Sar

I've personally only used one, but it's entirely possible that different brands of trap will work better or worse than others; I imagine it's probably similar to respirator filters - some will only barely work and others will kill any moisture problem you might ever have. I'm sure someone here must have used more than one in the past and be able to make a more authoritative recommendation! ;-) Most compressors I've seen have filters over intakes which would serve to reduce moisture as well, but it's not the primary intention so it's probably not a concern if you do have an in-line moisture trap. Bear in mind also that if you take your airbrush apart to clean it (as you should from time to time!) you should be careful to thoroughly dry all the parts before reassembling it - if you leave drops of water or thinner inside the brush itself then no moisture trap will save your kit...and I know I've done that before too! You might want to consider using a hairdryer to make sure your 'brush is dry before reassembly.

Yeah - if you don't use a moisture trap and there's too much moisture in the air, then the moisture condenses and collects in the airbrush and comes out in spatters unpredictably alongside the paint. Having had it happen myself in the past, I can assure you it's bloody irritating - every time it happened to me I had to start again on the piece I was painting at the time. :/

I don't know about MoriMori in particular, I've never used that one, but typically with polyester putty (this goes for three or four different brands I have used, they've all been more or less the same) the little 'bottle' isn't actually liquid but a similar consistency to the stuff in the tube. You use 'an equal length' of each; squeeze the putty and the hardener out in lines next to each other. The nozzles of the bottle and tube are sized such that you get the correct ratio. Also, I don't know exactly what it is but I've always worn a respirator and latex gloves when working with polyester putty, even with sanding after it's cured, the stuff just smells like it could cause cancer at fifty metres.

Man, watch what you say. Last time I offered anything for casting I got someone asking if I would do them one in chocolate. ...and I'm still tempted to try. ;-)

Yeah, I was thinking more in the recasting-greeblies sense, since that's what LtSO was talking about. All the same, I was under the impression Alumilite isn't that highly regarded amongst the kind of people who do cast up crazy-big destroids either, but let me know if I'm wrong...

Yeah, he's just in a box in the garage at the moment, along with 95% of the rest of my stuff; I get the keys to my new house tomorrow after too many delays, so I'm a little too busy to sculpt. ;-) I don't know how long it'll take to get settled, but I do plan to finish the guy. Or at least his head and shoulders. ;-)

You can get cheaper stuff than Alumilite that works at least as well; I've known some people rate alumilite pretty low, not just for cost... 'Smooth-on' comes to mind, but I could be thinking of mould rubber rather than resin, I get mine from a UK company so I'm not well-versed in US suppliers. I'm pretty sure I remember hearing good things said about Micromark's offering, though, whatever that is. Personally I do more sculpting than kit building, from figures to vehicles to little details, and I've got used to casting more or less everything I make; gluing together and painting the master makes me too nervous, these days... ;-) Admittedly, though, they're all an order of magnitude or two smaller than a 1/72nd Monster...

Sure - I too don't know the whole story, I'm not in on it and I have no direct interest in the matter, but there is a point of view you're missing... The blacklist (and its opposite) are trusted resources, and there are those of us who will come to the forum without knowing who is trustworthy and who isn't, see a project like this going on and make judgements on whether it's worth getting involved based on those lists. I mean - getting a set of John Moscato's Zentradi was the first fan-driven project I'd bought into, and I felt perfectly safe sending not-inconsiderable sums of my money to some random paypal account of a guy I know only through some forum because he has a good name, the forum says he's trustworthy. On the other hand, I come to this thread and see this, and from my point of view, all I can tell is that some guy started a project, asked for seed funds then arbitrarily cancelled the project and didn't give the seed money back to the people who'd contributed. I don't mean to suggest that Valkyrie should definitely be pilloried and blacklisted and kicked in the nuts 'til he bleeds, I'm aware there quite probably is a good reason, just that the full story should be made public when other people's money is involved - because if all I see as an outsider is this guy not following up on implicit promises and getting away with it because a bunch of guys are willing to defend him for being an old-timer, it dilutes the value of the blacklist and whitelist. I can no longer assume that people on the whitelist are trustworthy and that if a guy's done bad in the past he'd be on the blacklist, 'cause he might just have the right friends. Instead, I have to trawl through every single past thread and look for myself... I don't have the time for that, so the safe option is not to get involved. And that's bad, right? The whole point of these projects is to facilitate fans getting kits of things they wouldn't be otherwise able to?

