Shelf Queen 2025 Group Build - Camel Ambulance 1/72

[gedmundson]

Just catching up here, Alan - great idea for a project and looking forward to following your progress.
Cheers,
Gary

[RAGIII]

Outstanding progress. I Love the details you are adding to this one...only to crash her in the end  Lovely work!
RAGIII

[Dirigible-Al]

Hello everyone, sorry there's been no updates but I got thrown one of life's curveballs since starting this which has meant changes and that has meant bench time has gone down to near nothing. I got some spare time today and decided that whatever I do I will post anyway. A day on the RE.8 would probably show little difference so I hit the figures.
    I have probably painted too many Camel Corpse figures and definitely not enough Arab Revolt figures and the camels, though partially done, are not worth showing at this moment. I haven't painted soft plastic figures for a while and it has it's challenges. It is too bendy so handling them meant the paint kept flaking off. To prevent any more of this I stuck drill bits up their bottoms and they behaved themselves then. Cutting the flash off and trimming them was difficult because anything less than a surgical blade left bits hanging off them and they were hard to clean off. Although that was what I used a heated needle also worked well. Of course a file is out the question because it just turns the plastic into fluff. These were all hand painted white then once dry all the colours went on. I finished up by putting washes over them (basically the same colour as what's to be covered but darker). And here they are!

[NigelR]

Excellent progress Alan. Those flexi plastic figures are a pain to paint but you are doing a great job.

[Dirigible-Al]

Cheers Nigel.
Sorry I haven't been able to get to this. I have managed to put a few more things together today though and here they are. The RE8 will go on with a collapsed undercarriage with one of the wheels busted thru the bottom wing and the wingtip of the same wing will be torn off. I was going to take an aileron off too but after cutting them out I discovered they were roughly the same scale thickness as the armour on the Bismarck. It would have been too much work at this stage to thin all the wings down. The prop will have to be broken too. This is only light damage but enough to show it crash landed and has no hope of taking off. An advantage of not having too much damage is that the rigging stays the same, I think it would have been a nightmare trying to get the rigging right unless the whole top wing was off.
    All the bits between the wings are now on so the top wing can go on. I made the windscreen out of an empty packet of pills. It was almost the right shape but got a little persuasion with some heat. There is a compass under the windscreen made out of copper. Gun sight is a piece of brass tube with 2 turnbuckles and some aluminium foil wrapped around the pilot's end to make the tip fatter. The cylinder guards are just paper. I will do the broken parts of the wing with paper, as you can see I have cut a section out and cut off the wingtip. A bit of tidying up and a few washes of paint are needed now.
    Thanks for looking in, Alan.

 

[NigelR]

Good to see this one back on the bench Alan, I hope life's curve ball hasn't disrupted you too much. Those details look good and I will be interested to see how you do the torn off wingtip as I have a crash diorama coming up soon......

[Alexis]

I like how the project is heading , looking forward to the next update AL



Alexis

[Dirigible-Al]

Thanks Nigel and Alex for your comments. The Camel Ambulance part of the diorama is now finished as are the people bar one or two tweets. I still need to do a few camels sitting down because the Arab Revolt figures are all standing and an impression must be left as to how they got there.

The Camel Ambulance was to be pulled along by one of the other camel riders but I thought it best to have a couple of A.R. figures leading it because that is what they most probably would have done on seeing it arrive. There was nothing appropriate amongst the A.R. figures I have so I adapted a couple of WW1 German Infantry figures with a scalpel, a hot nail, some masking tape and a bit of filler. One has turned out very shiny but I will fix him before it all goes together.

The ambulance was made from plastic card with a frame of copper wire glued to it. Some masking tape was added as the bed and part of the structure underneath. Folded masking tape was put inside the stretchers to simulate blankets. I wrapped cigarette paper soaked in PVA around the frame because it is super thin and when it dries it becomes crinkled. There was also an unexpected bonus of it being partly transparent when it dried allowing some of the frame to be seen thru it. The crosses were made from an old decal found in my spares box. Luckily Hawker Hurricane has two 'H's.

I now have the Harry Tate and the desert base to finish. Thanks for looking in, Alan.

[Tim Mixon]

Very neat!  Excellent figure transformation.

[NigelR]

Lovely work all round Alan, this will be such a unique and interesting diorama I am really looking forward to seeing the end result.

[Dirigible-Al]

Firstly sorry for not being able to finish this on time. At the start of this group build I thought it would be no problem and even considered sneaking in a second project if possible but my personal circumstances changed and the result was loosing most of my bench time.

