A funny thing happened on the way to Dayton

Was headed to the Dayton contest on Saturday, when I got clocked just over the Ohio river bridge.  Got my bell rung and lost my last year’s production of kits, but it could have been much, much worse.

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Magazine review: RT Volume 40 #1

In past reviews I’ve said just about all I can say about RT.  It is, IMHO, the best non-commercial modeling magazine out there, and in fact is one of the best magazines period.  It is the only modeling magazine that I read all of the articles regardless of subject or scale.

This issue is no different.  In addition to an excellent article on building the 72^nd scale Airfix Spitfire PR.XIX, there is an article on building and improving the Italeri Italian manned torpedo from WWII.  There is also build article on a 1/144^th 727 airliner.  Finally there are two articles on the RG-31 Nyala, MRAP/ wheeled APC.  The first is a history of the vehicle, with a focus on its use by the Canadian armed forces, while the second is a construction article using the Kenetic kit as the starting point.  Both are excellent reads, even for a non-armor guy like myself.

Highly recommended.

MMCL meeting night

This was MMCL’s quarterly Friday Night Fight meeting.  Many members attended with a lot of building going on.

Meeting night

March MMCL meeting

The March monthly meeting of MMCL will take place on Friday, March 16th, 2018 at 6 p.m..  For more info, see the club’s Facebook page.  See here.

Indianapolis model contest

If you are in Indianapolis on March 10th, you should stop by the Indy model contest.  Info here.

February MMCL meeting

My local IPMS chapter, MMCL held its February meeting last Thursday.  Sorry about taking so long to get this it.  The meeting was great.  If you have an IPMS chapter near you, I urge you to attend and join.  Also, join IPMS/USA.  This meeting we had a guest speaker who works for the Department of the Army, identifying and recovering remains of MIA soldiers.  It was an amazing talk.

 

Also, we had some great models brought in by the members.  Here are a few shots.

IPMS/USA

Join IPMS/USA.  It is a great  organization.

The SS-4

Alabama modeler and doctor, Dr. David Geldmacher ,has started blogging.  I highly recommend you visit his blog.  What the good doctor has done is embarrass the heck out of me.  He has managed to post more actual modeling content in the last three weeks than I’ve managed to post in the last 6 months.  I post a lot of links to modeling news and interesting current events, but I’ve gotten away from actual blogging about building models, which is the reason that I started this blog in the first place.  Well I am rededicating the blog to that purpose.  I’ll still post the other stuff, but there will be a lot more model building stuff too.

The SS-4 is a Soviet Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile.  It was one of the missiles at the heart of the Cuban missile crisis.  This model covers a couple of modeling interests for me.  I like to do missiles and spacecraft and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis are subjects I am interested in.

Luckily for me, the Canadian company, Belcher Bits, has come out with a resin kit of the SS-4.  I managed to pick a copy up at the IPMS/USA Nationals in Omaha in July.  As you can imagine, there aren’t that many parts to the kit, since, like most missiles, it is little more than a tube on top of a launch platform.

The parts are well molded  in gray resin.   They are well detailed with engraved panel lines.  There ares some mold lines and pour plugs to remove, but nothing beyond the ability of most every modeler.  However, some of the missile body parts have locating keys that could be mistaken for pur stubs.  Don’t remove these by accident.  There are also a few seam lines that must be sanded down.

The kit doesn’t come with decals, which makes sense because the SS-4 doesn’t seem to have any markings in operational service.  However, I may add a few stencils just to break up the overall Russian green color scheme.

Now for some additional preparation of parts and then the assembly begins.

IPMS

If you aren’t a member of IPMS/USA or IPMS/Canada, you should join.

Magazine review: IPMS/USA Journal Vol.28 #6

The latest issue of the Journal is out.  Frankly this is the best issue in a number of years.  This has nothing to do with my having a book review in the issue and one of the other articles has previously appeared in MMCL’s Tactical Notes.  If you aren’t a member, join IPMS/USA now.