PLUS… - Club News brings us all the coverage of past and upcoming events from the Sonoran Desert Model Builders.

- In the Scorpion Gallery we get to see Shelf Queens from some of our members.

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In this Issue…

1/48 scale

vautour iiN

- Pat Harrington shares with us his Fast Build approach and his recent Projects.

Mold Lines is the official publication of the Sonoran Desert Model Builders Modeling club. We publish it on a monthly basis and it is your source for Club news, interviews, model reviews, photos or our member’s modeling work as well as articles on modeling techniques and other articles of interest to our

members.

WHO ARE THEY? The Sonoran Desert Model Builders is a chartered IPMS model club in Tucson, Arizona dedicated to advancing each other’s skills through tip sharing, encouragement and, most importantly, hands-on building. Our members enjoy a deep camaraderie and level of respect for each other as well as a passion for model building. We build it all... cars, airplanes, armor, ships, figures, sci-fi...

Our mission is simple… LET’S BUILD!

WHERE CAN I

FIND THEM?

We meet at the Northwest corner of Alvernon and 22nd from 6:30 to 8:30 P.M.

1100 South Alvernon Way Tucson, AZ

MEETING DATES 2016

JANUARY ……………… 7 th

FEBRUARY ……………… 4 th

MARCH ……………… 3 rd

APRIL ……………… 7 th

MAY ……………… 5 th

JUNE ……………… 2 nd

JULY ……………… 7 th

AUGUST ……………… 4 th

SEPTEMBER ….………… 1 st

OCTOBER ….….……… 6 th

NOVEMBER ..…….…… 3 rd

DECEMBER ……..…… 2 nd

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Now some people may argue that one should build in whatever way it makes you happy, after all isn’t having fun what the hobby is about. I would not argue against that, but I would like to finish my stash (or at least the great majority of it) someday and at the rate I am going that will not happen. Recently I have been talking to Pat Harrington who has come across the same dilemma. He has solved the issue with a approach he has called the “Fast Build”. We will let you hear about it from Pat himself later on this issue, but basically his approach is a blend. Some models he plans to build to his highest, contest worthy standards while others will be built using a slightly lower standard. I like this idea and I have already identified several models that could be built using this method. No after market items, no scratch building, strictly out of the box, not worrying about accuracy, etc. If anything, this could be a way to tackle those pesky Shelf Queens. Until next time. Model on!

Editor’ Workbench

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Hello Fellow modelers and dear friends, Welcome to another edition of Mold-Lines. This month I am going to get philosophical. You see if you have been following our newsletters we have been dedicating this year to those models that for some reason or another have lost their appeal and now sit unfinished somewhere in our modelling rooms. These are known as Shelf Queens. Many of us in the club have taken the challenge to finish one, or several of our shelf queens. Our champion on that subject is Dick Smith who made the New Year’s resolution to finish all his started models. We will see some of his great work this month as he dethrones another Shelf Queen. Now, for me my modeling philosophy has always been with every project to strive to do better than the last. Over the years I have seen a dramatic improvement in the results but this improvement has come with a price, I am a very, very slow modeler. It is not rare for me to take several years in a single model. So after looking at my stash (and trust me I have a small stash by most modelers standards) I asked myself, is it worth taking the time to build all models to the highest possible standard?

CLUB NEWS

RECENT EVENTS

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• Sonoran Desert Model Builder monthly meeting - The monthly meeting for the club was held on June 2nd 2016. This month we had quite a lot of WIP models on display. It is great to see everybody is hard at work on their next creation. We also had a good selection of completed models as well. As always, great modelling work.

Derek continues to delight us with more of his historic figures from the Roman era… and also with his choice of T-shirts.

CLUB NEWS

RECENT EVENTS

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John Meyers showed us his vacuum formed canopy for his 1/72 Spruce Goose. This thing is ginormous even in 1/72 nd scale.

Ron Schlorff built this P-39 Aircobra operating from a airfield in the Pacific.

CLUB NEWS

RECENT EVENTS

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Chuck Sherman’s Russian “Terminator” Fire Support Vehicle is coming along great.

See more awesome

model photos from our

meeting at:

www.sdmb.yolasite.com

Kent Weeks is hard at work with his Tamiya 1/32 F4U Corsair.

CLUB NEWS

UPCOMING EVENTS

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• Make and Take at the Pima Air and Space Museum - This event is designed to introduce children to the hobby of model building and the math and historical research used to build accurate scale models. The event will take place July 2nd , 2016 from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM.

• SDMB Monthly Meeting – Our club’s next meeting will be held on July 7th, 2016 from 6:30 – 8:30. It will be held at our regular meeting location. (See Page 2 for details).

