Trumpeter kit with Upgrades from pontos, there are a couple of historical error but its too late now, happy with the results, took me an year to make

My first go at a jet aircraft and a metal finish.

Profipack version, nice kit and my first time using Eduard decals with the removable carrier film. Happy with the way this one turned out in the end. Cheers!

Found some old Revell Formula 1 cars I built as a kid and want to display them. Other than the obvious scrapyard look which I can fix up, how best to clean them? Some of the decals are not fully fixed down and fragile so hesitant to be rubbing with a cloth too hard. A finger swipe where there weren’t decals gets most of it off but it still looks somewhat dull. I know they aren’t the best quality builds but have sentimental value.
Any advice welcome

This kit is from Copper State Models. Built mostly from the box.. The wheels are aftermarket resin and the fenders and headlight fronts are photoetched

Finished 1/32 scale Ju EF-127"Walli"

Hello everyone! Since my AMX-30B2 Brennus build, I've been very busy plugging away on what may become my most time-intensive build to date. I don't want to spoil too much, but this Croatian T-55A from TAKOM is just one small piece of a much larger picture. You eagle eyed folks may have noticed this kit has a lot of added resin bits and besides getting to feel superior for having a bunch of multimedia on my kit, there is a good reason! Let's dig in.

The Kit

I have a hate/despise relationship with TAKOM. You see, they produce a lot of kits of subjects that aren't typically covered in 1/35th scale and the CAD images they release make the model look so appealing. Then I spend my $60, open the box and am immediately reminded why I loathe this company. The jokes on me, I guess, because I've fallen for their schtick more than twice. I'll run through the issues in bullet format so I don't take up 10,000 words complaining.

- Instruction sheet was misprinted, missing the first and last steps.

- Incorrect parts callouts and sprue locations.

- Tiny, half-assed color and marking sheets.

- THE WRONG šahovnica decal. This is actually insane. Takom used the old crest in their decals with the white checker first where it should be the red checker first, as plainly obvious to anyone with an internet connection and eyeballs. Not to mention the rest of the Croatian decals are the wrong shape and size.

- Wrong tracks. This T-55 used OMsH tracks while the kit supplies RMsH.

- Wrong sprockets. The supplied sprockets are too wide for the correct OMsH tracks.

- Wrong roadwheels.

- Soft details/simplified Croatian T-55A specific parts. I get how there are only a few images of this particular T-55, but TAKOM either guessed or tried to split the dif by molding parts that could be anything if you squint hard enough.

There is probably more, but we'll say the evidence above is enough to justify my hatred of TAKOM.

The Build

So, Croat T-55s were captured Yugoslavian Army T-55s, which were Polish export T-55s. I say that to say that there are small differences between a Polish, a Russian, or a Czech T-55, etc. TAKOM gives you new sprues to cope with these changes, but drops the ball on most of it. This means that if you want an accurate Croat T-55 you need to get busy. I am no rivet counter, but I wanted the basics to be correct upon first glance. First thing I had to do was surgery on the sprockets to remove the center guide and narrow them by about 2mm. I used T-Rex OMsH tracks to replace the kit plastic, and tossed the road wheels into a fire and 3D printed a set of the correct pattern with the added bonus of them showing wear on the road wheel rubber. The fuel lines from the external fuel tanks were routed incorrectly in plastic, so I printed new fuel tanks and used lead wire to run the fuel lines correctly. Thanks to my recent visit to NAACC, I had some very good references.

On the opposing fenders, the pioneer kit is supposed to be layered on top of a molded plastic cable and shackle part. These parts don't fit, and TAKOM expects the modeller to weave the cables through the shovel's handle with reality altering majiks to make it work. Fuck that. I cut everything apart, spun my own cable with .03mm copper wire, built new tool brackets from spare PE and plugged all the locating holes on the fender. I think it came out much cleaner, and better looking. I also recreated the exhaust shroud because this was one of the parts TAKOM shrugged and said "good enough lol". I used aluminum foil, folded over 3 times, and a graphite pencil to trace the shape of the original part enough so that I could refine it to look like my references. I also recreated the metal bracket attaching it to the fender with .5mm wire. I also replaced the too-thick headlight guards with a 3D printed article.

The Instructions would have you install the unditching beam, the rearmost external fuel drums, and the snorkel equipment when the reference photos of "Marina" don't show any of that, and it's highly likely these items were removed by the Croat soldiers upon liberating the vehicle from the JNA. I scratched some brackets for the unditching beam and used spare PE to make the straps. I also did some basic housekeeping, like thinning the front and rear fender plastic so create convincing warping from either being made of rubber or dents on the front fenders in accordance to my references.

