picture of my pool. Then he sent me a picture, the diorama that he has been inspired to do, because he stayed with Steve and Mark before and after the National Convention and now he's got the bug to do an aircraft diorama, and the one he's doing is really interesting. And then, finally, the OTB crew or at least a portion of the OTB crew were passing by on their way to the Queensland model show, and he sent a picture of Dave Ian and he's sharing a libation in Paul's model room. So they looked like they were having fun.

Finally, stephen Lee, he purchased a silent air compressor because he had heard me talk about the one that I had forever and then, when it died replacing it and how much I liked it. And he discovered the one flaw in the silent air compressor. And I will admit this this is a flaw. It's so quiet that you don't realize it's on and you forget to turn it off and drain the tank. And so you could walk away from it, coming down the next day and look down at the gauge and realize the tank's fully under pressure and the switch is still on. Now it doesn't really cause any harm, but you do want to, when you're done using the compressor, turn it off and let the air out of the tank. But yes, that is the one flaw is it is so quiet that you can forget that it's even on. So he's now aware of that problem.

You can put on a wall timer. Yeah, exactly, that's a great idea. Have it shut off at midnight. I didn't even think about that. That is a a great idea. Have it shut off at midnight I didn't even think about that. That is a really good idea. Now you and I are going to have to talk further.

But if you don't have a leak in the system, it's going to charge up to its pressure and just sit there.

Yes, yes, you're right.

If it's leaking off, it's going to kick on and off all night, but if it's not, it's going to sit there under pressure. I don't know what pressure you run it up to, but it may or may not be a problem.

Yeah, it's 20 PSI. It's not anything close to what the system would stress it. But yeah, wall timer is probably not a bad idea. I'm going to think about it. You and I are going to have to talk about that. All not a bad idea. I'm going to think about it. You and I are going to have to talk about that, all right, so that's it from the Facebook side of things.

Well, folks, we appreciate it. That was a lot. We tried to hustle through it and get it done. But thanks folks for writing in. There's a few I've set aside.

If you didn't hear anything during the episode that you had written in about or we didn't get to, I might be coming at you private. So keep an eye out for that. If that doesn't happen and you think it should have, just sent me another note, and there's a couple of put a stack off to the side Cause some folks have asked me some things that I'd rather address personally, one-on-one, so we'll do that. But if you'd like to write into the show, you can do so by writing into plasticmodelmojo at gmailcom. We also take direct messages from Facebook and they usually haven't handled the email and Dave handles the Facebook message or, unless there's a severe subject matter reason for either one of us to do the other one.

And I want to add, dave, that currently we are soliciting questions and topics for the Wheel of Accidental Wisdom. We've got a handful of those, but not very many folks. Please keep those coming. And you know I mentioned it earlier today, dave we've gotten a few things from sponsors and friends and things that I think we might can turn this one into a a a a prize deal Maybe.

Yes, I think that would be a great idea.

Got anything else on this line of mail?

Nope just keep the DMs coming. I keep saying it, but I absolutely mean it. The joy that I get when I'm in line at the grocery store or at lunch in the office and I get a DM from a modeler who's been listening to an episode or seen something on the dojo and they've got some input to give, that really makes my day. Simply because I love modeling, I love the hobby and I like talking to other people who also love it. Our listenership here at Plastic Model Mojo continues to grow and that's largely thanks to you all, the folks who listen. Now, Please rate us on whatever podcasting app. Give us five stars. It helps us become more visible. Also, if you know a modeler who doesn't listen to Plastic Model Mojo, please recommend us. A recommendation from a current listener is the best way for us to continue to grow, and we are continuing to grow with new listeners, and that just makes the community bigger and better.

And if you've done that, please check out the fellow podcasts out there in the model sphere. You can do so by going to wwwmodelpodcastscom. That's modelpodcastspluralcom. It's a consortium website set up with the help of Stuart Clark at the Scale Model Podcast up there in Canada and if you go to that site you can find an aggregation of all the banner links to all the other podcasts currently active in the model sphere. So check them out.

In addition to podcasts, we've got a lot of blog and YouTube friends out in the model sphere. You're going to check out Jim Bates Scale Canadian TV. About time for some new stuff from Jim. Check out Stephen Lee. We've mentioned him before. Spru Pie with Fretz, great blog, great long and short form content. You're going to check out what Stephen Lee's got going on and what he's talking about in the hobby. Chris Wallace, model airplane maker, a great blog and YouTube channel. He just dropped one recently about a museum and a museum hobby shop. Yes, that's worth checking out. The Inch High Guy, mr Jeff Groves, the Inch High Blog, all Things 72nd Scale. He's been a guest on the show and really digging the 72nd scale work from him and if you're into that scale, check it out. Or if you're into anything like batch builds or curious about that stuff, check out the Inch High blog. And finally, evan McCallum Panzermeister36. Check out his YouTube channel if you're interested in weathering armor models or looking at his build reviews and the occasional rail car.

If you were not lucky enough to get to the Nationals, evan kindly posted the seminar that he put on at the Nationals on his YouTube channel. So, even if you weren't able to make the Nationals, you have a chance to see the presentation that everybody who went to the Nationals saw, and not only that, I've got to say he was very well-dressed for his presentation. Normally, here I ask you to join your national IPMS organization. Instead, this time I am going to thank you for joining your national IPMS organization. Ipms USA's current membership is right now about 5,450 members, which is as large as it's been in my living memory, and I think that it's just going to grow from there. But I want to thank all of you who have heard me and have joined. Thank you for joining. Stay tuned. Better things are coming.

Also, right now, if you haven't joined or need to renew, they're running a special where you can get three years membership for $60, membership for $60, which is a fairly significant discount off of the normal yearly membership. So go, join or extend your current membership in IPMS USA. Also, if you're an armor modeler or a post-1900s figure modeler, take a look at joining the Armor Modeling and Preservation Society, amps. They're a fine organization of modelers dedicated to the specific genre of armor and post-1900 figure modeling. Great group of guys. If you're not a member, join Well, dave let's have a word from our sponsor.

You got it.

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Well, folks, it's time for our special segment and we've got something pretty interesting tonight. If you've been on our Facebook page or our Facebook groups, you might have noticed a modeler named William Adair who's been cranking out over the last few years at least visible to us on these venues 144th scale aircraft and not just any aircraft, really small aircraft, stick and string pre-World War I and World War I era aircraft in 1 to 144th scale. Scratch built.

Pretty amazing stuff, dave absolutely unbelievable stuff well, william's got a book that's soon to be released on on his scratch building in this scale and in his subject matter, and we had a chance to talk to william and here it is. Well, dave, you know, we've got a lot of really great modelers who come through the dojo, and our guest here is one of them, and I remember when I first started noticing their work, you make some mental assumptions based on, yes, the norms of the hobby, yeah, and then like eight pictures in, you're like what is that? Oh, that's a matchstick. Oh my God.

I had the exact same reaction, mike. I'm looking at these and I'm going man, those are really good 70 second scale biplanes. Why is he scratch building them? Because they're kits of those. And then, like you said, you get to the picture with the match head and you're like oh my gosh.

Well, from Australia, tonight we've got modeler William Adair. William, how are you doing?

Hey, I'm really good, great to be here.

We're glad to have you. We want to get you on because and we'll talk about a little bit here going forward but your magnificent work is culminating in, I guess, your first published effort. I guess maybe it is, yeah, cool. Well, before we get into that, why don't you give us a little bit of your background to help us understand how you got to where you are?

I guess I'm your standard mid-50s modeler, kind of grew up in the sort of heyday of Airfix and Matchbox kits and that sort of thing during the mid to late 70s, early 80s. I was doing that, I guess, in my teenage years, that sort of thing. Left school, didn't quite know what to do with myself and I started a model-making job, which was kind of strange at the time. Now that I look back on it I heard through word of mouth that there was a place that was making these kind of like knick-knacks of colonial buildings. They're like little kind of things that your nana would put on her mantelpiece. They were plaster casts of Australian bark huts from the early settler period, ranging through to terrace houses from the Victorian era. They would make these and they'd be hand-painted. And I got this strange job doing this.

I heard through word of mouth about it and you would turn up to this place on a Friday with a piece of luggage and there'd be this whole motley assortment of people who would be queuing up to fill their bags full of these plaster casts. They'd take them home with pots of paint and throughout the week they'd put them all together through different sort of you know color washes and things like that, then bring them back the following friday, have them graded, paid in cash and away they'd go again. So I did that for a while, which was quite a handy job. There was all kinds of people doing it. This nice punk rock chick told me that if I take my suitcase to the pub afterwards and I ask nicely, they'll put it behind a bar for me so I can basically drink the you know drink the proceeds of the week's work.