• Don’t forget to support our monthly raffle - Every month we give away one item from our raffle stash for every 10 tickets . Tickets are only $1.00!

NIGHT WINGS AT THE Pima Air & Space Museum

The Sonoran Desert Model Builders will be attending the Night Wings at the Pima Air & Space Museum on the evening of Saturday, July 23rd from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM. There will be scale models by our club on display as well as the huge 390th Display. Come join us and share our hobby with the general public.

NIGHT WINGS AT THE Pima Air & Space Museum

THE FRENCH QUEEN FALLS

1/48TH SUD AVIATION

VAUTOUR IIN

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THE FRENCH QUEEN FALLS

1/48TH SUD AVIATION

VAUTOUR IIN

by: Dick Smith

I bought this kit back in the mid-70s and didn't know what I was getting myself into at the time. Hi Tech kits were "multi-media" issues; resin, short run injection plastic parts, white metal landing gear and vacuformed canopies. The kit was issued in 1/48th scale and has long been out of production.

There are no "in progress" photos of this model since most of the construction was done 25 to 30 years ago. This was a time when Green Stuff was the only modeling putty on the market and it had a reputation of shrinking when dry. With that in mind, I used auto body filler called Acryl Blue, a cousin to Bondo.

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The instructions from the kit consist of an exploded diagram. The preferred plastic cement at the time was super glue. I used a Dremel tool to cut off the casing blocks and to thin the sidewalls and cockpit floor to get the resin interior to fit into the fuselage. As the Vautour was a French made aircraft, the cockpit interior was generally painted black. I use Model Master “Aircraft Interior Black” for the base color.

1/48TH SUD AVIATION VAUTOUR IIN

I picked out the instrument panels with dots of red, yellow and white. The radar operator's panel is dominated with a large "hood" that I painted olive drab. With the cockpit complete, the next step was to fit the landing gear bays. The Vautour, which translates from French as vulture, has bicycle-type landing gear much like the Boeing B-47. The fit of the gear bays is terrible. After securing the resin bays into position it was necessary to add plastic strip to "box in" the gaps between the fuselage the gear wells. The wings are glued on the fuselage using a butt joint. This appeared to be a disaster waiting to happen so I drilled holes in the fuselage and wing.

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joints and slipped in pieces of brass tubing to reinforce the joint. The engine pods included the outrigger landing gear bays and a portion of the jet engines. The join of these parts to the wing was seriously flawed and it took several heavy applications of auto body putty to get a flush joint to the wing. There were several other construction headaches with this kit. An indication of those difficulties can only be measured by the fact that it has taken more than three decades to complete the model.

1/48TH SUD AVIATION VAUTOUR IIN

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I had decided that I'd finish the model in natural metal with French markings. However a more attractive scheme was a late camouflaged version from the Israeli Defense Forces from the 1960s. The colors are: FS-35622, light blue underside with a soft edge camouflage pattern of FS-34258, light green, FS-33531, sand, and FS-30219, dark tan on the top and sides of the fuselage. The ejection seats are constructed from five kit etched metal and resin parts. The Israeli "stars of David" and squadron insignia were scrounged from several old MicroScale, ScaleMaster, and AeroDecal sheets. I wanted to display my Vautour with the vacuformed canopies open. I used a razor saw and sliced the parts using plenty of running water to cut the friction and to keep the plastic from cracking. Would I ever buy another Hi Tech kit? NO! Would I ever build another Vautour? Maybe. However this model marks another effort in my attempt to finish all of the kits that I have started over the years.

1/48TH SUD AVIATION VAUTOUR IIN

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The Fast Build (A modeling approach)

Over the years as I was refining and honing my modeling skills, my focus moved from building for the pure enjoyment of the hobby to becoming more and more engrossed in contest building. And while I’m generally happy with the results of my labors, my output has been pretty limited. In an average year I might get 1... perhaps even 2 kits built that would be considered contest worthy, with a little room left over for the occasional library build or group display at Pima Air & Space. This has resulted in a situation where I’m acquiring more kits and detail sets than I can build, and even though I thinned the herd a few years ago, since that time the numbers have again swelled and I'm up to over 120 un-built kits again. I know I'll never get all of these built to “contest standards”, but with a little resolve and a bit of a tweak to my typical approach, I've found a new, comfortable middle ground that seems well suited to this shift in mind-set -- and I may actually make a dent in that 120 number after all. I think I may have turned a corner recently in my approach to model building.

By Pat Harrington.