I managed to do all but finishing touches and corrections on the base and thought it worth showing. I started with a block of inulating foam because I want to push impressions into it where parts of the RE8 skid and as long as it's not sealed with oil based paint or non water based glue this can be done. The terrain is based on a scene from a film set in mesopotamia that I saw a while ago and it looked like an alien landscape. It must have been a lake or river bed dried up and it resembled acres of grey crazy paving. Out of coincidence I saw an advert today set somewhere in Africa looking similar. I stumbled on a technique for crazy paving by accident when I soaked paper in white glue, formed it around the model and painted it too soon. Basically if you paint acrylic directly on white glue you get crazy paving. After experimenting I found you get different effects depending on the viscosity and depth of the glue. Thick glue gets you wide cracks, thin gets narrow and watery glue gets lots of weird small paving. I wanted a bank/raised area and made this by putting a mix of water, bleach, glue and blue paper in a liquidiser and just pasted it on. I had to do this 3 times as it shrinks a lot each time it dries. When I was happy with it I mixed wood dust from a sander with white glue and pasted this on the flat parts. The foam was painted with dark acrylic and the raised area with white poster paint. When dry I masked off the raised area and brushed the PVA on the bed making most of it thick but not entirely even. I then sprayed a very thick layer of lighter acrylic over the glue, I put so much on if I had tilted it the paint would have run off. It was then left for a few hours. I got the undercoat a little too dark by mistake but I can live with it. The raised mud/rock area got a brown wash but unfortunately the effect that was supposed to be achieved went wrong because the cheap poster paint did not seal the paper mache and it just evenly soaked in rather than run off the raised areas leaving light and dark parts. I didn't want to paint the whole thing white again and was worried about spoiling some of the crazy paving so when it dried I gave it another darker wash then when it was dry I dry brushed it with light brown. It ended up darker than I planned but once again I think it is good enough.

I just have a few touch ups and tweaks to do on it but hope this is of interest to some of you. Thanks for looking in, Alan.

[NigelR]

As a diorama person, this is all of great interest to me That dried river/lake bed looks very effective, especially as you achieved it without buying commercial products designed to make these type of effects easy! Excellent modelling. The base looks really good so far, looking forward to seeing this all come together.

[Rookie]

This is already looking great and I can't wait to see the end result Al.

Willem

[Dirigible-Al]

Cheers Nigel and Willem,

I managed to put a few hours in today and have enough progress to post something.

There will be a few Arab Rebels on foot in the diorama, I don't want to have them there without giving an incling of how they got there or the impression that they happened to have just come out of a nearby pub. There needs to be a few rested camels in the scene, problem is the Strelets 'Arab Rebellion' kit has no camels. The Australian Camel Corpse kit does but only has one rested camel. I have to make at least 10 of these, now the obvious way would be to use something like Siligum to make two half moulds around the camel and pour resin in it. The problem with this is it would make exact moulds and I don't want a load of identical camels. If I had a 3d printer no problem, but I don't. I solved this problem by making a couple of half moulds out of Super Sculpy, then baking them to make them hard. Once out of the air fryer and cooled I stick the camel back in it, cover it with Vaseline, then Super Sculpy again and bake the other halves. What I now do is squash the Super Sculpy into each half (not forgetting the Vaseline) and slide a knife across it to get a perfect half with a flat internal edge. The two halves almost glue themselves when put together. Now the advantage of this is the Super Sculpy is flexible, plus when taking them out some warp or stretch a bit making them different by default. This gives me a chance to tinker with it and make each one slightly different to each other. Then it's in the air fryer again. When they come out the air fryer they are for a few seconds, while they are hot, still flexible so it gives me a chance to make a couple of last changes. And that's it. I will add some bits of kit to the camels and have them different colours to add to the diversity. I did try Das Clay in the moulds and car body filler but neither was as good as using Super Sculpy though a couple of these will make it to them diorama. I also tried various different things for the moulds with silicone sealant being OK but I never got both halves exactly right with that stuff. I hope this is of use to someone.

Alan.


Using pins to mark the edges of the Streets mould.

First mould came out black because of oil in the fryer.

Squashing Sculpy on the first half with camel inside.

Second half moulded.

Two halves now done.

With two halves cooked in goes the Sculpy.

A few castings done and cooked. White blocks are silicone moulds but these weren't used.

Four more or less done.

AAaaar, pictures didn't come through. Give me a few minutes and I'll try again.

[Dirigible-Al]

No idea why Imger isn't working, they must think I've been naughty. These pics are compressed.