Better question did she entice you into punk rock?

dabbled in it, yeah good for you I was a school leaver at the time so I was, you know, very kind of like wide-eyed and didn't quite know what what was going on. But I I did that for a while and I think at one stage the boss had come past and he he was looking at the various you know painted pieces of different people. He goes who's this guy? He goes his, his wriggly tin, rusty iron roofs are really nice and sort of one thing led to another and I wound up getting a job there full-time in their R&D department doing some of the masters for the new products and stuff like that, which was an unusual kind of job. That was a bit weird.

What did you make the masters out?

of. They were mostly. I think the scale was a lot of the time it was like HO scale. So there was a lot of pieces that were appropriated from model railway, if you know what I mean, gotcha. You know like doors, windows and things like that. But a lot of the time it was clay with other pieces stuck to it, and then there's a silicon silicon mold made of that and then the plaster casts were subsequently done from those. They're often dunked in this kind of slurry, of kind of varnish that would sort of seal the plaster and make them quite solid once, and that was allowed to dry. Then you could paint over the top of that. But they had trees kind of moulded into the sides of the buildings and stuff like that. Some of them actually, from my memory, were quite beautiful actually.

But I did that for I think about a year, maybe a year and a half, and eventually the boss had said that him and his family were making a bit of a sea change and moving the whole operation to this sort of rather picturesque country town. So I had to get out of there and in those days I think model-making jobs seemed to grow on trees, because I saw in the newspaper that there was another job for an architectural model maker and I applied for that and I sort of left the one model-making job on a Friday and started this other one on a Monday, which was odd looking back on it, and that was a very different sort of setup. They did architectural models for architects, for council, for promotional stuff, that sort of thing, for, like, selling housing estates to prospective buyers and that sort of thing, and it was a pretty high-pressure job. I started there as an assistant and I was kind of told pretty early on that if there was ever a senior model maker there it was my duty to be on hand and basically, you know, ready to help at any time of the day or night. So in the architecture industry there's a culture it's probably I don't know if it's still this way now, but it certainly was in those days of basically pulling all-nighters, usually towards the end of the job, but frequently, frequently, things would ramp up.

From the start You'd be working 8 to 10 hours a day. Then it would go up to 16, 18, 20 hours, to the point where working a 30-hour shift was not uncommon at all. So I remember starting there and then about six weeks later it was 6 am in the morning. I'd been there for two days, I hadn't gone home, I hadn't slept for 30 hours. I was seeing the sun come up for I think the third time in my shift. I was like what happened? How did I get here? It was a strange, strange job.

The fellow that I work with was very, very into accuracy and everything had to be within, I think, 0.05 of a millimetre, you know sort of accuracy as normal sort of working distances. And some of these models were huge, like some of them were, I guess, about three meters square, some of the larger sort of housing estate kind of models and things like that. Other ones were like office towers with like lots of acrylic windows inscribed, and this was all in the days before laser cutting or, you know, 3d printing. Of course it's like sure guess early 90s when I was doing it, and so everything was done by hand All the windows were cut out by hand and everything was sort of assembled, I think even the architectural drawings.

In those days CAD was coming in, as far as I could tell, and most of the drawings seemed to be hand-drawn, hand-drafted, so it was still a very hands-on thing. I think these days there must be a lot of 3d printing and laser cutting, that goes on, but everything will be sprayed in like assembled, then sprayed in automotive paints, which is the most durable and really kind of gave the best finishes, I guess. But because these were large bases, you would be leaning over them, doing masking for days and weeks, as you do the roads and the garden beds and all those kind of things. So the fumes coming off of them were epic. And if you're doing that for 30 hours at a stretch and stuff, like you know, your sinuses start to fuse together and you know it's not a good job.

So I had to get out of there and while I was, I think I did this for about six years, which probably equates to about 10 years by the time you sort of put in the overtime and I was still in my sort of early to mid-20s, you know, at this stage. So for relaxation, about as far away as I could get from model making as a profession was gold and silversmithing. I got quite into that, oh wow, and didn't really have a way of learning. I basically just had some tutorial books on my lap as I'd sort of learn as I went and sort of taught myself to do it, got about as far as I could with that and then I thought it was time for a change. So I pulled out of the model-making job, went to art school for four years and did gold and silver smithing, which was pretty good, so I really enjoyed that. I'm still a jeweler to this day.

Oh are you.

Yeah, I didn't realize. So you're still a working jeweler. Yes, that's right, okay.

That explains some stuff. It's kind of handy in a way because you get to borrow some pretty nifty equipment, things like rolling mills for rolling out whatever kind of sheet you need to whatever custom thickness for a you know a wing or a you know fuselage, or drawing down wire to custom thicknesses, which is really handy. So you're not always pouring through the kns or albion alloys catalog trying to find the right thing, which can take forever.

So well, at the scale you build, some of those things just don't even exist well, that's it.

Yeah, so you've got. You know there's a bit of an effort to sort of get things done it's, but you know there's ways around it. I've been finding some odd materials that seem to get the job done, so that's pretty good what brought you back to? Aviation. Well, I always had the interest in it. I was going to make a joke that I can combine my love of aircraft with my joy of dropping small things on the floor.

Welcome to my world.

Yeah, but yeah, sometimes I actually just go to hell with it and I get down on the floor and I work there. If it's something really small, it actually works. I thoroughly recommend it. But I always had the interest in aircraft still, and in the same way that the metalworking or the gold and silver smithing was almost the exact opposite of model making, then model making was the exact opposite of jewelry making. So as a jeweler I would unwind by at least trying to make some models. I could never decide what scale I was into and I always figured if I could have just one, you know what scale would it be. Eventually I settled on 144, which is pretty good actually.

I'm glad I did that. Let me stop you there, okay, because if you're building airliners, I understand 144 scale, but if your interest is World War I aircraft and pre-World War I aircraft, 144th scale isn't exactly the scale that leaps to mind. No, it's not. There are literally almost no kits of such things.

Well, there's not much kits of anything in that scale. Really, you're really going begging a lot of the time, and for aftermarket as well.

How did you make the decision that that was the scale for you?

I don't know. I've always liked small things and miniatures, and when I was looking for a new career, I very, very nearly took up the study of entomology instead. I've always been fascinated by insects and that sort of thing. You live in the right country for that. Yeah, yeah, most of those insects here are 30-second scale and not 144.

Yeah, yeah, mr Goldfinch and I have had extensive discussions about the huntsman spider oh yeah, yeah, they're darlingstsman spider.

Oh yeah, yeah, they're darlings, they're great.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, so 144 scale.

Yeah, that's right, I don't know. I like that. There's an intimacy to it. When you see one that's built a bit well and it's sitting there on the desk, it's like a little small, heavily armed butterfly just landed in front of you. You know, it looks like a living thing. I can get that and yeah, it's. There's something to it, there's a. But there's also a kind of if you can hold it in your palm, it's got a. There's a kind of an ownership to it, almost you know it's.

I find when it's a large model, sometimes it's kind of it's very difficult to say it's there's a kind of a space between you you know what I mean.

You sort of you're looking at it from that. Yeah, you're looking at it from from I don't know about half a meter away almost sometimes, whereas the, the 144th, I've got the thing like up to my nose and I'm looking at it in. You know, you know really close detail and I quite like that that size. And there's also this kind of nice kind of shift between when you it's funny when you first look at one up close and you kind of your head goes into this kind of manual zoom where you, your head rocks backwards and forwards on your neck as you try and sort of zoom in and out on it, and but yeah, it's always something I find it hard to put my finger on exactly why I like it. But I do like that sort of that intimacy to them, that they're quite a almost like a living object in their own way, and it's nice when the detail is fine enough that you can. The detail keeps going when your eyes are just about giving out on it, if you know what I mean.

There's always that hint that there's a little bit more to see well I know in in the larger scales I'm working in, there's always an aspect of the challenge of trying to do something and get what I want. We're not only talking about in a scratch build kind of situation and there's a lot of satisfaction in that. Do you get any pleasure from the working through the nuances of figuring things out in such a tiny scale?

Yeah, I do. There's always that little dopamine hit that you get from working, working it out, yeah, exactly yeah, and each one is a like. I find lately I've been trying to sort of get that into the habit of taking pleasure in each single part that you make and each one is like a little battle fought in one, if you know what I mean. Um, yes, because some some of the pieces are quite tiny but can take extraordinary amount of time for their size.

Some parts like I'm currently wrestling with the exhaust pipes on a little Mercedes engine, which is a piece that I need to make is about 5mm long. It's a tapered cylinder. It's about 1.3mm at one end, tapers down to about 0.9mm at the other end, and then it's got these 10 fluted scribe lines running around the outside circumference of this, fluted at this tapered tube. So trying to turn that up by hand out of brass and then sort of make a little jig to sort of, you know, like rotating jig, to kind of hand scribe, it's going to be a challenge. However, once it's done, it's going to look fantastic, because it's sort of one of those little objects where it's like how the hell did that even happen?

