Santa's Sack....

Is now definitely empty. It was stuffed with great big boxes - sometimes only 'great big' is good enough. And what a diverse pair of kits they are. Boxes like these stand up to repeated explorations. For the moment, they are living on the coffee table in our living room, where I can inspect them at will. It may be some time before I get to build them but there's a lot of pleasure in the anticipation.

I also have the 1/48 F3H Demon and 1/72 A-10B N/AN, both from Hobby Boss, well on the way. I am also on with the Hasegawa A6M8 Zero, which requires the Big Ed set fitting - a long term project which I will report back on later.

I hope you've all had a good Christmas, and we wish you all the very best for 2012. Back to the bench for me.

More of the A-10

Just an update on this build. As you can see, I'm well on with the paintwork now.

First I gave the model an undercoat, and then later on, some pre-shading. Then I added a stiff coat of grey/olive drab and set it aside for a good 24 hours to dry and harden. Using the overall colour as a base, I added about 30% mid-stone. I wanted to subtly lighten it a full tone and highlight the panels. To finish I added 10% bright lemon and applied this shade to the upper panels only. The photos show the model about half way through this process. A subtle difference that makes all the difference.

After a coat of glaze has been applied, it will be ready for its decals. Back soon with more details.

Yakking on...

More then on the Yak 38 from Hobby Boss.

So how has it built up? Mostly very well. The only thing was a slight mis-alignment on the main air intakes. Thankfully I was able to get past this without major filling and rubbing down. Can't be losing all that lovely detail.

As you can see, the photos show the paintwork and decaling pretty well finished. Incidentally, the decals were nice quality with good register, clear enough to see that the stencilling was in Russian, and Russian is not one of my languages...I was looking everywhere for the anti-glare panel decal and it was only after many minutes of feverish searching that I realised I had to paint it on myself. With all the other decals now fitted it was too late for that. Trawling through my decal box I discovered a pair of heat shield decals for a 1/48 Sea King I built when Adam were a lad. After a spot of trimming I had a pretty close match. Check the photo, what do you think? Overall it's been a great build and great value at £22.

So far Christmas seems to be shaping up well, with some very nice looking festive items arriving in large boxes, but I'm not allowed to look at them. I'll share the details when I can.

Coming along nicely for the moment is the A-10B Warthog 2-seater - that will be an impressive build.

And shortly, more on a Mitsubishi A6M8 based on the Hasegawa kit. This has some lovely extras with it and promises to be a super build.

Up next.

Earlier I was going on about what you might wish for. Well, look what arrived in the morning post. When everyone else was building the A-10A I wanted to build the two-seat version - there was always something a bit menacing about it.

On opening the box, I noticed that I was not the first to have a dip. Both cockpits - and they are quite lovely - had already been assembled. Everything else was present and correct and looking really good. Surface detail is superb, but the real bonus is a complete set of ordnance. There will certainly be more on this build later.

Coming along rather well is the Yak 38. As you can see, the nose section is almost complete. The only addition needed was a pair of lap straps to the ejector seat. Nice, isn't it?

Did I mention that both these kits are by Hobby Boss? Well, they are, and if you check the December issue of the SAMI mag, you'll see a more than two pages of previews. Hobby Boss seem to be using the economic downturn to release a big influx of top quality kits at very reasonable prices - this at a time when Hasegawa are pricing similar kits for £60 and upwards. It's good for Hobby Boss and it's very definitely good for the likes of me.

So I'm off to the model shop.