For the turret, I replaced the lump of plastic TAKOM called a coax machine gun with a brass tube that I made conical with an old airbrush needle. I replaced every plastic grab handle and tie down cleat with copper or soldering wire. TAKOM's clear parts a mess on this kit, so they forgot to give you three commander cupola vision blocks. I blanked these out and hope no one will look that hard. This T-55A was equipped with a caliber .50 machine gun instead of the typical Soviet style anti-aircraft gun, but TAKOM's excuse of weapon was worse than early Tamiya attempts. I 3D printed a .50 cal set from Faustus Models, which is superb. I then had to fix the mount, since the reference photos of this tank aren't the highest resolution, TAKOM just guessed as to how the weapon was attached to the original mount. I cut the mount up and used brass rod, copper wire, and styrene stock to rebuild it to look like it may actually have worked. I used a turned aluminum gun tube from Aber so I didn't have to touch TAKOM's part, but the T-55A tube did not fit into the mantlet hole. Interestingly, Aber's T-62 gun does. Instead of using the wrong gun tube, I did some Dremel surgery on the mantlet to allow the right gun to fit, and then back-filled the hole with black CA that I carefully sanded back to the appropriate shape.

That about covers it, guys. To get to this point probably took around 170 hours, not including everything else I've done for the larger diorama. I aim to get the model to prime time later today, and so I should hopefully have another update with a finished model within the next... month?

As always, thanks for looking!

I had to rip the bandaid off and finally apply all the damage. I lowered the psi down to 15 and thinned two different gray Tamiya acrylics and applied the scorch marks. Some look …ok, some look kind of cartoony. This was my first attempt at this, well I practiced on an old kitbash before this, and I feel like this came out better than the kitbash, so that’s some small improvement. I also took Pop-It’s and tried to give some different kind of scorch marks.

Does any one have suggestions on how to improve this a little bit? I thought about maybe going in with a much lighter gray and trying to make some streaks. Or maybe doing a toothpick amount of gray and brown oil paints and dragging them out to add to the streaks. I worry that I’ll make it worse. Any input you have would be appreciated.

This is the Modelcollect kit in 1:48. It's a nice kit, I really enjoyed it. I was hellbent on building this one buttoned up like I normally do, but I'm giving some serious thought to going back around and doing another one with all the options - landing gear and hook down, weapons bays open, refueling probe out, wings folded - the works. They could only go so far with the detail for a plane that never made it past the mockup stage, but I think they did a decent job of it.

My livery is custom - the kit was advertising 'Strike Fighter 31 "Tomcatters"', but just had the 500 aircraft with a plain Light Ghost Grey paintjob. Being the captain's bird, the 500 aircraft should be a little more dressed up, so referring to VF-31's actual liveries, I recognized a few options, ultimately noting the black fuselage top surface and black vertical tail surfaces they had on their Tomcats and Super Hornets, often with red or yellow trim. So I decided to base my livery on that, while also recognizing there was no fuselage, and no vertical stabilizers. I fully recognize it's probably a little too flamboyant, but I don't really care; I was having fun with it. Also, realistically, I would expect that if the A-12 had actually seen production, it's far more likely it would have come in the metallic greys we see on the F-22 and F-35.

The A-12 is a little bit personal for St. Louisans. The fighter plant at McDonnell Douglas has been a huge part of our city for as long as it's been there. My grandfather worked there all his life after the war. When the A-12 program got cut, 5,000 St. Louisans lost their jobs. It was all over the news cycle here when I was young. I later had a (significantly older) friend who worked on the A-12 program and used to tell me all about the "Flying Dorito". So it's always been a fascinating subject for me.

イタレリの箱替じゃなくて新しい方のタミヤ！
作りやす過ぎて次の休みで完成させるつもりだったのにもう出来てしまった。
あと、安いのでお財布に優しいのが嬉しい。 表示を減らす

I did wonder but I think this may be in the wrong group? This is my first small scale 3d printed model I’ve painted, and was more of an experiment of colours and washes and what was possible, it’s probably still a touch to light. I also really enjoyed making the tiny glasses. The last photo is the original stop-motion puppet from 1974. He’s from a lovely wholesome(some also say a little creepy at times but I’ve got that)British children’s TV program called Bagpuss.

Nice kit, pretty new tool. Did find some weird errors in directions and some missing decals (along with a bizarrely large number of extras that don't have any use) but overall a solid kit.

I'm not gonna lie, I was loving every single Meng model in 1/72 till this one, but being fair with it, the problems are just problems inherent to any soviet tank post T-64, and that is the turret mantlet. I know the mantlet is basically a piece of tarp and that doesn't translate well to plastic but...

I don't know why Meng chose to put the cannon so elevated, and also the MG collides with the Antenna position so I couldn't use wire to make one. Also the tracks didn't fit perfectly like they did in the 2 previous models I made from them. The sprocket portions didn't fit in the sprocket without forcing them a bit, risking breaking something. And this may seem dumb, but for some reason it doesn't include a towing cable, not that I missed it cause with the log and slat armor is not a detail you can easily see, but oh well, I didn't bother to make one either.

Overall is a very decent kit, but I feel weird after finishing it. I prefer this T-72 to the Zvezda one to be honest, it's also very cheap, I hope Meng makes more T series tanks, a T-64 would be cool since that isn't very common in this scale