I have zero doubt of that. Now, most modelers, when they pick their scale and subject, they go to the hobby shop and they pull off the shelf a 35th scale tank or a 72nd scale aircraft or, if they're a sane person, a 32nd scale World War I kit. I've got a few of those. Well good, that reassures me. You didn't have that option. You decide okay, I'm going to build 144th scale World War I aircraft, and before there's no instruction manual, it's not like you have a kit. You open it up and you put the instructions beside you and it tells you what to do. What to do, you must start with a set of plans, and then how do you visualize?

all of the things that you have to do.

I guess I think that's maybe where the architectural model making job comes sort of in handy, because that was all just working from blueprints as well, so you had to literally start from the foundation and work your way up, and often it works the same way with the, you know, the, the first world war aircraft models, where you basically need to give yourself a foundation off, when I'll start with a almost like a keel strip, which is the, the floor of the fuselage, which is thicker than it should be in real life, and that gives me something solid to work from, and then I can basically hang the walls of the fuselage onto that and then put the roof on.

If you say you know, if you know what I mean, um, and it also gives you a solid base to to, you know, drill in things like you know, various struts and undercarriage pieces and, you know, hang some wings from it and that sort of thing. Although I mean, I originally started with kits as well and I kind of somehow I don't know how I quite got to where I am now, where I wandered into scratch building. So originally, I think one of the first ones was do you know the zvezda fairy battle? Oh yeah, they do the the 144 scale fairy battle as part of their. I think it was the art of tactics or something kind of range yeah, this is.

This is going back to 2014. I think it's got to be the worst kit I've ever seen in my life. There is nothing, absolutely nothing about it. That's correct. I think the tail wheel was actually okay and that fell off and I lost it, but everything else is rubbish like the fuselage is too short by about four and a half mil, and at 140, at 144 scout, that's massive. Um right, the the wings are too short, but they're also too narrow, so I had to cut them straight down the middle from left to right and then put a piece in and, you know, bogger that all back together.

The dihedral was wrong. The undercarriage openings were big enough for 72 scale. They were twice the size they should be. Canopy was too high, I think. The interior was solid, so they had to carve all that out and that was kind of half of the course for 144 scale. A lot of the time there I mean there's some beautiful kits out there now, but in you know, at that point I mean I'd love the fairy battle. It was one of those airfix kits I could never get when I was a kid if you choose to, to go to 70 second scale.

We supposedly have a new battle coming.

Yeah, I'd seen that online. I was like, hmm, that looks pretty good. But I remember the original Airfix kit was dreadful as well.

Oh it was, but I still love it. So you built this 144 scale fairy battle. That was complete rubbish and you went what the heck? I can do better than this just by scratch, building it myself it's often.

It often works that way. Yeah, it's a bit less. It's quite painful to have to like correct a kid and basically just be sort of making good on things that are inaccurate or, you know, like missing detail or bad detail and that sort of thing, and sometimes it's just easy to go. You know what, I'm just going to make it out of the clean sheet and put it together that way and it's going to. You know, you get a nicer feeling out of it. I remember reading I think it was on Hyperscale about 15 years ago or something Some one guy, he was scratch building and he goes yeah, I just I scratch, build. I don't build kits. It's just more satisfying. Somehow I thought, oh you bugger. I was like that's never going to be me. Oh yeah, sure, you know, I was like imagine being that pretentious. Oh my God. But I mean it's you kind of starve for choice sometimes. There's some. There's some lovely kits in 144. There's the ones made by Sweet, which are fantastic.

Oh yeah.

The most recent one, I think, was the Key 43, the Hayabusa. That's amazing. I've never seen anything quite so beautiful. The canopy alone is just schmick really lovely. I was talking to a fellow in japan. He said that's more pretty much a family kind of company as well. Um, and so they're very, they're very into what they do, so I'm always keen to see what they're going to do next. Platts is quite good as well. They've got some beautiful. There's their p51 and p47. I think've got some beautiful. There's their P-51 and P-47, I think are especially good. But for 144, there's not a lot out there. There's the Valum kits, but to be fair, they're not. Yeah, they're a bit ropey.

World War I 144. There's bloody nothing.

Yeah, there's nothing, and if you want decals and stuff, you're pretty much out of luck as well. Right, I think I remember seeing some. I think Mark, I do a few sheets of crosses and rounders I think Blue Rider as well, yeah, but they're well out of register and they're not too crash hot. So often you've got to make them up yourself. So a lot of the time before these days I really enjoy making my own decals, but in the past there would always be so many projects that would just stall for want of markings. But these days, not so much, I've got better at it. So yeah, I quite enjoy the decal stage these days.

Well, in construction, kind of at a high level, of the way you do things and I guess to. Well, let me back up. We talked a few days ago, making sure we were set up for this interview, and I told you that we often chase folks who are doing things that may not be in our own wheelhouse but may offer things that can be beneficial to modelers, irrespective of scale or genre. Just some good old kind of nuts and bolts and how you do things at your bench. And there's several things that you discuss in your upcoming book that I think are important and I'd like to get your live. Take on a few of these if we could. The first was your approach to magnification, because clearly you're using it or you're a superhuman of some kind. Oh God, no, my eyesight's rubbish.

Really, when we started this interview and the camera came on, I expected you to look like Marty Feldman with the big bug eyes. That would explain your ability to work in that small scale and let the listeners know that was not at all the case.

Actually, when I've got my goggles on, I think I've given my wife some real jump scares.

Well, I think your take may seem a little unorthodox to some because most folks are using like an Optivisor type device, like an Optivisor type device, and your take was kind of in the same vein as our friend and frequent guest, steve Hustad, as far as the way he approaches it, because he's doing a lot of pretty amazing things in 72nd scale. So what are you doing there? I know you mentioned not using the Optivisor so much anymore.

Yeah, I've pretty much got a cupboard full of any kind of you know every sort of magnifying device you can think of and I've tried them all. Originally I started out with a diamond graders loop, the little handheld magnifier. That was when my eyesight was still reasonable and I would basically take a good dive in with that. Have a look at what I need to do, do it freehand, then jump back in with the lens and have another look and see if it was okay and sort of work that way. I had optimizers for a while but they're too heavy and a lot of the time when I work I've got my drawings that I've seen my references on my computer screen right in front of me and I've got those at very high resolution. So I can do like very, very close measurements, you know, using the little ruler tool and stuff. So if I've got an optivisor that ruins my peripheral vision I can't really see too much. If I'm looking up, I can't really see too well. Also, the, the level of magnification on those. It means the the piece is. The piece that I'm working on is further away from my nose, if you know what I mean. Um, so I need to get the piece really up close to be able to see what I'm doing, because some of the parts are very small indeed. I had the desk-mounted magnifiers as well the big lens with a built-in light and it's sitting on a little stand like a lamp and you work under that. That wasn't so great because the magnifying lens is fixed in place but the piece you're working on you have to constantly bring it up into focus. Unless I was working flat on the desk, it wasn't really working for me. So a lot of the time you've got to be able to maneuver the piece around to sort of manipulate it and do what you need to do. So these desk-mounted ones weren't so great, because I constantly find myself working in midair and as well as trying to actually do the task in hand, I was also subconsciously trying to move the piece backwards and forwards, so it was in focus and that wasn't working so great for me.

Eventually I found these cheat-ass non-prescription reader glasses in one of those $2 shops and they're fantastic because you put them on your head, you've got all that peripheral vision. You can see the drawings on the screen that I'm doing. You can have one-eyed Netflix going in the background and sort of you know, like giving yourself occupy. While you're doing that, you don't look like a complete dog, which is fantastic, and you can bring the piece up closer to your nose.

Originally I started with, I think, 1.5 times magnification and that was pretty good and then I sort of upgraded it. It takes a couple of hours to get used to it. When you're sort of working with those glasses because you focus on things far away, it's kind of very blurry and you're in this kind of gray zone. But you do, you do adapt to it and it's fine and you know they're lightweight and like trying to wear an optimizer in summertime when it's, you know, blazing hot and you know it's just, it's miserable. So the glasses are good, they're lightweight and I sort of would go from I think 1.5 and I went to 2.5 magnification and then to 4.5.

I think these days I'm using six times magnification that I found I had to get those online. I mean they're all of about 10 bucks, they're not nothing at all, and some of them are quite small and I think I broke a couple of pairs with my big stupid head, so I popped out the lens from one that was an old pair and stuck that six times lens over my left eye of the existing pair of glasses. So I've got like a rather fearsome 12 times magnification in one eye, which is good for special occasions and it's it's quite good. It's because you bring the piece right up close to your nose. You can really work on things.

