Thank you Sandy, Zac, Warren and PJ Fisher, but especially Russ for your very kind push to get me moving again. And Russ - good luck with your build when you get to it!
Beautiful work so far, looking forward to more as you add to the build.
The RE 8 was one of my "Grail" kits from WNW, and I finally was able to get a Duelist's set when the last of the WNW kits were released from the wharehouse in the early 20's.
Please keep us informed on your build.
Russ
I must confess that posting anything, be it my own build logs or comments on other people's fantastic work, has been difficult, for lack of a better word... There's been so much great work showcased here and you should all know that even though there might be a lack of comments at times, every post is read and appreciated! This forum is a sanctuary in a way. Somewhere one can go and rest from other parts of life. I am sure that goes for a lot of other visitors to this site as well.
Some work has been achieved since my last post in May and I thought I would cram everything into just the one post here. Hoping that the next post won't be three months from now. Fingers crossed!
First up is work on the engine and the heat shields... you might remember that the kit part is a bit clumsy.
A lot of thinking went into this and the solution was eventually to create one template out of thinnish tin sheet, you know the kind baking trays are made of. This was then transfered to my Silhouette software and vinyl templates were cut. They were then used to cut ten more or less equal thin heat shields from more of that baking tray tin. These ten shields were finally added to the engine.
Some more bits were added to the engine as well. Like spark plugs from Taurus and the cylinders from the kit. The leads to the spark plugs also come as a plastic piece, but I felt that it would be nicer to create this from thin electric wire.
One fantastic thing with this site and all of its contributors is the help it offers to others. A lot of that help is in the form of inspiration or hints at how things can be done. Two such hints that I've picked up are from Bertl and Mike Norris and they relate to painting exhausts and adding a bit of detail to undercarriage legs. A while back Bertl showed his approach to painting exhausts (
here). I didn't have the right colours at the time, but I'm happy with my version anyway. But maybe I didn't follow Bertl's advice about not polishing afterwards... I'll have to fix that.
From Mike Norris came the idea to use plumbers PTFE-tape (
here) to mimic the linen wrapping on the landing gear.
Nearing the end now, bear with... weapons painted... but I dropped them on the floor and the sights were broken off. Will fix later.
Finally - the R.E.8 has a very distinctive 'air scoop' that goes on top of the engine. Again this comes, of course, with the kit, but it is a bit clumsy. Several years back I made new gun covers for a Fw 190 out of tin sheet from a baking tray. I simply taped a bit of tin sheet on to a gun cover and chased (possibly not the correct word) the metal to shape it around the plastic part. I decided to try this here as well...
That's it! Nothing more to show right now... will be back with colours in a bit.
/Fredrik