Yeah, I got mine early last week in the UK. I know it doesn't help you guys still waiting, but... they're awesome! Well done, Cap'n - and thanks! ... I'm looking at that part apprehensively, thinking "Man, paint surely will flake right off!" but I'll start on faith and see how it goes... ;-) (I'm planning a little vignette, when I've finally moved and unpacked all my modelling stuff again, so I may end up just recasting that bit in resin for my purposes, I don't need movement...)

Strips of wet-n-dry sandpaper superglued to strips of 2.5mm styrene. ;-) And man, I can't believe I forgot those tritool chisels. Personally I also find a set of small sprung grips useful - the kind of thing used here to hold the piece. Mostly I use them for holding things at particular angles for drying, they're also useful for clamping bits together while glue is drying - generally more convinient than a G-clamp or whatever.

On one hand, it's usually worth looking at tools that aren't specifically designed for modelling, as often you'll find that they're actually just as good - sometimes even the same tool, but cheaper because they're not sold under such a specialist banner. One of the local hobby shops here sold disposable-blade modelling knives and replacement blades for about four times the price you could get an identical 'wallpaper knife' at the DIY shop down the road a little... and the [cheaper] wallpaper knife blades came in a nifty little dispenser so it was less likely you'd cut yourself getting one out of the box. On the other hand, my experience of files suggests that they basically come in two varieties - those intended for filing plastics and those intended for filing metal. If you buy GW's, for instance, those are the metal ones; the 'teeth' of the file are deeper and further apart. I think the only problem I've noticed using the metals files on styrene is that if you slip and go wrong they scar the plastic quicker; if you file without error you get pretty much the same finish anyway. Oh, and the metal ones are easier to clean. ;-) (Myself, I most recently got a set of Expo files from my local modelling shop, which contained a mixture of both)

There have been a couple posted: http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?...e=post&id=29748 http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?...e=post&id=29948 Personally I think it looks better than I'd hoped - it doesn't look like I'll have any trouble with my slumped-dead-guy diorama, whenever I get the time to actually do any modelling... ;-)

They've discontinued the aerosol, you can still buy the pots of paint - the guy in my local GW suggested that he'd had more questions about where Space Wolf Grey spray cans went than any other product, recently. On the plus side, they've brought in an 'Ogre Flesh' spray, which is a nice dusty brown, which I now use for my Heavy Gear miniatures. ;-) (If anyone works out how to get GW acrylics through an airbrush without them gunking up, by the way, I'm really interested to know...)

I use an ancient Letraset burnisher that I got given by my dad, who used to be a graphic artist back in 1980 or so before computers came in, and I have to say yes. It's not that they push down better, but just that they have a completely rounded end so it's 'safe' - you're not going to catch the edge of your nail or the point of the toothpick on anything while you're doing it. Also it helps fulfil my modeller's fancy for having a large collection of really specialised tools that I can use for one task and one task only. "What's that one, then?" "Oh, that's for engraving shallow panel lines into convex surfaces" "It just looks like a small saw... how about that one?" "Burnishing the edges of low-tack masking tape down." ;-) Another thing possibly worth mention, although one of the other guys touches on it a bit - if paint is getting under the edge of your masking tape and resulting in a line that isn't pefectly clean, it's because the edge isn't right the way down to the surface of the paint... but that can be as much a problem with the surface of the paint as the tape itself. No amount of burnishing, to cite an extreme example, is going to allow you to mask a clean line on 50-grit sandpaper; the smoother (glossier) your paint is the better you're going to be able to mask over it. Not to mention that a gloss coat is usually pretty strong and will help stop the paint lifting off as well. ;-)