So if a lot of the time when I'm making stuff it feels like I'm working in 30 seconds ago and you get things made at that sort of level of magnification and stuff and you adapt to it and as long as your eyes can see what you're doing, your hands will follow in pretty short order. So I'll work under that, get things looking acceptable. And then I take the glasses off and have a look and I go, oh my God, did I make that? Where did this thing even come from? You know it's quite amazing because even like a tiny paint flake or a bit of dust can look like a boulder at that magnification and you're constantly just tweaking the piece as you go and keeping it clean and getting an acceptable result under that magnification. Once you're done it looks fantastic. So yeah, it's a good way of working. I find that a much better method of magnification than the other ones I've tried. I've got some really expensive sort of German Optivisors and stuff.

But they're all just sitting in a drawer and unused ever since I found these Apple cheapo reader glasses. Obviously, magnification is important, but you're you're sitting here with a pair with a set of plans and you want to make a model of the item in the plans. There are no molded parts for you to go. How do you teach yourself Like in your book? First of all, congratulations for starting with the Falls, one of the prettiest World War I aircraft ever.

It's beauty, isn't it?

Oh gosh, it is. You're scratch building that and it's got this beautiful set of wings. Beautiful set of wings. You don't have a molded set of wings in 144th scale for a false and there's no place I know of that. You can go and look in a book well, other than yours now, but where you can look in a book and it says, oh well, this is how you make that. So how did you learn to do something like make a set of World War I aircraft wings in 72nd scale?

I don't know, I didn't really have a place to learn that. That was just. I just would basically think about it for years until eventually something kind of came up. I tried all the other you know the old Harry Woodman style of doing like the balsa core on the inside and then scoring a sheet, and you know that sort of thing. I tried that with scaled down. You know, I used like the head projector film that was. I think it was about 0.7 of a millimetre thick and I tried, you know, scoring that and it kind of looked promising. But it was just too clumsy and stuff.

And I was messing around one day with a little tiny 144 scale resin, lysander that was. The wings were dreadful and I was looking at the rib detail and thought, oh, maybe I could just pencil that in, pencil the ribs on, maybe that would do it. And then I was like hang on a second, what if I painted them? Pencil the ribs on, maybe that would do it. And then I was like hang on a second, what if I painted them? So yeah, I found I could basically mask off the ribs on the on the wings and just the literally just the thickness of paint was enough to to represent those rib tapes that you get sort of running, you know, for, over the top of each rib right and sort of.

Yeah, it was a bit of a surprise at the time, I don't, it was a bit of a eureka moment and that sort of really made the whole thing possible well, to back up a little bit the, the, before you even got to that point, you discussed the, the filing of the, the airfoil shape, oh yes, to the, to the main wing body, and I think that's really where the, the bread and butter, is okay, because most people just want to know how I do the ribs. I don't, yeah, I don't think. I think there's probably several approaches that would work for that, in varying degrees of success. But taking a piece of, I think it was acrylic, yeah, that's right, the acrylic is. And filing that, yeah, it is. And you must be just a master with a file.

Jeweler Mike.

jeweler mike a lot of the, a lot of the 144 scale stuff is basically fairly genteel and as much that you can sit there at your desk and just you know, happily do it. And you know, while sitting down, whereas the making the wings, you got to be up out of your seat and at a bench somewhere, like you know right, chewing at them with this, the biggest bastard file you can find. So I mean, the acrylic is good because it's it's much more stable. I originally tried making wings out of styrene. I've seen a lot of people do that too, but at that scale the wing aerofoil cross-section is about 0.6 of a mil, maybe 0.7, typically at its thickest point.

So if you're trying to make a wing cross-section in styrene, the thing is just floppy, it's just like paper. A wing cross-section in styrene, the thing is just floppy, it's just like paper. It won't stay straight. Yeah, that's it. And the thing's only got to move a millimeter out of flatness. And in 144, like a millimeter is that's equivalent to what four and a half mil warpage in 30-second scale, yeah, so it's only got to move a little and it just looks ropey and wrong. So acrylic's really got to move a little and it just looks ropey and wrong. So acrylic's really good. It just doesn't really want to bend very much at all. It's a harder material to work with, but it's just nice and stable.

Well, and the idea of taking the edge of a ruler, filing it to the airfoil shape to carve the acrylic, I mean that's pretty inspired.

It's one of my only talents, I think, is improvising. So yeah, I just basically look around and go, oh, that'll do. And yeah, sacrificed an old metal ruler and I think it's been through about four or five different iterations of wing cross-sections, that ruler now. So the end of it's looking very strange indeed where it's got the, you know. But it's good. Once you scrape that underside of the wing shape, you can then tape it down and then sort of go at it with the biggest files you can find on the top surface to get the rest of the wing cross-section in. It's not too bad.

Well, the templating of the cross-section with the metal ruler kind of leads into. Another general theme throughout your book is jigs and fixturing. Oh yeah, I love my jigs. You make a heavy, heavy use of that and that's something I'm quite familiar with myself. Yeah, Just your general philosophy there and why you like it so much. I think I know the answer to the second one at least.

Your jigs are amazing.

I mean, you really put some thought into these things yeah, the jigs are a bit of a morale booster if they look nice, when you, when you're making it kind of modeling within modeling. Yeah, maybe it is. Yeah, it's it can. It makes the piece look more finished than it is as well sometimes, which can be quite, quite motivating, which is good originally. I mean, the good thing about the jigs is they. It gives you a bit of maneuverability because you I mean it's, you don't want to be holding the piece. You know like grabbing and grabbing the piece and sort of you know like hanging on to it by the fuselage. You want to do as little as you can freeze up a hand yeah, and I noticed that.

I mean, I I always have like a little bowl of kind of soapy water or whatever on my desk which I'm always dipping my fingers into and sort of basically keeping my hands clean, but I do find like even just the oils on your hands can mar the surface. If you look close enough, you can see where it's really sort of like affected, like a primer coat and things like that. Um, so I tend to basically avoid touching the piece at all costs if I can once I get to a certain stage of the construction. But no, the jigs are fantastic, and there's pretty much a jig for all occasions. Now there's the.

You know, the main one is great because you can basically like mount the fuselage, mount the wings on it, and then you've got this object that you can literally hold in one hand and basically turn every which way. I learned recently, though, when I had the originally I had like styrene formers and things, basically jacking the wings up and holding them in place and stuff like that and then I realized fairly recently that the smart thing to do would be to make those out of clear acrylic so I can actually see through them to actually align things, because half the time they'd be trying to you know the wings position correctly to the fuselage and I couldn't see the damn fuselage because the jig was in the way. So yeah, lately I've been making see-through jigs and that's much better. They're quite good like that because you can manipulate the the piece much easier as you're working with it, especially in the rigging stage where you've got to turn it this way, and that you don't want to have the thing getting damaged as you as you go well, rigging.

that's on my list too. I would be on anyone's list wanting to ask you about things. I think the takeaway for me was the use of a much larger and even much larger in this scale is not really big, but a more stable, rigid piece of wire to template your rigging, and then you're actually using a really tiny nichrome wire for the actual rigging. Now I read the spool in the photograph and this nichrome wire, which is toaster wire, essentially, is for e-cigarette and vape products, I believe. So, yeah, yeah, so this stuff is tiny.

Yeah, 0.05 millimeter. There's smaller ones. I've got some 0.02 and 0.01 at the moment.

I've played with that kind of wire at various times and it's fairly malleable. So I understand your technique here, but describe kind of how you approach the rigging and using the other wire to template your final rigging.

Yeah, that's kind of the secret ingredient really, and I actually find these days I actually quite enjoy rigging, which is an odd thing to say generally, but especially in this scale. But I've got a bit of a system going now so it's actually pretty painless. But I've got a bit of a system going now, so it's actually pretty painless. So I use the 0.05 nichrome wire and I roll that out flat Prior to using it. I'll basically cut lengths that are about 5 centimeters long, maybe a little bit less, about 45 mil, and I have a little steel block and a piece of thick clear acrylic and I roll each piece out so that they're dead flat. The nichrome's a bit shiny, though a bit over scale for its sheen. So often I have to give it just a quick wash of thinned down lacquer paint to take the shine off it a bit, and I have all those little bits kind of mounted on a stick and ready to use.

