Random thoughts

As you may know if you follow this blog, I have a certain obsession with learning all I can about insulation foam. Yeah, we all have our nerd lusts. When I started working on my latest project, the Model T vignette, I played around with a few materials to build the vignette base. Here are some thoughts on my findings. Foam sealer/texturizer Deluxe Materials Foam Armour Thick water based resin that sets to produce an attractive, durable, scratch resistant coating on foam to prevent dings, wear and disintegration. It dries to a surface that can be painted and glued easily and will reduce damage. This stuff brushed/spread on clear and has a bit of a rubbery texture when dry. I gently sanded it and was surprised it actually sanded. I didn't expect it to be that hard. As you can see in the picture, there was some waviness to it, but [...]

If you don't follow The Modeling News (https://www.themodellingnews.com/), you absolutely should. I lose track of this site from time to time and am always surprised by how much time I can just spend browsing the content. They have mostly updates about product releases, but also share links to Kickstarters, build logs, etc.

Ode to the paint mule That sacrificial lamb that helps you avoid looking like a fool. You've saved us from stumbling many times And ensured our paint job isn't missing a sign. Over and over, we add layers of paint Learning what's good and what ain't. A quick shot of oven cleaner And we're starting over making our skills even meaner. I have a couple models that never made it past the build stage, as well as a few upper tank hulls that I picked up for free in a hobby shop freebie box. I use these as paint mules ... models I use to test my various paint and color techniques before I airbrush them on a real models. I'm a bit of a perfectionist so I like to make absolutely sure that my technique is tested and dialed in before I spray the real model. I start with a [...]

In 1996, I graduated college and started at a small web development shop (i.con interactive). I was employee #3. Within a few months, I was leading a small team, and within a year, I had a robust team up to 20+ live projects/clients, and was inventing new web design ideas and work processes every day. There were weeks, sometimes months where I was sleeping 4 hours a night in order to get meet deadlines. And I loved it. I left i.con and went to NVision Design. I got more sleep there, but we were blazing new trails and learning new skills literally every day. After 4 years of the start up game, I went to LEGO and established a net new relationship between the company and the adult LEGO fans. My work landed on the cover of Wired Magazine. After LEGO, I started and sold a small 35 person agency. What's [...]

Congrats! You've bought your first 3D printer and you're ready to get started. This post is the one I wish I'd have found when I started 3D printing more than a year ago. Let me start this post with a basic sketch of what resin 3D printing is all about. Liquid resin is put into a "vat" The vat sits on top of the "screen" The screen is a UV light source that lights up certain pixels based on the instructions in your CTB file for the model you're printing. You create this file with a "slicer" program. That program basically takes your model (the STL file) and "slices" it into hundreds, if not thousands of layers. The 3D printer looks at the CTB file, grabs layer 1, and lights up the screen pixels to match. The "build plate" is that flat metal surface that moves up and down on your [...]

Most of us have seen some remarkable work done with XPS insulation foam. Whether is being used as the base for a diorama or being cut up into individual 1/35 scale bricks, this material is light but strong. You can carve it, cut it, and shape it into some cool shapes. The wargaming crowd has been using XPS foam for years, but we modelers are more recently discovering its wonders. My barn in-progress XPS foam is used for insulating buildings and comes in large sheets. They typically come in 4’x8’ sheets of various thicknesses (1”, 2”, 3”), although stores may sell smaller cut downs too. If you want thicker construction, gluing several pieces together is going to be much less expensive and radically easier for us hobbyists to find than thicker pieces. This material is great because you can shape in so many ways and with so many tools. You can [...]

While scratchbuilding may make you feel like a god, making plastic look like real metal is a sign of reaching all-powerful status. Dramatic? Yes. Well deserved? Yes. Or at least I think so... I'm working on the Takom Mk. 1 Male and am about to start painting the hull. But with the house up for sale and me spending a lot of time at the fiance's house, smaller bite size projects tend to take precedent. Such was the case this weekend when I started working on painting and weathering the tracks. (Very nice click tracks, by the way) Step 1: Primer I sprayed my standard Touch n' Tone on the tracks and left them to dry and cure for a few days. Step 2: Airbrush base color Using my airbrush, I sprayed a haphazard pattern across the entire run of tracks (repeating all the rest of the steps for right and left [...]

Modeling makes my mind calm. There's several types of activities that help me pull my brain out of the haze and stress of daily life... photography, video games, etc. But there's something about modeling that's different, I think because it results in a physical creation. I've been working on the Alliance Modelworks FAMO mit Flak conversion for a couple months now, and I banged out the construction of the Takom Mk. 1 Male and Takom Big Bertha kit over the summer. My house is staged for house showings (it's for sale and on the market), so having a spray booth/painting setup in the model room has been near impossible. Or at least highly inconvenient. So I've not done much painting lately. But that all changed over the weekend. I actually finished construction on the FAMO and primed and rust/primer basecoated the FAMO and Mk. 1. I never really realized how dang many [...]