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The Fast Build (A modeling approach)

Three weeks before we installed the display at the Pima County Library I had not built (much less even selected!) a model for the exhibit. I was becoming resigned to the idea of not having anything that would be ready to install in the main display. But then at our April meeting (a scant 3 weeks ahead of installation day), Dick Smith

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The Fast Build (A modeling approach)

brought in his work-in-progress for the exhibit: a 1:48 F-86 Sabre from the 1958 film "The Hunters“. This film was probably one of my all-time favorite films from my pre-teen years. I must have watched that movie -- in part or in full -- 10 to 15 times before my 13th birthday. I just loved all the cool, swept-wing jets zipping and zooming by on our 12-inch Black & White Zenith TV set. "THAT’S IT!”I thought to myself. I'll build one of the "MiGs" from the movie. Most of you are old enough to appreciate the fact that during the Cold War Russian-made Migs were in very short supply.

“I think I may have turned a corner recently in

my approach to model building.”

So Hollywood had to make do with what they had… and what they had was several squadrons of aging F-84F “Thunderstreaks” that the studio’s prop department painted-up to look like MiG-15s. So now I had a plan... but I had no kit.

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The Fast Build (A modeling approach)

. Luckily, Derek was hosting a swap meet the Saturday following the April meeting, so I told him what I needed. True to his word, he found me the kit. I only had 2 weeks before the day of the Library installation. I knew the old Revell-Monogram kit would build into a pretty good model -- raised panel lines notwithstanding. With no time to re-scribe the airframe, and none of my usual after-market resin or brass sets to dress it up, this model was going to be my first completely "out-of-the-box" projects in more than 35 years.

I started with the cockpit and went through the first 4 - 5 steps pretty quickly. Once I got the fuselage halves glued together I knew I actually had a shot at getting this model done in time to install in the Library exhibit. To my surprise (and delight!) everything progressed pretty smoothly. The paint scheme for my chosen subject was very helpful: overall middle blue-gray that I was able to custom mix. The nose-art was all done with masks cut from photocopies from stills from the movie that are available on-line.

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The Fast Build (A modeling approach)

Throughout the build, I never repeated a major step... even though I may have wanted to. If a seam happened to appear after my initial filling/sanding/painting, my attitude was, "Oh well... moving on..." I built this way averaging about 2 – 3 hours per night during the work week, and I had several 4 to 5-hour plus sessions on the two Sundays before the installation date.

After 13 days and about 50 hours I completed this first of several “Passion Projects” on Friday night, one day ahead of the install. After all was said and done, I had a finished model for the primary exhibit and a new completed project that I'm happy to display in my collection. The second Passion Project that I am currently working on is a hypothetical Japanese Shinden Night-Fighter with a Luftwaffe-inspired paint scheme and the FuG 217/Neptune J-2 radar array lifted from the Dragon FW-190A-8/R-11 kit.

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This month we bring you a selection of several Shelf Queens from several of our club members.

Scorpion Gallery

Damon Blair: “…the 1/48 Testors OV-10A. This was started in 1993. I worked with the actual crew chief of that airplane. He said he remembered when Testors came out and took a bunch of photos of his bird. His name appears in the decal sheet (see right below the orange sticky, “DCC SGT T Turner”) It was pretty wild to meet him years after I started this model.

The A-10 in the photos is the old Monogram 1/72 kit. This one I started in 1996.

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Scorpion Gallery

Dave Brown sent us some cool photos of his queens. Above: German Tiger I and JSU-122S. The Tiger is one of Dave’s oldest queens at almost 15 years old. Below: Trumpeter A7E and Revell He 111 P-1 both is 1/32.

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SDMB Club Officers

& Contacts

HOW CAN I JOIN THE SDMB?

Test the water before you join!

Here's how: Drop by and say "hello" at one of our monthly meetings (see our Next Meeting page for date and location details). If you like what you see and hear then drop by again the next month

and be sure to bring your questions and we'll help you get started! The first two meetings are free so drop on by! After your second meeting we would appreciate you joining our club. Our club dues

pay for various things such as community programs and sponsorships of trophies in contests. We are happy to have visitors but even happier when you join our club of award winning modelers.

Dave Brown arizonadesertdave@gmail.com (PRESIDENT)

Kent Weeks kentanddeanna@centurylink.net (TREASURER)

Derek Campbell 4nagato1@gmail.com (SECRETARY)

Mike Bilcik mbilcik1@cox.net (CLUB IPMS POINT OF CONTACT)

Dave Diaz EDITOR_SDMB@Yahoo.com (NEWSLETTER EDITOR) (Vice President)

Steve Barlow redsteve921@gmail.com (CLUB WEBMASTER)

Visit our website at www.sdmb.yolasite.com You can also find us on Facebook. SDMB is an affiliated club of the International Plastic Modeler’s Society www.IPMSUSA.org