But trying to cut each one of those and then sort of test fit them, trim a bit and then get the right fit is just painstaking and it's not worth the time and the effort. It's just too hard. You often tend to kink the piece as you test fitting it as well. So that's no good to you. You know you wind up with a whole bunch of crooked wires. So what I do? I get one of my favorite products albion alloys wires. Do you guys have those in the us?

oh, yes, well, they're imported in from england yeah, I think they're from the UK, but I love their stuff. It's fantastic. Yeah, they have their 0.2 millimeter wire, which comes in about six pieces in a tube, but they're dead straight and nice and uniform. So what I basically do is I'll have my model ready to go and if I'm measuring, say, the wire from the base of the fuselage wing root to the outside strut, I'll cut a piece of the 0.2 wire and it's easy to hold in tweezers, it's easy to actually see when it's in place and where it's located.

Now what's the 0.2 made of? What's the material there?

Oh, it's a nickel wire actually. I think, yeah, okay, how are you cutting it? I've got a steel block and I just chop it with a scalpel blade, okay, and it cuts through in one push pretty easily. I'm on the hunt at the moment, though, for a decent-sized, nice flat ceramic tile or something like that, if I can find one, because I think the white background will be much easier to see the wires in.

I was just thinking through the things I don't like about cutting round wire. The wiser. I was just thinking through the the things I don't like about cutting round wire, especially especially a hard material like you know, a stainless wire or something like that can can be kind of yeah, I tend to avoid the stainless because it's it's springy and it doesn't straighten very well and it also just doesn't cut so great either.

So I tend to steer clear of it. But the nickel is pretty good it's. It's also because it's it's straightened, it's kind of work hardened, so it's it's relatively brittle for what it is so you're, you're templating with the nickel wire yeah, or interrupt actually, yeah, it's okay.

Um, so yeah, I can basically get the required length for the piece of strut material with this piece of 0.2 wire and because it's easy to see, I can tell when it's sitting in the right spot at the sort of the two locations of the rigging points. But I can grab it with the tweezers, I can chop a bit off, I can, you know, get the right fit. So I basically do that for each rigging point. I do it gradually, if you know what I mean. But I keep these 0.2 wires in a book. I've got like a little page open and I'll have outer wing strut to lower wing route rigging piece one or something like that, you know, and I'll write a little kind of note in the book and then tape the, the wire down and keep going, basically do all the rigging points. The great thing about the aircraft is there's a left and a right side. So once I've got these little 0.2 mil wire templates, I've got enough to do both sides of the ring. And when it comes to cutting the, the actual rigging wires, I just lay this piece of 0.2 wire down on the desk, on the you know the cutting surface, put the piece of 0.05 wire against it and I can use that that 0.2 wire, as a template to basically snip the ends and get the exact length that I need.

Um, one of the handy things I found recently for doing rigging wires like this is putting little droplets of water at the two contact points where the rigging is supposed to go, because the capillary action of the water holds the piece in place. Normally I'd be putting these rigging pieces in in the past and the damn things would be falling on the ground to be like disappearing into my, into my pants, and getting it get into the, getting to the weave of my trouser and then sort of scratching the hell out of me later on. Um, or I'll be, you know, under the desk trying to find where the damn thing went for the third time in a row. But putting little bits of water on the, on the contact points where the rigging goes, is just this little sort of temporary clamp, if you know what I mean. Um, and it's it's a really handy thing. I do that with a lot of stuff these days. I often use water as a you know, as a holding device. So, yeah, once, once that's done, I can put the piece of rigging wire in.

Okay, I have to ask if you're using water to hold the wire in place? How do you glue?

the ends of the wire. I was using watered down PVA, so I'd be mixing the PVA glue into almost like a wash, if you know what I mean. Gotcha, when there was a little bit of residual water there, I'd just touch it with a brush and it would fill in and it would hold in place.

Then you'd pull the rest of the water off with a brush. Yeah, that's right. Okay, I got it.

Lately I've changed that I think I got halfway through one of the models in the book it was the DH2 Pusher Scout and I was using the water down PVA and about halfway through the build swapped to UV activated clear resin which I found in a little kind of Japanese craft store, which was like a $2 shop Right, which we have over here a place called Dais diso, and that was basically the same thing. I'd use the, the water to get the the right sort of size and fit and adjust everything. But once it was time to actually physically glue the rigging in place, I just put two tiny dabs of this resin in, uh, in the two contact points and then just put the you know the straightened wire into position and that worked the same way as water really, in that the capillary action of that resin is just enough to hold the piece in place. But the awesome thing about the resin is you've got almost an infinite amount of time to work it. Even with watered-down PVA it's kind of a race against time to get the piece in before the stuff starts to disperse and then sort of evaporate, right, and I was always finding it wasn't really quite working for me. But the UV resin is a game changer because you've got as much time as you need to actually wriggle the piece around and get it going.

I do find, though, that the resin in very small amounts it seems to take longer to. It needs more UV light to actually make it kick over into a cured state. When I was using larger drops of it, I could basically hit it with a UV torch and it would be fine. But I find, with the minuscule amounts of resin that I'm using for the rigging, I often have to run outside and get real sunlight to do it, to kick it over into a cured state. But no, it's really good stuff.

But it's also handy for um doing things like little you know, control globs and knobs and things like that. You know um I get. If I get a piece of non-stick material like the back of a sticker or something like that, you know the backing film that you peel off. You can put the resin on there, manipulate it into whatever kind of dome or shape you need, cure it, peel it off, and then you know apply that to the model, and that's quite handy stuff too well, that's not not on my list, but since we're talking about adhesives and you've used the pva, you use the uv cure for your general construction.

what are you mostly using? Because I would think I know, when I'm working with very small things, even in my much larger scale, that sometimes styrene solvent type cements aren't the best thing because of thin cross sections and things like that can really go to hell really quick under that kind of solvent. So I'm curious, with some of these tiny, tiny things you're doing, what you're actually using for your primary construction adhesive?

Well, I'm a big fan of the water-thin superglue Okay. I use that quite a lot for construction because it's especially on sort of thin wall objects like you know, say the side of a fuselage, where the the skin is only about, you know, 0.1 or 0.15 a mil. I find the super glue is very good for that. I also use the, the tamiya extra thin, the quick setting variety okay, because that that tends to wick off fast enough. That it's. It doesn't sort of damage that, it'll sort of flash the surface and give you a glue bond but it doesn't sort of just start leaching into the surface and then sort of, you know, soften it and wind up melting it melting it, causing sinks and things like that.

Yeah, okay, well, that, yeah, although having said that, I did recently get the the regular extra thin, which is a slower version and that's kind of handy for because I was finding, when I was trying to glue really small objects with the extra thin quick variety, by the time I reached over, got the little little brush kind of you know like, whipped away the excess on the side of the bottle and then went to go and glue the piece.

The damn thing had evaporated already, so it wasn't really doing me much good. So I found I was applying too much glue just because I was trying to beat the, the rate of evaporation. So lately I'd switched to the the slow variety and that gave me a little bit of a time to actually get the amount of correct amount of glue in the brush and then transfer it to the piece and go from there and I had a bit more success, I think, with that strangely, which I wouldn't have thought, because for years I've been persisting with the quick stuff for very small objects, but I'm quite happily using the slow stuff now do you mind if I ask you about your book, which is you were kind enough to share a copy with mike and I so that we could look at it before the interview.

And when I looked at it first of all, once I got past the this man is insane thought, and then I looked at that book and it immediately reminded me of two books I have in my library and I am wondering whether and neither one of them is 144th scale World War.

I scratch building, but they're both scratch building and they're both a lot of big-scale biplanes and all A book called Scratch Built by John Alcorn, george Lee and Peter Cook oh, I got that just recently, yeah, okay. And then the Master Scratch Builders by John Alcorn, which was the companion to it, and your book. These two books are two of my favorite books and your book reminds me very much of that, in not only the scratch building effort and all of the techniques and all, but even the way the book is laid out and illustrated and the way you've illustrated your techniques and everything from rib tapes to using the end of the ruler to get the airfoil section or the box construction on the British pusher DH2, on the British pusher DH2, it all reminded me very much of the layout and illustration, so I wondered if you had either one of those books.

I got the one recently for absolute steel. I think it was about 25 bucks, oh wow.

The person on eBay had basically badly advertised it and I just happened to see it. I was like, oh my God, I'm getting that. I got the one where there was I can't can't remember the chapter name but he was doing the gloucester gamecock in it. That could be the master scratch builders book. I think yeah. But it's an amazing book because I love the as I'm reading it. Did you ever see that? Did you do you remember the banter between each model maker in their different chapters? They'll often cross-reference each person's work and make little side comments and stuff like that, and it was like in-jokes. So I get the impression they must all know each other quite well.

They were all of a generation or two generations before the current generation of modelers, generations before the current generation of modelers. In fact, at the IPMS Nationals, the judges grand award is the George Lee Award, named after George Lee, but your book reminds me very much of it in that you can read it and it is inspirational. Even if you are not going to build a 1144 scale world war one aircraft, you can read it and go, wow, that was a clever way to solve that problem.

or I hope that those techniques kind of can apply that to other yes, I think they do.

