ChuckD

Bill, I'm kinda surprised you're getting anything like good results shooting at low pressure and with little thinning. What airbrush are you using? That stuff seems so thick I can't imagine it shooting well at high air pressure. Not any more. I had quite a few at one point. There was a thread here about gun collecting and I threw a post or two in it with some of the stuff I used to have. Can't seem to find it now. I got out of gun collecting a about five or six years ago.

Since you mentioned Vallejo Matt Varnish... I just used it yesterday on my Tamiya -1A Corsair and found that it left a whitish haze on everything. Not to derail an interesting conversation, but I'm curious your spraying parameters for achieving success with the stuff. Incidentally, my go-to flat clear has become good old Liquitex matte varnish cut about 3:1 with distilled water. A couple thin coats of that and you have hard, flat finish that I haven't found a match for yet.

No to derail too much, but is the Revell Ju-88 still in production? Quick googling shows it being somewhat tough to find.

Thank you, Dave. That will likely get me where I need to go, or at least close enough that I can figure the rest out. Besides, there are only so many places to stick a wing on an airplane.

Good morning, everyone. I bought this kit recently from a member here and the instructions are missing. Google and Hobby Search are failing me in finding a digital replacement. Anyone got a copy of them that they can scan and send to me? Thanks! Edit: Looks like the forums cut off my topic a bit. It's kit 3201, the Petie the 2nd boxing of Dragon's P-51 line.

Such awesome work. Loving every update.

Awesome. I gotta get off my but and get moving on my -17E that I've had on the shelf for a while.

Holy hell. I'll be the first to admit that I've made mistakes in airplanes and have had the good fortune to walk away with myself and [most of] the airplane intact. But that guy just kept piling up the mistakes. Yikes. Great story though. Thanks for sharing.

Funny story... I was flying a C-182RG from Michigan to middle Wisconsin to visit relatives in college. Nice long IFR cross country in and out of the clouds all the way. On most Cessnas I've flown the fuel selector lets you select the right tank, left tank, or both for your fuel source. On the selector itself, there is a placard that says something like "for level flight only" on the setting for the right or left individual tanks. Generally, you set the selector to "both" and leave it that way. However, this ragged, beat up (over 9000 hours last I saw her 10 years ago) rental C182 had a bit of a quirk. With the selector set to both, it would draw fuel significantly faster from one tank over, leading to a pretty severe wing-heavy situation after several hours of flight. To combat this, it was common knowledge around the ramp that when taking her for long flights, you needed to select individual tanks. So, somewhere along the way to WI, I switched it to the one of the tanks individually and every hour, switched it to the other individual tank to help draw the fuel load evenly. Tooling happily along, I started my decent as I neared my destination. At one point, still many miles out an in a general descent in VFR conditions, I realized I had quite a few thousand feet of altitude to burn before I'd arrive at pattern altitude. To counter this, I'd often put the aircraft into a slip which more or less exposes the side of the fuselage to the slipstream, slows you down, and allows you to descend quickly without gaining too much airspeed. I'd done this hundreds of times before without problem. But those times, I'd remembered to leave the fuel selector on "both." Shortly after I began the slip, the fuel in the tank I had selected was pulled by centripetal force away from the tank's intake pipe and the engine immediately quit. It was like someone threw a switch. In the gun hobby, there's a saying: "the two loudest sounds in the world; a click when there should be a bang, and bang when there should be a click." This would be the aviation equivalent. The relative silence was deafening. One second, the big, beefy 6-cylinder Lycoming was humming away as it had for hours, singing its low pitched song. The next, the the only sound that filled the cabin was the metallic clatter and shudder of thousands of precision parts windmilling in the slipstream. It was unlike any sound I've ever heard and is still clear in my mind. In a second, I snapped back to coordinated flight which quickly put the fuel back over the intake pipe in the tank. The windmilling engine immediately caught and resumed it's monotonous hum as my trembling hands reached down to switch the selector to both. Turns out those "for level flight only" placards are there for a reason.

Incredible work. How's that ultra training going?

Here I go, getting all hot and bothered about at B-24 again. :/

Wow, well done! Having been around plenty of grubby aircraft undercarriages in my life, I can say that you captured the dirt, grit, and grime of that area splendidly. Bravo!

They did. The bombardier was closest to the plane because his chute didn't open, but he was still miles away.

As I'm sitting on two HKM B-17s right now... I can say with some certainty that yes, I'd absolutely buy a 1/32 B-24J for around the pricepoint of one of HKM's B-17s if the quality was comparable. I'd probably even throw down for a B-24D, even though I much prefer the aesthetics of the nose turreted models. My love affair with B-24s began around the age of seven when I found Steve Birdsall's "Log of the Liberators" at the local library and read the intro chapter about the Lady Be Good. I was a strange kid. Anyway, I know there are some vacuform B-24s floating around out there, but vac kits are outside my league.

I'd kill maim lightly slap for a 1/32 B-24J kit. HKM, ARE YOU READING THIS?

<--- Sad panda.

WAIT WHAT??

Aftermarket ain't cheap.

You know, that's a great point. I hadn't really considered it until you mentioned it, but most of my spurious, impulsive kit buying has been focused around quality kits from the golden age of Dragon. I've got multiple copies of their three big Panther kits with magic tracks (my preference) and loads of PE. I bought them because they are great quality kits and they are essentially out of production - at least with all the original extras that came in the box. As to the HK B-17 going OOP... I have no insight other than my gut, but I'd suspect you're right. However, I've noticed since they've ramped up the E/F kit, that the G kit is getting harder and harder to find. It appears to be out of stock at most of the major retailers. On one hand, it's such a major endeavor to develop, tool, market, and deliver that it makes sense for HKM to put out as many as possible. On the other hand, it's an enormous kit with a high price tag and its market is likely fairly limited. Either way, I never in my life thought I'd see anything other than the nowadays-abysmal 1/48 Revell/Monogram B-17, so I'm thrilled just to have these kits available and if I had a bit more expendable cash, I'd have several more in the stash.

Thanks! Apparently as a probie my max "like" quota for the day is zero, so I couldn't like your post. Anything to keep spammers away though.

Registered just to follow this thread. Incredible work and good luck on your ultra-marathon. I've got a friend pestering me to do one too, but not sure my soul is ready for that kind of beating yet.

To be fair, this is like bellying up to the bar with your pals and announcing you're giving up drinking. I have ~40 vehicle kits in the stash and complete one every other month or so. So, I've currently got several years worth of kits to build. My take on the large stash argument is that you never know when inspiration will strike nor what that inspiration may be. I prefer to have a wide variety of kits available so that when I feel the drive to build something in particular, it's already there and ready to go. Just this week, I broke out a Panzer 38(t) that's been on the stack for a couple of years now. I bought is years ago thinking "someday I'd like to build a 38(t)." Apparently that day was Monday.