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Sar

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About Sar

  • Birthday 09/17/1980

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    jake@bichatse.co.uk
  • Website URL
    http://www.eviscerate.net
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  • Location
    Peterborough, UK

Sar's Achievements

ARMD Deck Swabber

ARMD Deck Swabber (2/15)

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  1. "Ditto". ;-) And yeah, I'm looking forward to the time in the dim and distant future when I get to build this thing. The last few resin kits I've put together (not from such a quality reputable manufacturer ;-), about 80% of the time was consumed cleaning up mould lines, filling holes, fixing alignment problems... I've only had the chance to scan over the pieces so far, but I couldn't find anything that needed doing to them past taking them off the sprues. Impressive!
  2. I don't know if it's not a bit late, but in the UK I get my isopropyl alcohol from Lloyds - the chemist with the stylised mortar-and-pestle logo. IIRC it was about £4 for half a litre. To be honest, though, I would expect them to sell it anywhere they dispense prescriptions, I think it's commonly used for cleaning wounds and so on. I've bought it in at least two places, you just have to ask the staff behind the counter. (I've never actually got all the way through one of those half-litre bottles, either; one I lost, one I knocked over... :/)
  3. I think the last time I read anything about CBT gauss rifles, they weren't railguns at all, they 'worked' on the principle of a series of high-tesla toroid electromagnets with activation timed by huge capacitors... ...although from what little I remember from secondary-school physics, the power required to accelerate a high-mass slug in such a manner over such a short distance would probably heat the thing up a fair bit more than a machine-gun anyway. ;-)
  4. This is probably going to be where I curse myself for not paying enough attention to modelling news to know what you're talking about, right?
  5. I built the Spartan sometime last year - in-prog and commentary. It was easily the most troublesome resin kit I've built, but that's not saying a great deal; it's also the only recast kit I've completed so far. Nearly every part required gap-filling and a lot of filing/sanding, all three main torso parts were noticably warped (and at least one of the sides had serious mould misalignment). On one hand, in the end it wasn't anything that was impossible to fix with a sharp knife, some sandpaper and some putty. On the other, I really intended to build the Spartan quickly so I could get to my real love, the Tomahawk... but I've just not had the motivation to go back to it since. Although I've been kind of out of modelling for a few months since then for various reasons as well. Man, I should get around to working something out for that missile smoke... :/
  6. Sar

