I am old guy! I got into the hobby when my Dad bought me a Revell bf109 Messerschmitt in 1/72. I was about 10 so about 1962. I built consistently until I left for the Army when I was 19 (1971). My last kit I built in 1973 in Germany and that was a Tamiya Motorized Leopard Tank.
I used to borrow my Dad’s car to “go the the library to study” then snuck to Columbus, Ohio, fifty miles away so I could attend monthly meetings of the IPMS in which I won prize ribbons, a 1st place for a 1/72 Hellcat (McCampbell) and a 2nd place for a 1/72 bf109E (von Werra). Late during the period I fell hard for 1/48 Monogram kits. I am a scoreboard junky, always looking to do the planes with the pilots scoreboard (especially kill markings) on the plane. After the army and thirty years as a police officer, I returned to the hobby about three years ago with a three year project to graft the nose and waist windows of a 1/48 Revell B-17F onto the fuselage and wings of an 1/48 Monogram B-17G to get a B-17F. The result is elsewhere in “community.”
If I were you, I would start where you left off. You’ve got skills, you just need to remember what those were. If you were doing Monogram in the 70’s or 80’s, get one of those kits that you always wanted to do on ebay and go for it. Also, Revell of Germany absorbed both Revell in America and Monogram so the kits you used to do are available under the “Revell” name and they are the same kits you remember from the same molds so you can get them relatively new from Revell.
Some of the things I learned I will relate.
Shaky hands! After a life of hard work your hands probably aren’t as steady as they once were. If your hands shake all the time violently you had better see your doctor. If you are a morning coffee drinker, wait until afternoon or evening to do your fine work. Rest both of your hands on your workbench, part in one hand, paintbrush in the other, and have your hands touch; it doesn’t have to be much, I make contact with my little finger of my painting hand, but it does lesson tremors a bit. Sometimes if it’s bad enough, find something else to work on and then come back later to the fine work. Also, if you exercise heavily at any point, your hands will automatically tremble a bit as you try to work. Do your exercise far away from the time you model. It helps. Then there are workarounds. When working on my B-17, I wanted to do “black basing” in which you prime the plane in black, then spray little puffs of white or gray from your airbrush while avoiding the black of the panel lines. I did not have that kind of control to avoid hitting the panel lines so I got a bunch of different widths of masking tape, took the smallest width of tape in the pack (3/16") and laid it over the panel lines. Here’s the tape:
And here’s what it looked like:
Then I went wild with the airbrush and it did no harm. The narrow masking top pulled right up and it was a sloppy enough application to provide the effect I wanted. Also, in places where it is too tight to mask the panel lines, like the nose of the B-17, you can just do the white puffs then go over the panel lines with a medium black Sharpie to get the job done.
Don’t try to do 1/72 unless you’re a glutton for frustration; go to a larger scale! With cataracts which have not been treated (although my eye-doctor is watching them), everything is a little darker for me. If you have to deal with this you know that it is like living with sunglasses on all the time. So, there is no way I could every go back to 1/72. Pick a larger scale, like 1/48 or 1/32 or the new 1/35 scale, or even 1/24, they make planes in all of these scales. Weak eyes are driving the popularity of larger scales right now so pick one you like. Remember, you still have to display them somewhere and the larger scales require more room. Your wife will not like you dominating her dining room with a 1/24 B-36 Peacemaker.
You need light to work, lots and lots of lights. You’ll never have enough. Here is my workspace.
Weak eyes: Tiny pieces require assistance with seeing what you’re doing. Get a couple of magnifying glasses to help you see your work when needed. Here’s mine!
Get yourself a bunch of tweezers. Get the normal kind for installing tiny parts but remember, sometimes tiny parts shoot out of the tweezers and disappear into the aether so be ready for that. Get the reverse kind of tweezers that holds the parts until you squeeze the tweezers. You can use these to clamp wings while glue dries as well as holding parts while painting. Here’s some of those!
Having enough clamps is crucial. Get those that don’t exert so much force that they break your plastic parts. I attach mine to my telescoping lamp!
Back in the day, you raided your Dad’s workshop for sandpaper. Get a selection of different grits. Cheap ones can be found in the women’s nail care section of just about any Walmart. I get these emery boards and cut them in half making them great for tight spaces.
