karimb Posted March 31, 2018 Author Share Posted March 31, 2018 Hey guys and girls Sorry i have not had the chance to do any updates as of late but i have been working hard on the Kamel... So much so we are almost done with her and i sure do hope you like what you see in the update tomorrow! There will be a ton of photos so bear with me! till then stay safe and happy modeling! Karim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolf Buddee Posted March 31, 2018 Share Posted March 31, 2018 Karim, your work is nothing short of brilliant! Teach me your ways O Master! Cheers, Wolf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 1, 2018 Author Share Posted April 1, 2018 For sale: all my models and supplies... I am continuously blown away by the realism you can bring to a model Karim. Most of here build models, you create art. Tony thanks my friend... i can say the same for the masterpieces you post bud! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 1, 2018 Author Share Posted April 1, 2018 Karimb, I've been thinking. On those German planes, there is a gunsight over each Spandau, but really no gunsight on the Pilot's line of sight. I'm wondering if that could be why it's there. Does it comply with the Pilot's line of sight along the axis of the fuselage? If so, we could be looking at some created-in-the-field aiming point. Gaz Possibly Gaz i didnt think of it that way... Strangely the Spandau on the starboard side does have the aiming crosshair on it but i do not know if it is of any use except if the pilot dangles out the side to try to aim. I think what you are saying might be close to the truth but the radiator cap is also on the side as in not centered... the mystery continues. Does anyone have any idea or estimation as this is quite puzzling! Gazzas 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 1, 2018 Author Share Posted April 1, 2018 Karim, your work is nothing short of brilliant! Teach me your ways O Master! Cheers, Wolf Sensei Wolf! Your builds have always been an inspiration to me and a masterclass in modeling... i keep going back to learn and take notes from your older posts and am eagerly following your new projects (that includes the Corsair youre working on at the mo!) Thanks for checking in on the build and for the kind words! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 1, 2018 Author Share Posted April 1, 2018 Guys and girls Sorry ran out of time today i woke up late so the update will be for tomorrow! Brace yourselves lol Off to the races for a Beirut turnaround! Karim MikeMaben 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeMaben Posted April 2, 2018 Share Posted April 2, 2018 Take your time Karim , no hurry on our account Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 4, 2018 Author Share Posted April 4, 2018 Take your time Karim , no hurry on our account Lol Mike... I am to blame. i got so caught up with actually building the W12 and rationing my sleep that i didn't get much time to write up the progress but here goes below! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 4, 2018 Author Share Posted April 4, 2018 Hello gang! First of all let me apologize for such delay in writing up the update i had promised last week, and the week before. Time has been very much at a premium lately and writing up these updates takes quite a bit of time to get laid out correctly and for them to be informative enough. In the light of this i preferred to use the time i had between flight and a small ear infection to work on the W12 in order to get it done in time for Moson show at the end of the month! As we speak the kit is safely sitting in the display cabinet next to the AMC DH2 who is going to be in tow for the contest tables too. Since our last update, well, alot has been done, to the point we are calling the W12 done and dusted. I will try to write up every little thing and the posts will be very heavy in photos so bear with me and fire up those fast internet connections! I had mentioned i wanted to add the cockpit door hinges, which i just did by cutting a piece of 0.3 lead wire to length and gluing it in position between the door and the fuselage entry area. Radiator got glued to the fuselage and there is a small area on the bottom that doesn't line up very well but that is mainly due to me sanding the fuselage halves together when i joined them and leaving a small vertical step between the two halves. The weathering of the fuselage might not be to alot of you guys's taste but i wanted to have a nice stained and hard used aircraft to go hand in hand with the weathering of the paint, so i used oils and pigments to dirty up the fuselage. For the oils i used ochre and brown and for the pigments at the bottom i used ochre and light dust pigments from AK. The thing is (note to self!) the front and observer clear parts got fogged during the painting process. The fogging is not from paint on the parts or similar, it is from dried paint pigments that flew in when i was clear coating etc etc during the painting process. In my next W12 build or the W29s i have, i will make sure to keep the clear parts off until i am satisfied with the clear coats and all. I thoroughly discussed the issue with Jaroslav on the phone to take his opinion and he proposed i slowly pried the clear parts off if i was able, which i tried to no avail. i didnt want to force the prying out in order to avoid any blade breakage or worse to have the fuselage pop open or a crack to appear. To mitigate the dusting i managed to use a bent microbrush to wipe most of it off. Jaroslav made a point too, those things would probably not be pristine clean and i founbd the white dust pigment pretty much looked like dried caked