The Final Hog

I suppose the prospect of an A-10 in its lizard scheme did seem a well-trodden path, but recently I built this one from Hobby Boss.  The old Tamiya kit was always good but like the rest of us, it's getting a bit old.

This new kit is quite different.  Extensive detail, nice decals, lovely clear transparencies.  The only build problem I had was getting the fuselage together.  The best way I found to solve this was to glue the front half together and allow it to dry.  This forms an anchor to allow the rear half to be fixed.

Fitting the flaps was interesting.  An empty slot in the wing was the flap's home!  One false move and it would be lost in the wing forever.  After that it was plain sailing, an absorbing build.  LOADS of weapons.

You can add resin and etched parts if you want to, but I suggest just doing it out of the box.  It looks accurate, it looks good, and it is fun.

Dora-Rama

After taking so much time getting it right, your pride and joy deserves much more than just a shelf. Since there is now such a wide range of figures and accessories in 1/48 scale, I felt a 'mini-rama' to be an entirely appropriate setting for the FW190 Dora.

For a few of your English pounds, you get a nice selection of Luftwaffe officers and men in useful poses - you even get a dog! So using a 10" by 8" picture frame, railway ballast and assorted static grass, I go to to work.

The whole thing rests on regular plaster filler from a local DIY store. While it was drying I carved out some rough planks and added the ballast. The idea was for a small revetment which the Luftwaffe were forced to use during this period of war. With everything painted and grassed up, I felt the scene was still lacking something. A search through assorted stashes revealed some Verlinden late war signs and a length of chain. Check the photos, you can see where it all went.

I think today, more and more, just completing the model isn't always enough. The resources are there to enable the modeller to go a step further and really make the most of his (or her) creation.

The Tribolt News

Yes, it's another Thunderbolt. Three in a row, to be exact.

This time it's the Tamiya kit. I really wanted to do in a bare metal finish. Zotz decals offer around 10 subjects to choose from, and I chose Dorothy 'K'. It was a D-28 with a retro-fitted fin fillet. For this, I used Tamiya's P-47M as all the parts to do Dorothy (as it were) are in the box.

Big Hawg

Your eyes do not deceive you, yet another Hobby Boss release - their A-10A in 1/48, big brother to aforementioned L'il Hawg .

I checked, and this is one of HB's earlier releases, as the parts fit is not as crisp as on their later kits. It does need more rubbing down, and a little more filler, but the results? So far, so good. It has loads of weapons, including the Avenger cannon - a kit in itself.

L'il Hawg

A couple of months ago, I built Hobby Boss's A-10B in 1/48 scale. Well, here is the little brother - not as detailed of course, no separate Avenger cannon kit for instance, it's much more simplified in 1/72. The fuselage is in one piece, and the lower wings and fuselage are a single mold, as is the cockpit. Same with the canopy, so posing it means a go with the razor saw, but I think it's fine as is.

Eduard & Dora

Here is a little something I have been tinkering together. This is Eduard's rather lovely Dora-9 Late. It's going to be part of a mini-diorama, with some figures. As lovely as it is, it does present the modeller with a few little problems. But you can't argue with the results. The decals are from Eagle Editions, guns from Master and Aires.

Spectre Analysis

So what has been taking up so much of my time lately? Ok, here is the list.

• The Eduard FW190 D-9
• The Hasegawa A6M8 Zero
• The Special Hobby Fiat G-55
• The C205 Veltro by 21st Century Toys (Yes, Toys...more on this later)
• The F-5E from AFV Club

Italeri's AC 130H 'Spectre' gunship is a nice build. This is not their regular old C130 with raised panel lines and just upgraded with a few extra parts. This one is quite new, though as the French say, plus ça change...... It's typical Italeri - big chunky parts, not too much interior detail. You can lower the ramp, but there's not a lot to see. Lots of guns, but the walls are a little bare apart from the armoured ammo box. The cockpit is similarly sparse; pilots' and engineers' instruments are ok, but four seats and a bulkhead and that's it. To bring this up a bit, I've added seat straps of tinfoil so that when the big transparency went in it would look reasonably busy.

This transparency was not the best part of the kit - it needed several pieces of plastic card and some filler to get it to fit right. If you're building this, get a pre-cut masking set - freehand takes all night.

Fit of parts overall was ok. Lots of rubbing down, but then it's a BIG model. No filler required after the transparency, so I was able to make good progress, and suddenly I had this great big plane on my bench.

What do you think of the results? I think it is rather charismatic.