For priming I like Stynylrez. It is from Badger and comes in four colors: black, gray, white and silver. I have not used the silver yet, it just came out, but will try it out soon. I like to prime with silver (that’s the original color of the unpainted planes) so I’ll try priming with it to kill two birds with one stone. Here is Stynylrez.
Glues: there are glues for just about everything. I use simple Loctite superglue in both Ultra-gel and regular quick drying, you’ll use both depending on what you are doing. The gel gives you a couple of seconds to position the part and the liquid glues on contact. For everything else, I use Tamiya extra thin. Get one bottle of the extra thin, then get refills for it by buying large containers of Tamiya airbrush cleaner, it is the same stuff. Here’s that:
Photo-etch is really popular right now and just about the only thing that works to stick it to styrene is superglue. I am not a fan of photoetch but it does have its uses. Lately, the thing for detailing is 3D printing in resin which is far more forgiving and far more realistic than etch. In 3D you can get an entire double wasp R-2800 radial engines that have all the wires already there so you just paint them carefully and you done. I know you like to do all the super-detailing yourself but, with poor eyesight and shaky hands you have to know your limitations. All that being said, I do prefer photo-etch for seatbelts. Pre-shape them with tweezer and glue them into place; do not try to glue the seatbelt on and then try to bend it into shape. Pre-shape (and test fit and adjust as necessary) allows you to use a drop of superglue, drop it into place and it’s done. Here is a sheet of photo-etch with the seatbelts in the center of the spaces left by removing the engine wiring:
Remember, superglue will not stick to superglue so if you have a superglue fail you have to scrape off the dry superglue to make a clean gluing surface before you try again. Also, superglue won’t stick to the type of plastic used on Coffeemate container lids and margarine container lids. You can squeeze a little superglue on to a piece of plastic like that, close up the lid on your superglue container and then use a toothpick to apply it where it needs to go. This will keep your superglue from drying in the container.
I am a slob; as you can see from my photos I rarely put any tool or supply away when I’m working so I’m always looking for ways to organize my workspace. Here is a cheap idea for holders for your supplies. If you’ve got an old Sauder or Bush desk, or something else in your basement with drawers, take a drawer, cut two paint sticks which you also probably have in your basement, use two or three screws to attach the paint sticks to the back of the drawer (pre-drill as paint sticks split really easily) and you have a drawer angled toward you. I got some cheap plastic display boxes from Amazon and put 9 boxes in each drawer to hold toothpicks, rubber bands, stir sticks, cotton swabs or whatever you want. Here is what that looks like:
This is probably the most important thing I discovered building my current project or a GWH P-61B in 1/48. Back in the day, I put pieces of scotch tape on canopies, carefully cut along the canopy lines with an X-acto knife, painted the ribs, pulled the tape off and done. Now they have vynyl canopy masks. I’m so far not a fan. They didn’t work for me on a P-61B I’m working on; they just didn’t line up right, some too large, some too small, some didn’t stick down and some were the wrong shape. Here’s that:
So, I pulled the pre-made masks off, tried masking tape and that failed miserably. Luckily I broke a bunch of pieces on my P-61B getting them off the sprue and had a cheap P-61B I bought off ebay for replacement parts which also provided a new set of canopies for a do-over so I replaced the canopies. Here is the crappy result of the masking tape.
Finally, I got a suggestion on YouTube. It’s a tape called: “Selizo High Temp Tape, 5 Pack Multi – Sized 1/8”, 15/64”, 15/64”, 15/32”, 5/64”, Heat Resistance Up to 280℃ (536℉)” on Amazon. It sticks when you want it to, pulls off with out a problem and paint doesn’t seem to get under it. Here’s what it looks like.
You put it on, it is yellowish but you can see through it like scotch tape. Put it in place, burnish it down with a toothpick, run a sharp X-acto blade along the canopy lines, pull off the excess and you’re ready to paint. I still can’t believe how easy it was. Here is the tape on the canopies and the result after I took the tape off.
As I said, I’m working on a 1/48 Great Wall P-61B. If you remember kits back in the day you had to get a hammer and chisel to separate the pieces from the sprue, forget that. Current kit making technology allows modern kit companies to make pieces that are less that 1 mm thick. What you probably don’t know is that when you use a typical sprue cutter the blades slightly push the sprue apart at the cut. This slight movement in opposite directions will break any of these tiny pieces and make them useless. You actually need a strategy for thin part removal so you can free them without putting any stress on the part at all. For instance there was a fire extinguish in the P-61B with a nozzle and a very thin hose connecting the two. I pick up the tiny fire extinguisher up and just that slight stress broke the part. I broke so many parts I had to get a second cheap copy of the kit from ebay. Here is the GWH sprue with the small parts.