up dust/salt so i went and lightly dusted the clear parts and some of the lower fuselage areas where the water spray would stain. I am happy with the outcome. I also dusted ochre and white dust around where the struts join the fuselage. The propeller was painted initially with a coat of buff then the central area of the hub highlighted with tamiya dark yellow. I then used thin strips of aizu tape (0.7mm) to mask the laminations. I have noticed in alot of photos that the propellers of the W12 and W29s have long striations instead of the oblong laminations that you find say on the single seat fighter props so this is how i ended up masking the prop. The laminations were painted with tamiya linoleum deck brown. I pondered for a while wether to pencil grain the props or go for a very light brown oil stain and grain and ended up going for that technique. Before oil graining the propeller i drew the black 'glue' lines that separate the laminations on the propeller. Gloss seal. The woodgraining was done using brown wash oil from abteilung's line of oils. Everything was sealed again with gloss clear from MRP after the oils had dried overnight! Tamiya smoke was used to shade the brass propeller tips. Decals were added and sealed in again and the brass tips were painted using Mr metal color brass buffable lacquer. The prop bosses were painted with dark aluminium from MRP and the screws painted with Mr metal color buffable gold lacquer. Everything was weathered with dark brown wash. The exhaust was drilled out and thinned. Initially it was painted with nato black from tamiya then an overall coat of red brown was used. I didn't want the exhaust to look rusted up but rather caked from the heat of the gases and the sun and also a touch of rust showing up here and there. after the brown tied in everything with the preshading, i started off by airbrushing the coolest areas with dark rust colors then progressively moved out towards the hotter areas using brighter colors ranging from red brick to orange to yellow to faded yellow where the pipes meet up and where the manifolds join the head of the cylinders. I used clear green to highlight the areas where the manifold joins the cyclinder banks, and where the pipes join together. I also dabbed some darker, almost black color in some areas to show where rust is just starting. The top area of the exhaust stack is bigger in volume so i figured it would be cooler in temperature and ended up using iron buffable metallic pigments to highlight where the exhaust would be as it was supposed to be when it came out of the factory. The top part of the exhaust got a treatment of soot using nato black and some black pigments. A rust wash was used in the areas where the pipes join together to form the stack. The trick for the exhaust to look good is to vary the clear coat from dead flat to semi matt where the heat and rust is less to metallic where the areas are still in natural metal. One thing of note for those wanting to use the same exhaust i have used, there are two sink marks either side of the part that need filling and blending in before painting. The external rigging booms that attach from the float structure to the wings were cleaned up and painted using MRP gloss black, tamiya nato black and rubber black to break up the color. They were coated with MRP semi matt clear coat to give them a nice sheen, which is the same clear coat i used on the main struts of the floats. Nothing to report there the assembly is super sturdy and is excellently moulded as per wnw's usual super high standard. The only thing we had left was the wings which i considered a phase that would either make or break the whole build of 1407. I started off by painting the wings. I used the two version of MRP linen version 1 and version 2. One is whitish buff and the other version has a markedly more yellow tint to it. I used the second version on my fokker eindecker build as it is very close to the yellowish hue of the German doped linen used on some of the aircraft. I wanted the bottom wings of 1407 to be markedly yellowish. I initially painted the ribs of the bottom side of the wings with the lighter color, and the whole top wings with the same. I then masked the ribs on the bottom and top wings using precut vinyl masks (0.8mm for those who want to know) that i had plotted on the Silhouette. I used to cut the rib masks from tamiya tape in the old days but then i have started using the silhouette for those and i find it cuts down the job time in terms of hours and the results are much more crisp and the parts exact duplicates so you have consistent results. I then preshaded the top part of the bottom wings with tamiya smoke and the top part of the top wing using red brown from tamiya. The bottom of the wings were preshaded with tamiya smoke and then when all the rib masks were removed the top part of the wings was blended in with the lighter MRP linen and the bottom was blended in with the yellow tint version of MRP linen. The wings were clear coated with MRP gloss. In the reference photos of 1407 in wnw's manual there is very noticeable staining. Now i do not know if the staining was caused from the crash or if the staining was there from regular use of 1407. I tried to find photos of W12s in flight which showed the underside area of the wings but i had no joy so i ended up replicating the staining either way. i first airbrushed a heavy coat of AK heavy chipping fluid then i airbrushed red brown and brown in a very highly thinned coat and then chipped the paint off leaving some long streaks like in the photo in the manual. After that i ended up gloss coating again. Now, one thing i want to mention, i was planning on using Aviattic's