    Help Please

    It's one of the Chaos Warrior pieces from Heroquest, no? ;P
  7. Whilst I've never seen anything specifically on model or kit sculpting, any kind of sculpture will help to an extent. I guess you'd probably get something out of technical drawing classes as well, but I don't know how much. ...both of these really depend a lot on what kind of model you're doing and what materials you want to work in. I'm in the middle of two (mostly stalled) scratchbuilds for 1/144th vehicles for a wargame; one's a rounded Hind-a-like helicopter, for which I'm using wax carving tools and a knife a lot and making pretty much everything out of milliput, the other's a boxy transporter, the whole thing's made from sheet styrene and I'm mostly using a scribe and sandpaper. I've sculpted figures in the past and used a single wax sculpting tool for the whole thing. At the very least, I'd recommend the same tools as you'd use for building a plastic kit - knife, high-grade sandpaper, pin vice drill, etc. - and add a steel ruler, dividers if you plan on making scale reproductions of plans. Then some other stuff depending on what you're sculpting and what you're sculpting in. Are you sure you're thinking of Milliput and not Polymeric Systems' Kneadatite? I've seen Milliput come in beige, white, terracotta and grey, but I don't think ever green. Kneadatite is commonly used for sculpting miniature figures, it's got the consistency of half-chewed gum, comes in green, blue-white and brown varieties (IIRC white is the softest, green somewhere in the middle and brown hardest - can be machined) and typically feels like hard rubber when cured, typically green stuff can be cut or shaved but not really filed or sanded. Milliput is a more clay-like epoxy which hardens to... well, something more like clay... and thus, can be sanded or filed but not cut. Most other epoxy putties I've used have been more like milliput than like green stuff, but I've not tried Aves. Yet. ;-) Really, the best way to learn sculpting - like pretty much anything - is just to try it yourself. Yes, I'd recommend sketching it out on paper first and using that to cut out sheet styrene to base the construction on, bulk out with putty if necessary... The second-best way to learn sculpting, IMO, is to follow photos of builds other people are doing, you can often pick up how they did something just from the odd photo: Honneamise's here are pretty nice in that respect, and I've also picked up a lot of confidence reading through these builds, although any direct info there is in Japanese.
  8. ... anyone who was following the ghost buildup thread? ;-) Seriously, though, wouldn't the obvious solution to submission angst just be to not disqualify entries that didn't win from future months? If Honneamise's painting wins this month there's no reason vf_1s' shouldn't be nominated next month, is there? It's not any less good a painting next month. Perhaps rule that you can't enter something for three months after the last thing of yours was displayed, to keep the shuffle going? I'd have thought something like this should really be about getting a broad look at some of the cool Macross-related things people are producing rather than worrying people about timing or whatever...
  9. Just cheap liquid (non-gel) superglue - I use wet-n-dry (water resistant) sandpaper, so it doesn't soak through the paper and render it useless. I'll spread the glue thinly on one side of the plastic strip, lower it glue-down onto the end of the strip of sandpaper, press down, wait for that to dry then coat the end and the other side of the plastic with glue and fold the strip of sandpaper over the top. Typically the sandpaper hangs over the edge of the plastic by a half-millimetre or so, but I've not found that to be a problem when sanding with it. I try to have two of these on the go at once, one with 200-grit and one with 400-grit, which is about as high as I usually need.
  10. This is more or less my problem, albeit in pounds sterling. ;-) If it was something I could drive in an hour or two to from sunny Peterborough, UK, I'd probably make the effort; past that, I think I'm missing something about such an event that would entice me along... I wonder if the EU members aren't a little far-flung and lacking the consumer-affordable long-distance travel the states seems to have. What does a hypothetical MWEuroCon have to offer past meeting up with like-minded aircraft-based-anime freaks that makes it worth taking a couple of precious holiday days and travelling a thousand miles by cattle-courier? Not that I don't love you guys like my own brothers, you understand, but I run short of holiday days enough as it is, and travelling is one of my least favourite things. ;-) (But Falcon14141 - I was shopping the other day and the coin release for the shopping trolleys had a dual slot, you could use a pound coin or a euro coin if you wanted; it's gaining acceptance! ;P)
  11. I found that emery boards from such places were more expensive by far than homemade equivalents - I tend to buy various grades of sandpaper in bulk from auto supply places, cut them into strips with an old pair of scissors or disposable knife and glue the strips to a thick bit of plastic or two I've been using for this purpose for ages using cheap superglue. So long as you don't get any glue on the sanding side, they're great... ;-) Oh, and a word of warning about nail polish/varnish - over here (UK), at least, a lot of it's acrylic, it seems. Perhaps people didn't like the idea of lacquer thinners wafting around their houses? (That said, my mother always used to yell at me when I was living at home for airbrushing with alcohol in my room, despite respirator with organics filters and open windows and fans, but would happily sit around at her computer desk with a cloud of acetone nail varnish remover floating around her... ;-)
  12. And here was me thinking Safari was an OK browser, on the whole... *shrugs* One way or another, the server's definitely telling me it's a "text/plain" document, and it's bad behaviour on the browser's part to display that as anything other than plain text. It really does look like a server configuration problem, I'm getting the same mime type returned from all the .cfm pages on StarshipModeler; I've mailed Onezero with a description of the problem, anyway, in case it wasn't known about. Nice job, though, on the ship. ;-)
  13. I don't know... I've accidentally scratched paint jobs while I'm constructing the model before. I tend to leave mine on a shelf, so there's not much opportunity for post-construction damage. Thinking about it it's probably better that I did notice such damage before I finished the kit, though, so that I could properly deal with it before it was too late... I've used powdered pigment for colouring resin before, and for the volume of pigment I needed the cost was negligible compared to the cost of the resin - something like £5 for a tin that looked like it'd last for 5 or 6 kilos of resin. Although I wasn't using enough of the stuff to make the resin a really rich solid colour, my main goal was just to distinguish it from other bits of resin.
  14. It's because it's got a mime type of "text/plain" for some reason, it's probably a server configuration error. Browsers that behave themselves render it as plain text because it says it's plain text. Browsers that are hideously broken (such as, say, Internet Explorer) will just try and render HTML out of it anyway, which is probably why it doesn't look broken to Kylwell.
  15. I know popular wisdom seems to go against me on this one, everyone I've talked to about drybrushing has said they use a stiffer than normal brush, but personally I've always preferred a soft brush. I find it's easier to smear or dapple with a stiff brush, even with practically no paint on the bristles; they push onto flat surfaces more so there's more chance of them leaving paint where they shouldn't. Also, if you trim down your brushes be aware that you'll need to be more careful about wiping away paint before drybrushing. The paint tends to collect in the centre of the bristles where they're bunched together into the ferrule, and it's hard to wipe out; normally it's not so much of a problem and you can just rinse it away when you wash the brush when you're done, but if the bristles have been shortened then that part's so much closer to the tips you're painting with.
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