I think that I think they really will just like those two books I I referenced, which I find myself going back and reading again and again, just for inspiration and just to to absorb some of the techniques that they're doing, which I may not do in the same way or have need to use, but still find as inspiration for thinking through things, as you're building a model.

I think a lot of the time there is a kind of a universal sequence. Think a lot of the time that there's maybe a there is a kind of a universal sequence to a lot of these tasks. You know a lot of these models, so, yeah, maybe that the way it's laid out is kind of dictated by that sort of same pathway that you need to to choose, you know, while doing the construction. So maybe there's, you know, similarities there. One of the other scratch builders I really loved was I haven haven't seen him online, he doesn't seem to have an online presence, but his name is Megas Sonos from Greece and I think Chris Meddings at Inside the Armor did the scratch building book of his. I don't know if you guys have seen that one.

I have not seen that one.

The blue cover. He does the Canadian. I've got that one.

Okay, now I have to go find another book. Thank you, okay, now I have to go find another book. Thank you.

Yeah, that one's worth it, that one's worth it, Although I always think of that particular maker because he did a scratch-built 48-scale short sterling oh one of my favorite aircraft.

Yeah, yeah, and he did it in one of the model-making magazines. It's not in that book too much, I think, but he also did a Halifax which was outrageously good. Um, but I often, often think of his work and his paint finishes and stuff like that and try, and, you know, think of ways I can do that in 144. In fact, often, often, I'll tend to get inspiration from other makers in the bigger scales and often, as I see what you guys do, you know, and what the community are doing, always, whenever I see a model that I like, I always imagine it as 144 scale. I think how to do that. Do you know what I mean? Um, I used to have a photograph from a magazine that I cut out years and years ago.

It was a a6m, a zero float plane, fight at the roof, and I had it for about 15 years, sort of cut out as just a small sort of postage stamp sized image from one of the model making magazines as an example of like a beautiful 144 scale model, and I always try to figure out how to emulate that. And then a while ago I was going through my collections of old magazines and I found the hole in the magazine where I cut the piece out, you know carefully, carefully, with the scalpel. I looked at the caption. The bloody thing was 148.

And all this time I've been trying to copy this guy. Yeah, oh, I was going to say before. Going back to the adhesives and glues, I meant to say before, what I've been using lately is deco solvent as a solution for gluing some really small parts. I've got the Mr softer, the, the gunzi guns right, yes, product which is pretty hot stuff, and if I found, if I've got really tiny objects, I can anchor it in place with that um on a painted surface and it's just enough to kind of gum it in there.

And yeah, I did. I'm doing a taube on a plane at the moment, oh my god, um gosh, which is basically trying to do everything that Wingnut Wings has done with their Taub in 144. And there's six little cooling levers underneath the cowling and they're about 0.3 of a mil wide and about 1 mil long tapered levers.

Those wings have to have been a challenge. Have you gotten to the wings yet?

oh yeah, they're done, they're painted. I'll have to send you a picture of the. In fact, I think it might be on the dojo actually I think it is so.

Pay attention, dave we have so many people on the dojo, I check it like twice a day and stuff still gets by me. Yeah, we have almost 5,000 members.

Yeah, it's a lot, isn't it? It moves fast. You can find yourself way down on the page in the space of an afternoon. But no, these levers are great because you could stick them together, fuse them to the surface of the model with the deck of solvents even though they were like little kind of plastic components and that's enough to hold them in place, and then just seal them over with a coat of primer and that's enough to get them in. So it's a handy thing to do.

Speaking of paint, there are two last things I want to touch on before we wrap up with this, and they were both in the de Havilland DH2 section of the book. Yeah, and they both involve paint, and I found these both really interesting. One of them in particular, I think, has upscale potential, and that is the two things were painting, clear decal film. Ah, yes, yeah, it's one of my favorite things now To various thicknesses and creating a stock of that that you can then go back and trim to size and have these water slide access panels and things like that or whatever you're doing with them. We can touch on that one and then, kind of on that same vein, while my 35th scale armor brethren are flicking paint on their models to emulate spattered mud and grease and oil, you're splattering paint on like polyethylene sheeting and then popping it off and placing it on your models for detail parts yeah, this is one of my favorite parts of a build now.

I really enjoy it. So I I think I mentioned earlier that you know you could almost die for want of decals in 144 scale and I started making my own and doing you know, painted sheets and cutting out the discs for roundels and things like that and sort of laying them on. So I could basically make my own sort of multicoloured decal sheets and markings but later started using like painted decal for detail parts and literally using it as a construction material rather than just a coloured marking. So I'll get. I like the I think it's bare metal makes the clear laser decal sheet and theirs is crazy thin. It's beautiful stuff. They also do a white decal but if you paint over it with lacquers and things it tends to crackle and craze. It's not so good. It's quite a thick material. But I'll often measure the decal sheet, including the paper, with a set of calipers first and it might be like be like, say, 0.07 of a mil or 0.1 of a mil, whatever. Then give it a, give it a couple coats of paint and then measure again its thickness afterwards and I can sort of extrapolate how thick each layer is. So some things like you know, overlapping panels, where there's that slightly raised edge on a panel line, and stuff like that you can cut, cut your decal to the right size, lay it over the top and then you get just that little tiny thickness of paint that gives you the, the difference between panels and things like that, and it's. It doesn't seem like a lot when you, when you talk about its actual physical dimensions, but the eye sees it and I love doing that it's, um, it's, it's almost like free detail, because you can get some really nuanced kind of like heights and effects and things like that and it doesn't take a lot of effort to to do.

There was on the dh2, there's the on the sides of the engine of a fuselage nacelle, there's the, the raised panels of the stitching. I think it's probably that might be the photograph that you saw, mike. Yes, yes, yeah, so that was the. Uh, the solid portions of the fuselage have got this kind of like rolled edge where it's a bit of a thicker strip that runs around the grey portion of the nacelle and that was basically just some grey painted decal that was given two or three coats so it got a bit of thickness to it, cut with a fine scalpel and you just lay the decal on and using the decal solvent it just kind of fuses into the surface and it becomes part of the model. Also, the raised lip of the of the fabric areas that was done with a like a buff colored decal, painted decal strip and that that works too.

The upper wing has got decal details as well. There's the little kind of mounting brackets for the left and right wing which join to the center section. There's, I think the strips are about, say, 0.3 of a mil wide and about 1 mil long. And you basically the great thing about these is normally if you're trying to assemble these by hand out of like pieces of plastic and stick them in place, you've got glue marks to contend with, there's alignment issues and things like that. But if you're applying decals as construction material, you've got an infinite amount of time to you know, wiggle it into place and get it exactly where you want it to go. If it looks a little bit over scale, you can just pull it off easily and then you know, replace it with another one and things like that. So some of the smallest details I do are actually just painted decals these days and it's quite a handy thing.

The second one was the paint flex that was yes, a bit of a recent innovation too, yes, so yeah, every time I receive a sticker or cut myself and need a band-aid, always holding the um, little non-stick backing pieces, I tend to use lacquer because I think that sort of hangs together best. But I'll put on a brush and just flick it over the surface in various colors and you get a myriad of different size dots that you can use. You can even trim them with a scalpel. If you want a half circle, you can get your dot and sort of cut it into a semicircle and things like that, and they can be applied the same way with a decal setting solution like the decal solvents like Mr Marksoft. It's toothy enough and hot enough to actually just fuse the paint to the other painted surface and sometimes you can give it a coat of lacquer over the top just to kind of you know, back it up if you. If it's on something you can handle a lot and you're not quite sure it's going to stick, but no, it's really effective. So it's.

It's a fun way of doing all that sort of post-paint detailing and you could use it in larger scales, things like, you know, fasteners on cowlings and things like that. One that springs to mind is like the hawker hurricane. For example, it's got the the fasteners on the cowling, which generally yep, as, as on models, they're often shown as a countersunk hole right and they usually wind up black once you put your wash in, which is not necessarily quite right because they're actually a raised item and they often show lighter than the surrounding surface. So you could mix yourself like a a lightened color of dark earth or dark green and sort of flick that onto a page. Lift off the little dots, put them in place and you get these lovely sort of raised, raised details that would be hard to do with a brush or hard to do with paint in the regular manner all right.

Well, I want to thank you for joining us tonight. We're gonna going to have to stop at some point.

We could go on all night. Once I get talking about the technical stuff and I'm enjoying myself, I'm talking about myself, I'm like, oh God.