French linen clear decals for the bottom of the wings and for the elevator and ailerons. I have been using Richard's decals for years now and have amassed literary a full folder of them numbering i don't know maybe 80 sheets, the whole range of decals he produces. From lozenges to fokker blue, to the DR1 streaking decals to everything in between. For some reason, on some of the batches i notice silvering occurs, even without using a setting agent and after having properly glossed up the parts and the gloss having cured rock hard. What i am suspecting is some of the batches i have had trouble with are some of the older batches of sheets i have acquired years ago. I am still unsure what the issue is exactly as after removal of the offending decal and using the same type from a different sheet the product works just fine with no alteration of the base coat or anything else done. Either way, i plotted the decals for the bottom of the wings from the french linen sheet and started off laying down the decals. As i had a flight the next day i let the decals dry overnight and to my horror next day i had the dreaded spiderweb silvering (you can notice that very well in the photo i will post below where the wings are resting next to the fuselage in the wnw box). Richard do not take that as a criticism of your product but rather something that has happened a few times to me and it is no big deal at all! I had to remove all the French linen decals i had placed and needed to find another solution. In my correspondence with Michael Scarborough we discussed this issue and i was telling him i was going to have to change from French linen to some different sheets i had and that i was bugged because i wouldn't maybe get the hue i was looking for so he thankfully reminded me about going back to basics. Yes back to basics. Paint the linen just like i have done many times. To do that i ended up blending in a coat of tamiya dark yellow in streaks in the middle of areas which turned out really nice and which will be further enhanced at a later point with oils. Now we had a smooth transition between darker yellow, a lighter yellow, the rib shading and the ribs which are lighter (since the top fo the wing is not translucent my take is the rib areas are of a lighter color). For the top of the wings, i decided to go another round of polishing with micromesh and started with 6000 and finished with 12000 grit. the top area became like a mirror ready for the Aviattic naval hex. The top hex decals for the lower wings were plotted and the top aileron too (the ailerons at a 45 degree angle in the hex print). The top wings was another issue since the photos clearly show a continuous pattern. The only way i was able to come up with a continuous patter was to cut the decals by hand for the top wing which i did with no issue. I simply cut the initial piece for the top middle part and then lined it up on top of the decal sheet and started from there for the outer parts of the wings. The decaling started from the middle and i worked outwards. The decals in place i went to sleep and woke up to check on the decals the next day and hadn't a single complaint. They behaved admirably with no silvering or no bubbles. I made sure the night before they were well burnished down without trapped air or any other defects and i used sparingly Mr setter for the curves and overlaps. I then moved on and airbrushed my own markings which i had prepared using the silhouette plotter for the bottom wings. This allows me to play with opacity and to modulate my weathering in order to fit and tie everything together. I used basic white and basic black from MRP to paint the markings on. Nothing to report there except i had a great time as usual painting the markings on. I then proceeded to re mask the rib areas where the marking was painted and postshading the ribs with tamiya smoke. Chipping was done with color pencils using browns and beiges and some grays. I don't know if they show in the photos but they are there and they add a little 'something' to the overall look of the bottom of the wings. The bottom of the wings were then airbrushed with a clear MRP semi gloss coat. It was time to start work on the top wing markiongs since the decals and the polishing had been ticked off the list! WARNING: and disclaimer! I am known to have done, and still do, pretty stupid things in my life. This is one of them (Ask my sister, she warns my nephew not to take my words 'literally' or do some of the things i do, and this quite frequently!!!). I had decided i was going to paint the markings ON TOP of the Aviattic decals using my homemade masks. For those willing to take the challenge and walk down the hard path to success, read on. otherwise skip to the photos lol! and avoid placing masks above any sort of decals I first gloss coated the top of the wings with MRP gloss coat and let it dry overnight. The lacquer coat is nail tough. Next and this is the crux of the whole endeavor - reducing the tack of the masks. Now you should all be aware no matter how much detacked the masks are you will always have some lift in the decal below. Once you are ready for that, mentally and materially then youre good to go. I set aside a brand new razor blade from gilette, the likes of which are used on old cut throat razors. those blades are thinner and cut far cleaner than any new #11 blade and they are the most useful in the upcoming situation. As i was saying the secret to making this whole cuckoo plan work is to detack the masks. I start off by sticking them on my forehead, my palms until they detack a bit from where we started. the second thing i do and i think that is what makes it work is the sand trick. Let me clarify