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.