Plastic Model Diversions

 Hello friends:

Popping up to post some photos of what I've been up to lately, not wargaming really but as I've noted here before, I enjoy hacking away on plastic model kits from time to time just for the therapeutic value of the process and having something to look at when all is done.

I've nearly finished this 1/48 scale Mk 1 Hurricane by Italieri.  

I've been using the Vallejo RAF Battle of Britain paint said, which is intended for the airbrush but I've been using a brush.   A recall reading that someone once interviewed an RAF airman about how they painted aircraft and he basically said they used "whatever we had in the shed".   I suspect a lot of warplanes then were a little rougher in appearance than they look in the model airplane magazines.

A few more fiddly bits to finish and then I can put the prop on and call her done.  I may find something to dull down the finish on the decals.

And as one kit is winding down, another is just getting started.  Oddly, I was inspired to build this by my wife Joy, who was born in Collingwood, Ontario, where we live now.   Collingwood was a shipbuilding town, and a number of corvettes were built along the Great Lakes.  Snowberry was built at Lauzon near Quebec City and was originally intended for the Royal Navy, but was transferred to Canadian service.

I've read various comments about this kit, which contains hundreds of fiddly little bits, and I suspect it will be a challenge, so I'll work away at it from time to time, post progress photos here occasionally, and hopefully it will finish up on the mantleplace at the rectory - in Collingwood!

 Cheers and blessings to your sprue clipping!

MP

Happy Messerschmitt New Year

Hello friends:  

Three days into the new year and I’m only now wishing you a happy 2024 is about on pace for this sadly diminished blog.   I hope that you and yours passed a happy holiday season and for those of you who still keep Christmas, there are devotions and homilies on my other blog, the “God Blog”.

In 2023 my identity as a wargaming vicar weighed 90% on the vicar side, and only 10% on the hobby side.   At sixty one I still have energy and enthusiasm for my vocation, but began to notice that the hobby and the friendships that make it so enjoyable have suffered.  Until this last week I hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in months, and hadn’t rolled dice in ages.   

Case in point, I have kept a model kit in my church office, in the hopes that I would add a part here or there in my spare moments, but hadn’t touched it since the summer.   I have resolved to be more attentive to these sorts of distractions in future, for my mental health and overall wellbeing.   A thoughtful Christmas present from my wife Joy, a local gym membership, will also be used.  

Just after Christmas I hauled out the model kit, an Airfix 1/48 scale ME 109 E3, and finished it on New Years’ Eve.  I used the paint and decals scheme for the plane flown by Oblt Josef “Pips” Priller, immortalized in the film The Longest Day.

I’m too old a bunny to try an airbrush on a kit like this, so contented myself with using a brush for the cammo scheme. I did try using a dark ink wash for the panels.  

I don’t see any wargaming use for this model, I think it will just adorn a shelf somewhere, and one day sit beside the 1/48 scale Hurricane that is waiting to be built.

I pray that 2024 is off to a good start for you and that we will all be happier and more fulfilled because of the hobbies that give us joy.

MP+

Happy Heinkel

Hello friends:

One way of dealing with Covid fatigue for me has been returning to a teenage obsession with model airplanes.  May have ordered these (from Wheels and Wings in Toronto, excellent store) after watching the Battle of Britain recently.

I crowdsourced which one to build on Twitter through my @Marshalluigi account and the Heinkel got slightly more votes, so off I want.  The Italieri 1/72 kit is fairly simple, not a lot of complex parts, which is kind of a blessing after the recent Lysander kit.

 

Oddly the kit included crew figures but the instructions said don’t use them.  Instructions be damned, I said.

Another excuse to watch The Battle of Britain.  “Tomato Eins en Alle, Tomato Eins en Alle, noch zehn Minuten bis Ziel!"  

There is something sleek and rounded about the HE111 that is quite graceful.  While it looks terribly vulnerable in the film, an HE111 carried a LOT of machine guns, six in this model variant.