We've done a little bit of both. Yes, that's right. One thing, in closing, you need to tell folks is the title of the book, when it's going to be generally available and all that great stuff uh, yep, it's called aircraft in scale and scratch building in 144.

It's by willie madere. It's published by font hill media in the uk. A little birdie told me that it was actually out. Now I'm not sure if that's 100 true. It's been available for pre-order for the last couple of months and it's listed as due out this august.

So if you can check it out, it might well be there now now, I think font hill is a direct source, I believe it is, yeah, and I think it'll be available by you know, all the other usual vendors I've seen it on amazon and things like okay all If you'd give us a link to your preferred purchase avenue.

We'll put that in the show notes of the podcast Mm-hmm Because. I'm telling you people will want to buy this and read this and marvel at it because it's fascinating and some of the solutions you come up with are just flat amazing thank you.

Thank you, it was a. It was a strange project to do it, just kind of one of those funny things that happened during covid, if you know what I mean oh, yeah, a lot of those kind of like yeah

I was gonna say there's a podcast.

That happened that way yeah, I was just on a. I was on a flight simulator website one one evening. I was getting quite say there's a podcast. That happened that way. Yeah, I was on a flight simulator website one evening. It was getting quite late and I saw a message pop up of one guy goes hey, does anyone make First World War aircraft models? I'm just curious, I've got a project in mind. And I just went, oh, yeah, I do. And I flipped up a couple of images and went to bed and woke up the next morning to a private message saying, hey, would you be interested in putting a submission in for a book? And I was like, oh crap. So yeah, it just kind of was out of the blue. It's just I happen to be standing in the right spot at the right time, I guess.

It's fantastic and I'm here to tell you, when I compare it to the master scratch builders and scratch built, I am putting it in a high praise because those are two of my favorite modeling books, both for inspiration and technique.

Oh wow, that's amazing. That's very high praise because, having seen that book now, it's really one of the best.

Oh yeah, Absolutely.

All right, william, thank you for accommodating us and it's been great talking to you and we look forward to more, more of your work online oh, it's a pleasure.

Oh, no worries, I'll be putting some up and yeah, hopefully we'll uh get to talking sometime soon well, next time.

Next time dave goldfinch flies to the united states, you need to stow away in his luggage.

Yeah, yeah, in a matchbox. Yeah, there you go. Well, thank you so much, it's been great. Thank you, it's fantastic, it's a pleasure, great talking to you guys, Holy moly Dave.

Yeah, it's amazing stuff, just absolutely amazing. I'm in awe of it we're spoiled, dave. We have kids yes, absolutely we have.

We have kids and kids that we can actually see well, that was a lot of fun and we appreciate him taking time to speak with us, and I'm you know that's a book I'm gonna buy, because technique knows no genre? Yes, absolutely, and the artistry of it is just super impressive yeah, I just, I just really dig craftsmanship like that and yeah, there's not a lot of that going on these days, but he's he's doing his part, that's for sure.

Classic Model Mojo is brought to you by Squadron. Head on over to squadroncom for the latest in kits and accessories, all at a great price and with great service. Are you a modeler on the go? Check out the Squadron mobile app for your Apple or Android device for easy shopping from just about anywhere.

Squadron adding to the stash since 1968 1968, that's the year I was born, Dave.

Well, I was born a few years before, but funny thing is, I was killing a little time and I was perusing the squadron app today, man, and that's, that's just a dangerous thing to do.

Well, we need to worry about what we've already got, which is top halftime report, dave. So what you been doing, my friend, on on the bench.

One step backward, two steps forward, my friend on on the bench one step backward, two steps forward. I've been concentrating on the fine mold sam kit because I want to get it done. I want to get it. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel in the distance, so I'm pushing all my other projects aside, concentrating on that.

That's the landing lights from the F-8 that you're seeing.

Yeah, thank you. Okay, all right, oh, it's going to be that way. Okay, I've had some problem. I tried some masking. That didn't work. I stepped back. I had a little negative modeling. I stepped back, I regrouped, step back, I regrouped, fixed those issues.

Moving forward, the thing is completely primed. I've painted the bare metal inside the landing gear bays, the landing gear struts themselves and the inside the landing gear doors, and some of those parts will get a coat, a clear blue-green coat, the protective sealant that the Japanese used. I'm to the point where I'm about to start laying paint, actual camouflage paint, on, and this is a simple two-color scheme gray on the bottom, green on the top, very much like what you're doing with the Paul, but it's got a very basic separation line. It doesn't have the complexity of the floats or the struts. So I'm anticipating that the painting's going to move very, very quickly and then we go from there and there's an outside possibility that this one will be done for our show here at the end of September. We'll see and I'm happy I'm making progress there. Like I said, I've pushed everything else to the side till I get this done, and once it's done, I've got several other things to address, but my benchtop is active, it's happy, it's full of mojo.

Oh, one other thing I did. I posted on the Dojo Facebook page. I was lucky enough to have Scott Skippy King drop by for a couple hours on Sunday and he came over, sat in my model room and I got to watch him model. He's working on a special hobby, ferry Fulmer and Skippy is an amazing modeler to watch. He is the most patient human being I think I've ever seen, and every time I watch him it emphasizes to me how much patience pays off in our hobby. Don't get impatient. If you spend the time to sand, test fit, sand, test, fit, look, contemplate, stop and think about what you're doing, how much better a modeler you will become. And I really enjoy every time he comes over and I really enjoyed watching watching him work. It was, it was inspirational to me. So my, my benchtop is really really good. How about yours?

well, it looked like skippy ditched the face rug too he's gone with the wyatt erp.

He got rid of the beard and all, but he's got. He's got the mustache that droops down both sides above the lip and then turns 90 degrees down and runs down to the chin. He looks honest to gosh. He looks like he could be playing Wyatt Earp.

Well, as you alluded to, I've been working on the E16. It's been the going subject here for quite a while, probably too long. I got one of those Facebook photo or Google photo memories, oh that hurts. Popped up the other day and it was when I was painting the cockpit subassembly. Yeah, folks, that was quite some time ago and that's a kick in the crotch.

I got to get this done, man, yeah facebook really is bad about doing that, because you post those photos not thinking google.

Man, it wasn't facebook, it was, oh, was it google? It was the google, oh well. So the base colors are down green and gray. I got the leading edge yellow masked out and painted. All that's done now. Now I went back over a couple of sessions and short sessions, like I've been talking about earlier in the podcast Hour, here and there. You know I've got all the overspray touch-ups. You know I had a few errant sprays of green here and there on the gray. It was funny. On the yellow, the rear pontoon struts, outboard sides both got yellow on them. Somehow I made the same masking mistake on both sides. At least you're consistent. Those were easy to touch up to because they were outboard. There's some funkiness on the inboard that I'm just going to leave, because unless you have it upside down at 45 degrees on this axis and 20 on the other, you can't really see. So we're not going to worry about that. Gotcha, I can live with it. It's a shadow, it's black basing right, that's right.

So it's black. Basing right, that's right, I think, before I go much further, this thing needs a delicate washing, particularly the wings, because I've held it a lot without gloves on. Going to give it a little washing with a little dish soap and a little warm water. Get that cleaned up and it'll be ready for a clear coat and then decals. And at some point I need to redo the engine. I gotta paint the engine. It's just overall black right now and there's a little overspray in there from some of the other colors.

But I think I want to mask the opening again, the edges of the opening, and hit it with, like to me, a nato black yeah which is a really dark gray, dark gray and then start hitting it with lighter grays that are really really thinned out, like 80, 20, 90, 10. Just to really only accumulate on the high points and then see what that does. Because that's the other flaw of this kit, it's the age thing. Right, it's the one piece cowling and engine.

Yeah.

In fact we had a listener on the dojo wanting to start this kit and he outlined the two flaws of this old kit, as well as the solid-molded dive brakes on the pontoon struts and then the single-piece engine face and cowling. Yeah, this kit's ripe for a redo from somebody, but I suspect the information is so scant on this aircraft that it's just never going to happen.

Probably not. I mean, it's probably low priority. Among other things, it was also not manufactured in great quantities. No, no, Although there are solutions. No, no, although there are solutions. That engine is actually made by at least one manufacturer in resin.

Yeah, that was what I was going to say. If it's an engine that was utilized on another aircraft that was more common than this thing and, to be honest, if it was, I mean I don't even know if it'd have to be a Japanese radio engine. I mean, the hub is going to be the thing that really is obvious. Right, that's right, and but you know that's behind the propeller.

Yeah, I understand, I think uh, creative gizmology a new cowling with some better definition to the cowling flaps would, and an engine that wasn't molded to it, where you actually had some hollowness to the cowling.

Yeah.