this point as it sounds a bit crazy. i figured out a while ago that since the problem is the tackiness of the mask how can we reduce this for good. reduction of tacky surface without having to reduce the centimetric surface per se. which means covering part of the sticky surface with something. since i live in the sand pits (ie doha) there is alot of very fine dust to be found around everywhere. I just go and place the mask on a really dusty surface outside the house. A car windscreen works a charm. The dust particles cover up alot of the tackiness and you still have a mask that partially sticks. I don't know if what i wrote down makes any sense or if i have lost my marbles while writing this in words but it does work a charm. I suspect if you laid some salt down on a tabletop and did the same it would also work. Either way this is how i got the markings done on the top wing. White, then the black same MRP paints as used on the lower wing then the gray was done freemasking using the side of the mask and the little pointy bits remaining from the Eiserneskreuz were hand painted using a highly diluted RLM gray from tamiya. The offending bubbles and lifts were treated with the Mr setter fluid and everything went back to normal. The ribs were highlighted using a post it note side and tamiya smoke and some chipping done on the Balkenkreuzs using a 10/0 brush and highly diluted different colored paints. The whole wings were coated with MRP semi gloss and left to harden overnight. Broke a sweat doing the whole thing but really worth the results as you will see... To tie everything in and weather the wings i used ochre, burnt umber, smoke, faded dark yellow and cream brown oils from Abteilung to do oil dot fading which added vibrancy to the large decaled areas and to the bottom of the wings. End of the chapter of the wings! The struts were painted and there were no issues to report there. The locating points are very well defined and the fit is mechanical. Wnw had the brilliant idea of marking the bottom attachment points with small letters L and R so you don't mistake the struts and the letters disappear once you insert the struts in the wings. Since the W12 has very few turnbuckles i decided to modify the bottom of the struts and replace the molded on eyelets with Gaspatch turnbuckles which add to the whole look. The rigging was very basic and was done with EZline and of course the brass tubing is from Bob's buckles! The top wing mounting was positive and everything lined up and locked in place. once all in place is used tamiya quick setting extra thin (which i find myself using more and more for the delicate jobs and i can't recommend it enough. this thing is blazing fast!) Wingnut wings also provides you with the flare rack on the trestle sprue (if i am not mistaken). They don't mention it but i found two of those and painted one to place it on the port side behind the turtledeck as shown in 1407's photos. For the observer's MG i used the kit's PE jacket which i annealed then burnished using UVDR's burnishing fluid. Rolled using drill bits of the correct diameter and then installed. I painted the gun flat black and then used metallic pigments from UVDR to 'paint' the mg. The wood stock was done by initially painting the stock in buff then doing the woodgraining using oils. The MG mounting ring was painted RLM gray and weathered with pencils and oils. Little bobs and bits were added and...... drumroll...... 1407 is completed and now resting in the display cabinet! What an enjoyable build this was. A real breath of fresh air! The build was trouble free and the subject is a really interesting one with alot of potential for weathering and alot of different materials to simulate. what more can a modeler ask! The Kamel is now ready for her big meeting with the world when she will be on the contest tables at the Moson show on the 21st of April along with her little brother the AC DH2... I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who followed the build thread and again excuse myself for the sporadic absences due to work and life taking over. For anyone wanting to take their first foray into seaplanes i would highly recommend the W12!! Now that 1407 is behind us, you guys are in for a surprise. Well not a surprise but a more colorful subject which will soon be posted and i hope you guys will follow and enjoy. I will be taking the ready for inspection photos tomorrow or the day after and post them here so you guys can see what she looks like in all her glory! Below the missing work in progress photos! Thanks again everyone, stay safe and happy modeling! Karim LSP_Kevin, TorbenD and Trak-Tor 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 4, 2018 Author Share Posted April 4, 2018 In a broad specific order! tucohoward, Gazzas, TorbenD and 3 others 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 4, 2018 Author Share Posted April 4, 2018 tucohoward, Lenny320 and LSP_Kevin 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 4, 2018 Author Share Posted April 4, 2018 TorbenD, tucohoward, KUROK and 2 others 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn M Posted April 4, 2018 Share Posted April 4, 2018 gorgeous Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bomber_County Posted April 4, 2018 Share Posted April 4, 2018 I am unworthy to look upon such beautiful modelling, i think I'll just shuffle away and say no more that I am a modeller.......... Seriously Karim absolutely stunning........wish I had 5% of your talent.......... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karimb Posted April 4, 2018 Author Share Posted April 4, 2018 gorgeous Thanks Shawn! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now