I dreaded painting the nose canopy but it turned out well enough if viewed at a distance.

I suppose a distant project might be making a handful of BoB 1/72nd models for a game TFL’s Bag the Hun, though I might just hang it from the ceiling as teenage me used to do.

Thanks for looking.  Blessings to your models,

MP+

Lovely Lysander

Good day!  Since this is my first post of 2021, I wish you a happy new year - may it be happier for all of us.  Over the Christmas holidays I started the traditional plastic model kit build - a 1/48 scale Lysander for my Weird War 2/ Pulp project.  I had opened the box back in the summer of 2020 and the myriad of small parts therein seemed more complicated than the time I had on hand would allow for.

The kit is by an eastern European company, Eduard, which I gather is a gold standard for WW2 games, though I found the instructions somewhat less helpful than I would have liked.

This time I kept my nerve and forged on, going as slowly as was necessary, as it required some nerve doing things like gluing the brass-etched parts like the foot pedals onto the cockpit assembly - totally unnecessary for gaming, but if you’re going to do a thing, do it well as my dad said when he vainly tried to teach me how to make the balsa wood airplanes he had made as a kid.

Brass-etched seatbelts, cockpit instrument panel, and pilot’s compass.

g

Wireless set.

The interior fuselage assembly complete.  I had a discouraging moment when I broke off the wing roots at the top of the frame with some  misapplied press from my clumsy fingers and had to re-glue them.

The Lysander has a huge canopy and the Eduard kit came with precut masking tape, which I had to carefully apply with my wife’s best tweezers.  That was fun.

The masking tape certainly helped the final product.

And finished!  Because of the gaming it might support, I chose the all-black paint scheme used by RAF 141 Squadron, which supported SOE operations in Occupied Europe.

 Those huge struts supporting the wings give the kit a lot of stability.   There is also an underslung fuel tank for greater range, and a ladder to help passengers enter and exit the aircraft.

 

Somewhere in occupied France.  Yvette of Cafe Renee and Michelle of the Resistance keep watch as the RAF delivers something vital to the war effort.   

Thanks for reading.  Again, may 2021 bring happier lives and gaming to all of us.   Stay safe, and blessings to you brushes.

MP+

Wings Over the Rockies: A Skiplane for the Pulp Project

 

Hey friends!

There has been spasmodic activity in the Mad Padre’s Chapel since we entered this strange limbo of lockdown.  With more time on my hands, I’ve completed some projects, including this addition to my 1930s pulp project, the Rockies Ablaze.   Last summer I went into Wheels and Wings, a massive model store on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue, and told one of the staff that I wanted a “skiplane with a 1930s vibe in 1/48 scale.    Almost a year later, here’s what I ended up with.

The model is a kit made in the Ukraine by ICM, a Soviet U-2 Polikarpov biplane with the undecarriage options for skis or wheels, and these crazy sidecars for evacuating wounded.  With some leftover decals from a 1/48 scale Airfix Spitfire kit, I thought it would do for an interwar plane in Canadian service.

It was a very excited crowd that came out to Sarcee Field near Calgary to see the RCAF’s latest addition, the DH 32 Junco.

Representatives from the Alberta government, the Western Militia District, and the RCMP are on hand to see this new marvel, which its pilot says can land on any flat piece of ground the size of a hockey rink, all damned winter long.

“Yessirree, she’s a treat to fly, and not so cold, if you know how to dress for it.”  Inspector McAllister has his own thoughts about spotting the many illegal trap lines in his district.

“Aerial reconnaissance!   That’s the thing we learned the hard way.  Invaluable at Vimy Ridge, let me tell you!”  General Millman’s driver smiles diplomatic and thinks to herself, “Not another bloody Vimy story."

No one invited Fitz, Jacques and Leo to the airfield, but it’s not like there’s a fence around it or anything.  “I tell youse boys, dis plane dere will be the trouble” says Jacques.  The others spit tobacco on the snow in agreement.

 

Blessings to your brushes!

Be well and safe.

M