So, you need to start with a really really thin bladed sprue cutter. So far, the thinnest bladed one I’ve found is from Tamiya. Here is the Tamiya on the left and a regular one on the right.
If I find one with thinner blades I’ll get that. As it was, I sawed the large sprues with a razor saw to pre-cut them to minimize damage, then use the thin bladed sprue cutters to finish the cut. I don’t know it that’s the best strategy or not. Maybe it’s just that the Chinese kit companies don’t consider how thin the little parts are and go for detail over buildability. I someone has a better strategy for this I be happy to hear about it!
Addendum: There are these new fangled decals which are printed in 3D. I got mine from Kelik but there are a lot of companies which produce them. You have to sand off any raised detail on the target surface first. You cut them out and soak them like any decal and then stick them on your plane. They look like this:
They are supposed to stick on their own but mine pealed right up. A YouTube video suggested white glue but this didn’t work for me either. What did work was putting a thin layer of Gel superglue on and scraping away any excess glue and then put the 3D decal in place and that worked. On my current project, I got some for my P-61B. To see which one was better, I built two separate P-61B control panels for comparison. So, I took two days putting in 30 odd normal decals on the first P-61B control panel and (since I broke a bunch of pieces and had to get a cheap 2nd P-61B on ebay) I took about 20 minutes putting the 3D decals on the 2nd control panel. Here is the comparison and, if I remember correctly, the 3D on is on the right although it is hard to tell.
Addendum: If you have a nose wheeled aircraft, like my current P-61B, which typically needs to be weighted in the nose and you usually use fishing weights you might want to try Tungsten Paste. It is used for those little Pinewood Derby racers the Cub Scouts build. It’s moldable, you can jam it in where ever you want and it is 1.7 times more dense than lead so you need less of it. When space in the nose is at a premium, Tungsten Paste may be the way to go. Here is a lead nose weight and a lump of Tungsten Paste both of which actually weigh the same (1.5 Ounces):
Addendum: At some point in the past, model companies realized that the first places people looked for detail in models was cockpit and engines. Monogram was far ahead of everyone else in this regard. If you remember, the Monogram P-39 in 1/48 had an open engine access door, and the engine actually displayed and no one had produced a P-39 since with engine and machine gun access panels and open cockpit door with interior detail to this day. There have been about five or six generations of engine detailing. At first they just made an impression of the pistons on a piece of plastic, then the engine became several pieces, then the started making photo-etch upgrades, then resin kit upgrades and now they are doing 3D printing in which all you have to do is paint and install. You certainly don’t have to mess with these but if you want to go to the effort the 3D engines are incredible. In the next few pictures you’ll see a kit engine with etch wiring I got with my P-61B and built myself, a Vector engine model kit and a Resin2Detail 3D R-2800 which sells for about 25 bucks:
It’s up to you how you want to go. I hate working with photo etch so I’ll either build the kit engine if it looks good or use the 3D version as a replacement. We’ll see how that goes!
Addendum: I originally put this next one in my B-17G to F conversion post but I keep finding more uses for them so I thought I would bring that over here. At HobbyLobby, in the Jewelry making area, you can get these things called “Tiepins.” I have no idea what they are really for but each is a little loop on a bendable wire, 100 for about 5$. In the hobby department I found some K &S brass tubes, #5125, 4 foot long tubes for about 5$. The Tiepins, which have about a million uses exactly slides into the brass tube. Here is a picture of the brass tubes and Tiepins, a Tiepin in a brass tube and some uses I found for them:
![A001 KS Brass Tube 2125 One Sixteenth & Eyepins|690x476]
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The greatest place to get information on any building problem or building any model (other than Finescale Modeler of which I have every issue ever) is YouTube. You can spend a half hour watching your kit being built and painted to give you a head start and warn you of any problems.
That’s all I can think of at this point, if I think of anything else I’ll post it as an addendum. Also, if any of you have a suggestion for old guys or a question, throw it in here.
Remember, is you aren’t having fun you’re doing it wrong!
