Grey Ghost 531

Higher atomization probably means smaller paint droplets and that would be good for scale appearance. I've never seen it quantified. Single action airbrushes use the button to control the air. The paint is usually controlled by turning a knob, either at the back of the airbrush or near the needle. It works the same as pulling the button back in a double action airbrush but it is hard to do in the middle of painting. Most double action airbrushes have a way to set the paint to a fixed adjustment so you can make it work like a single action airbrush if you don't need to vary the paint amount.

Not in the mail but I picked up a Hasegawa 1/72 Mitsubishi Ki-67 Hiryu (Peggy) for 10 bucks at GraniteCon from the vendors. It looks like a nice kit. I also got a DML 1/72 Bradley and a couple of the Dragon 1/144 tanks at HobbyTown USA.

I think at least some of that effect is the result of photography. I have polarized sunglasses and a polarized face shield on my motorcycle helmet. The picture of the stinkbug's canopy looks a lot like polarized car windows look like to me through the double polarizing of my glasses/face shield. Kind of red on one edge and green on the other.

It's like real fine putty that you paint on. It sands and polishes out glassy smooth. If you use enamel to check to see if you have filled your seams enough now you can use Mr. Surfacer the same way and it works way nicer. It will fill any rough sanding marks too. Try it, you'll like it.

Side showing vent pipe to window.

business end

Back with the back cover removed showing the fan cut outs

Pics of my spray booth. Top view of it; the top of the picture is the front of the booth. The fans intake air into their center hole and blow it out the side duct which open into that bottom channel and from there out the vent pipe.

I built one out of scrap plywood using two squirrel cage type blowers from the Northern Equipment mail order catalog. Here's a plan. I vent it out a window with a three inch vent pipe. It's not perfect and according to the experts it's only a matter of time before I blow myself up because the fans aren't the proper spark proof types, but I haven't yet.

The only difference between early and late Navy/Marine Phantoms is that they early Phantoms had the tops light gull grey and the bottoms of the fuselage and wings and the control surfaces white, very early ones had the leading edges of the wings and the intakes in corroguard. Around 1975 they stopped painting anything white, they were overall light gull grey. The grey was the same either way. It was actually 16440 as they were glossy. I'd still use flat for a model. If you go to THIS LINK there is a ANA to FS conversion chart at the bottom. It says that FS36440 is the equivalent of ANA 620.

Boyd's Primer White. It will cover almost anything with one or two coats. It is marketed for the car crowd but it sticks to airplanes too.

Yes, but I can't vouch for whether it's any good or not.

Roll Models delivers: 1/72 Olimp JN-4H/JNS-1 Schiffer book on the Ar-196 about a dozen bottles of various modeling potions.

Roll Models carries Waldron. You can get them directly from Waldon as well.

If you don't want to remove the paint too, just stick tape to them and rip them off. That should get the decals pretty well. It might reveal the paint color has faded though. If you want to strip the paint as well there are a number of options. Oven cleaner for one, a product called "Strip a kit" for a second.

Even a diaphram compressor is okay without an air tank as long as you're not doing thin lines. If you're mostly going to large areas and stay away from the luftwaffe squiggles you can get by without it. I did for years and years. It's possible to do good mottle or free-hand camo even as long as the areas are big enough to allow multiple passes. Try and do a thin line and you'll get a dotted line unless you move the airbrush very slowly (i.e. very little paint) The air tank will also catch a lot of the moisture.

I know that you can buy resin boots to make boot prints in the "soil" of your armor dioramas in 1/35. Why not carve little boots in the proper scale out of a rubber eraser and use them as stamps with some grime colored paint? Or you could cut a stencil of boot prints and airbrush them on. I did the stencil thing with tire marks on an aircraft carrier flight deck and it looked pretty good. At least until it was dropped flight deck down onto the floor...

I think that it's a fact of life that solvent based putty will shrink as it dries to one degree or another. I use 3M Acryl Blue which is an autobody glazing putty. It shrinks, but not as much as Squadron Green and it sands much nicer. It doesn't tend to "chunk" as much as the green stuff when you scribe a line in it either. I get around the shrinkage by being patient and applying it and sanding as many times as it takes to get the area flush and waiting long enough to make sure it's done shrinking. I think I always end up with at least three layers before I prime. That's probably why I've be

I've heard, but not tried, throwing them in the freezer until they get nice and hard and then sanding them as normal. I'm waiting for winter when it hits 20 below outside (F) to do my rubber tire sanding...

Nice looking "Whale" by the way! Hasegawa? I've used the press-n-seal too but not for masking like that. I've used it to cover the bulk of a model when I was airbrushing details instead of taping up the whole thing or using paper towels. It worked okay for that since I wasn't burnishing it down all over.

A big box of goodies from Squadron! Well, it really came last Saturday but I only took a picture of the loot last night.

Check out the Tools'n'Tips section on weathering. The chalk wash method has worked well for me. Just make sure your gloss coat is pretty good or it's harder to remove the excess.

By maxing out the contrast you could probably create a mask to etch your own instrument panel. Combine that with the acetate instruments to make a killer cockpit. Using the same image would guarantee the instruments would line up with the holes in the panel.

Nothing in the mail lately but when I got back from my road trip there was an anniversary present waiting for me. Get this, my wife let me take my road trip over our anniversary and then had a present waiting for me when I got back! She got me the DVD box set of "Victory at Sea" and the DVD of "Battle of Britain". She was very reasonable about letting me go over our anniversary because I wanted to go as close to the solstice as possible so I could have daylight for as long as I could on my first day out. I went all the way from Vermont to Fayetteville, N. Carolina; 1024 miles in about 18 hour

That's why I use stretched sprue. Nylon thread seems to be affected by humidity too much. I rigged a ship model with nylon, tightened it with my usual piece of insense and all was fine, until it got humid and all the rigging sagged again. I think heating nylon just dries it out so it shrinks a little but as soon as it soaks up some humidity it relaxes again. Sprue shrinks and stays shrunk. I guess it's getting fractionally thicker when it shrinks in length so that the change is permanent. I can make it thinner than invisible thread too.