That would be the visibly that and the dive brakes would really raise the thing up. And he was also talking about improving the interior. Yeah, I did a little of that but I didn't follow anything. I was making it up so you could improve the seats because the seats are solid. A lot of those Japanese seats were perforated. They were cushionless because you sat on your parachute, yep, like a lot of seats, almost all seats really. But I think you know I didn't have that knowledge when I built the cockpit. I think now, if I was doing it over, I would look at seats from other Japanese aircraft because they're probably really similar, if not identical.

But there are a lot of good aftermarket resin and photo etch seats. Yeah, good aftermarket resin and photo etch, yeah, so but well, when you build your, when you finish this one and build the second one that you're going to do, you know you can use your dental vacuform to vacuform a new canopy. You can cut out separate flat cowling flaps, you can drop in a resin engine and then you can improve the interior as well.

That'll never happen, dave. Come on, you know I'm liking it, it's making progress. If I could just quit breaking the pontoon struts the attachment points. I think I've got it glued pretty good now, and now the touch-up's done now and now the touch-up's done so.

Well, now you know, for future float plane aircraft you want to try and model the floats separately and attach them later and you want to strengthen those attachment points with brass rod or something else, because you know that's a weak point.

Well, I don't know that it gets better with other Japanese float planes, other float planes it might get better, but the Japanese float planes, the Paul has the most robust struts of any of them because there's no rigging between them to help support them, because they have the dive brakes in them, rigging between them to help support them and they and cause you know they had the dive breaks in them. You know something like a Jake, the. The struts are a lot more spindly and there's a lot more rigging, you know, running between all the, all the struts. So I don't know. I'm looking forward to seeing your Jake.

I might wait for somebody else to release a new kit, I could understand why I might go to the US Navy route next. Okay, what do you got? We talked about yours, that's all I got.

That's all I got, Because you and I both did the same thing. We concentrated just on one of the items on our bench and we're both pushing to get them done. Mike, have you been spending any money modeling? Yeah, sort of Well. You know, that's the answer for me too.

Because it's pre-orders and I'm not charged until they actually have product to ship. So I've committed to spending money. You know you often talk about being the book guy. You know my library has grown substantially in 2024.

I will take credit for that.

And.

I've bought a lot of big, thick books.

Yes, you have. And continuing on that theme, I've reserved two copies of Tango Grad Publishing's new KV book, one for myself and one for Evan McCallum, panzermeister 36.

I thought maybe you were going to have one of them in your library and one in the bathroom.

I might for a little while, until Harry's gone, and then Evan gets the one that was in the bathroom.

I thought that would be the deal.

I thought that would be the deal. Anyway, tankograd is probably my favorite publisher just because of the way they do things and it stems from my use of original World War II German snapshots as reference material. Mm, hmm, always used that as a source on top of that. But but anyway, tanko grad leans, leans into that really heavily and accumulates and collects photographs and puts out these books.

Now they did two, two volumes of their kind of magazine format, their soft covers right they've got a an early and later volume on on kv tanks, but this is something new. This thing is really really thick and it's really really expensive. Like college textbook expensive, and college textbooks are a state-sanctioned criminal syndicate.

Yes, they are.

So that's what we're talking about here. This book was going off memory here, but it was 250 Euro, yeah. So yeah, the ouch factor on this one's, this one's high. So, evan, there's going to be an Italian guy with a crooked nose. Show up. If you don't fricking pay up on this thing, buddy, it's not, it's not going to be a fun heritage con.

Yeah Well, it's not going to be a fun Heritage Con. Yeah well, evan's got all that mad YouTube money so he's swimming in it. It's not going to be a problem for him.

Other than that man. I've bought two bottles to be a flat yellow at Hobby Town.

What about you? Well, I'm still waiting. I ordered, as you know, the Mo Musaru is the ICM German mini subs. A listener had helpfully pointed out what I had already found was that there was a company called RC Subs out of the Czech Republic, czechia, and I ordered some photo etch and aftermarket for both the U9 and the ICM mini subs. It's sitting somewhere in New York waiting to clear customs. I guess it's been there for like three weeks and I keep checking back every couple of days and it's it's in the black hole, man, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

There's that, that postal service receipt and hand off to customs.

Yep.

And then customs hands it back off to the postal service, and whenever I've had things go wrong, that's where it happens.

Yes. Well, right now it's hovering in that area and I'm just waiting, and so all I can do is hold my breath. In the meantime, I was getting to the point on my A7 where I needed A7M, where I needed to get out the canopy masks. So I went through my drawer of all of my Japanese aircraft accessories and discovered that I don't have the A7 canopy masks. So I quickly hopped onto Hannitz, found them, ordered them, ordered one or two other things, and then, of course, when you're ordering from Hannitz, you can't just order a couple of canopy masks. You got to look at what's on sale. And so I ended up $40 later with a Hannitz order which, thank gosh, did not get hung up in customs and was in my mailbox an amazing five days after I ordered it. So I won't have that excuse for delaying finishing the A7M.

And then, finally, thanks to our friend Rock Rozak and his recent interview on On the Bench, I've been thinking for a while about picking up a full-size tablet. Reading on your phone is very difficult if you want to do actual reading. And Rock was talking about how, when detail and scale came back out, initially they were doing digital only, and he figured that's what everybody would want, and he was surprised that people wanted actual physical books. In listening to him in the interview, I said I'd been considering it, and then listening to him in the interview pushed me over the edge. So I picked up a Samsung A9 Plus 11-inch tablet and starting to do some actual reading of modeling magazines and books on the tablet, and it's already confirmed to me that it was indeed the right decision. So thanks, rock Mike. We're here about the end of the episode and I'm about the end of my modeling fluid. How are you?

Well, I'm at the end of mine too, and I don't have to ask you how yours is, because I happen to know Buffalo Trace. If you tell me that you had a bad Buffalo Trace, I'm going to be shocked.

I did not have a bad Buffalo Trace. I guess the only thing I would say about it is I wish it was easier to find in Lexington. It should be. They make a lot of it because it's not expensive when you can buy it for MSRP or whatever you want to call it Right. I like it on the rocks. For me it's not a sipper, it's not a neat one.

Right.

I like the heavily weeded ones, the Wellers for that, yeah, but it's good. I mean it's it's good. I mean it's really really good.

I like it a lot and I really appreciate the bottle from mr deborah and maybe you'll get a little bit of it when I'm when, I hope I get a little.

I hope I get a little uh, your beer is probably pretty good too, because you had it at the, at the. You had it on location before location, before you got the bottles or the cans.

Yes, and I will tell you that I enjoyed it when we were having it at the microbrewery. I enjoyed it just as much drinking it out of a can. Thank you, mr Suida. I'm a sucker for Hefeweizens. I like wheat beers. They are, to me, very drinkable beers. This is something that definitely goes well with a modeling session. So, yeah, highly recommended. The ABV isn't bad on it, it's 5.5%, so you know it's not going to hit you like a sledgehammer or anything like that. And Great Dane Brewing crop circle wheat. If you have a chance to get yourself some, get yourself some. Mike, now we're at really the end of the episode and do you have any shout outs before we get moving on?

As always do, dave. I want to shout out all the folks who help bring you Plastic Model Mojo through their generous contributions, the latest of which is Mr Drew Oliver, if you'd like to be like Drew, there are several avenues for which you can do so Patreon, paypal, buy Me a Coffee and, of course, the Plastic Model Mojo merchandise store. Links to all these avenues can be found on this episode's show notes at wwwplasticmodelmojocom. So we appreciate all that. It's going to help us bring you new things and, hopefully, the not-so-distant future in, hopefully, the not-so-distant future.

Yeah, we got new stuff in the works and it is in large part thanks to the folks who've decided to support us financially. Thank you. My shout-out is to Dr Miller, who you and I got to talk to for the first time in a little bit recently and we dropped as a special short. It emphasized to me how much I enjoy talking with him and how much each time we talk, how I learn something or learn a new perspective on something. Listening to him talking about masking was really quite interesting to me. You know you think it's something very simple, but he had some unique insights into it and I really enjoyed it. So thank you, dr Miller.

Anybody else? I've got one other shout out and this is just a re-emphasis of the shout out that I kind of made up above, and that is thank you to all of the people who have joined IPMS USA. The organization is stronger with you. It's growing, it's changing, it's moving in new directions. It's changing, it's moving in new directions and the increased membership and the increased support will help those changes take place faster. So thank you to everyone who's joined IPMS USA or any IPMS national organization.

Well, finally, I want to shout out Joe Porche, our old friend. Yes, we had a nice private exchange with Joe and information like that Joe is really helpful for us as a podcast and we thank you for that and we look forward to seeing you in Virginia next summer.

Absolutely.

Well, dave, we're at the bloody end of this once again, my friend. So many kids, so little time. Dave and Mojovia, may the road rise with you.