Myself I find GW's primer 'fairly good' - better than most auto primers, for instance - but still not fantastic. I'm another advocate of Halfords' acrylic primer, though. It's not so much that a good Halfords' primer finish is better than a good GW primer finish, just that I find it much easier to screw up with GW's. I don't know what it is about it, though. (I've heard GW does a lot of manufacturing in the US for their US minis market, though, perhaps primer is another thing that varies in production between the US and the UK, where I am?)

Personally, I'd be trying two-part epoxy rather than CA glue - they vary in hue, but I've certainly had completely clear and colourless epoxy before. It's dead strong, it's typically thick enough to do some filling with as well, and it doesn't discolour so readily as cyanoacrylate... but on the down side it takes ages to cure and it stinks to hell while it does it, so you'd certainly have to be patient... Well, that's a lie - personally I'd just be assembling the kit as normal and painting over it, I don't care for clear kits at all. But that's just me. ;-)

Um... you know there's an image on the Hobbyfan listing with a ruler up against it, right?

Here y'go. (The more I look at it the more convinced I am that the eyes need a lot of work. :/)

OK, so I've been making slow progress... So, a question - is that thing on his hat defined anywhere? About two-thirds of the time it looks like the one on the left, the rest of the time like the one on the right... I'm thinking the eyes probably need to be bigger, too. I did some pipe work too, but it's less far progressed... ;-)

Not really, no; I went to visit a friend at the weekend, so I didn't have too much modelling time - all I've done since the last photos are a small amount of surface-smoothing sanding and watching an old clip of Frank Zappa on Crossfire in the eighties. ;-)

Man... there are a couple of stylistic choices I wouldn't have made myself, but put together and standing, she still looks damn fine! I particularly love that helmet...

I take the other option - wet-sanding. ;-) But yeah... it's good advice. If anything I'm not convinced that dust masks even really do that much good, I've given up using mine in favour of the respirator I use for airbrushing.

OK, OK, I was bored... Currently the head's 47mm tall, from top (which needs more putty anyway) to chin (which probably needs a little less). I guess probably about 1/5th scale, from a rought measurement of my own head. ;-) I'm thinking bust - as much as I'd like to get it as right as I can it's really just a tide-over project 'til I can move house... and yeah, I've moved the brow down all 'round, it's looking better to me... too much space above the eyes is a perennial problem of mine that I nearly always forget until I've already done the brow. :/

That's the main thing for me, too... I have a fairly large collection of anime-related statues and action figures and so on, but nearly all of them come from customer-loyalty points from the place I used to get DVDs from. ;-) None of them ever do anything other than stand around looking cool and collecting dust. Only one Valkyrie, one of the old 1/100th or so (Banpresto? Someone like that) transformable strike valkyries, for the last year and a half it's just been occupying the stand competely static 'til I finish the 1/72nd model kit that's supposed to go there... ... I probably ought to fill in the panel lines in marker or something, I might find my enthusiasm for flying it around the room rises... ;-)

Milliput - it's one of the few modelling materials I have that isn't packed up in a big box, and even then only 'cause I just ran out a month or so ago and bought more. ;-) It's pretty good stuff, though, IMO; workable like soft clay, and with water, cures at room temperature (accelerated by heating) and carve/sandable when cured. I'm playing around with MagicSculpt at the same time on a parallel messaround project, and that's a little too sticky and not quite dense enough for my taste, but still a pretty good medium all told. I did make a little paper moustache (old photo) but I'm having to rely on imagination and digital editing for a hat for the moment... The pointiness of his chin is one of the main things I've found varies from episode to episode (compare the attached pics to yours, for instance), but yeah - currently it's definitely too square. Absolutely! It's as much angle as anything, but that's certainly an Important Design Consideration... ;-)