Maddog Manufacturing Now Open for 2022!

[ogrejohn]

Nice work Mark! PE is not something I like doing, yours looks good! 

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you Jon! I'm not particularly find of P/E myself, but if it's the only game in town for certain models, well.....

[Dukemaddog]

Now that my foot is finally healed enough to walk on without having to ice it all the time, I was able to get a few hours in the hobby room in between getting caught up with all the other things that were neglected. Here is what I was able to do, so all aboard the trams again for this new tour of Maddog Manufacturing!


First off, while I was re-organizing the room and re-packing many of my spare parts in a new container I got , I finally found the missing propeller to the Fokker Friendship! It was in that container marked "Propellers, Blades and Rotors":





Naturally I had to paint it like the other one so I got started:





I cleaned that up a bit and finished the painting of the whole thing:





Now that I got that finished, I'll post my new pics of the finished plane in the Aircraft section...


After that, I decided to see how the pews looked so I punched one out and assembled it. Pretty cool:





Each square on the mat is 1 inch in size if I recall. That will give you some idea of how small that is.


Moving on to our Hanger, here is the work I did on the Marine Harrier to prepare it for paint. First after masking the canopy, I added the extra part in front of the wing; dry fitting the whole assembly and gluing it together on the fuselage but not to the fuselage. That is why you see it removed here. I also was able to pull the front exhaust cans off thanks to poly caps inside. The rear ones wouldn't come out so I taped them with the rest of the things I needed to mask:





I then dry-fit it together again to have it ready to shoot when I break out the airbrush:





My next project was the F-117 that I'm building to replace the one that was stolen. I'd had it all assembled already so I flipped it over and shot white in the gear bays and bomb bay. I used a rattle can, that is why it is everywhere. I also had shot the landing gear parts, the inner gear doors and the inner bomb bay doors:





After that dried overnight, I placed the gear doors and bomb bay doors in place without glue and shot the flat black all over the bottom of this plane:





Yes, they are raised, but I'm building this with everything open so I'm not worried about it.


Once that was dry, I flipped it again and shot the top with the flat black:





I love how the doors underneath stayed in place!



Next up is a detour to the shipyards again because I laid the keel on a new landing craft, this time an LCM from the Dragon 2in1 kit. I now have three landing craft under construction that I need to get done:





While here, we can check out the Emden. I didn't do much to it, simply taping off the hull and painting the black boot stripe on it:





Later I taped that boot stripe off, masking it for the lower hull paint. I searched around a bit and finally found what I believe to be a suitable enough hull red by Humbrol. Hopefully I'll be able to get it painted soon.




Now that we've seen that, it's on to the Motor Pool section to see the latest vehicles under construction.


First off, I decided to start one more of my birthday presents, the Roden pakwagen. The instructions have you start with the gun:





This was quite fiddly, but with a little careful sanding; I was able to slip that gun into the cradle without needing to glue it as you see here. I also added the rest of the details for the gun cradle:





Finally the gun shield went on, but not without a fight. This was nearly impossible to keep properly positioned without five hands, but I managed to get it looking right.... so far:





After that, I built the fenders. Simple assembly. I simply had to add all those doors to them:





I then glued them onto the lower hull and added the interior details:





After that, I got the side walls on the top hull:





That's probably going to need some filler....


Moving on, I started a little Japanese mortar towing truck that I got for Christmas. It was a fast little thing to build! I left off the engine cover because there's a few more things that have to go on the front of this first:





Here it is sitting next to the 120mm mortar it tows. I'll be keeping this one in the firing position. Since there's two models in this kit, I'll make the other one towed:





That is all I have for this week. Not much in the way of vehicles, but I have a shipload of them to paint so next time might be quite an extensive tour. until then, thanks for joining and comments are welcome.

[JCON]

Very good progress!!!

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you Joe! I hope to make this same progress in the spray booth.

[ogrejohn]

All nice work Mark but I really like that Fokker and the Emden is shaping up nicely! 

[RLFoster]

Good to hear the foot is on the mend! Nice update on the models...well done!

[JED]

Yet more nice and speedy work Duke

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you John! I am also pleased with the Emden. As for the Fokker, it is done already! LOL!

Thank you Robert! Sometimes the foot reminds me of what happened, but I'm glad to be walking again. Hopefully more progress will happen soon.

Thank you Jed! I wish it could be speedier....

[Dukemaddog]

Welcome to another week of progress by the Duke.


This week I finally got to airbrush! Wow, it felt great to make significant progress for once! Maddog Manufacturing has been in full production mode. All aboard the trams for the latest tour!


We'll start in the Hangar again where a little bit has been happening. I did start a new helicopter, this is one I've been wanting for quite some time.


This is the cockpit I started for the AH-1Z Cobra, all ready for paint:








The next thing I did was to touch up the paint on the bottom of the Japanese U-125. First I masked off and sprayed the specific damage with my Sotar 20/20:





Later the mask came off. This looks so much better now so I can move forward once again:





Speaking of masking and spraying, I started by adding the Silly Putty to my Japanese OH-1 helicopter; now that the base coat is on:





You'll notice that I broke off one of the horizontal stabilizers as I expected. Oh well, I still got it masked for spraying. I then shot the second color on this helicopter:





Again, another part broken from handling. That thing is small; no place to really hold it when shooting paint.


Finally the masking came off. I can now clearcoat this and start the decals:





Finally, the third helicopter I'm building; the AH-56 Cheyenne, got some small progress done too. I painted the cockpit and pilots for the time I can add them to this model:





I then went to shoot paint on the helicopter itself, but realized I had a lot of seam work to take care of first, so no more pics of this for now.




That's all that's happened in the Hangar, now on to see what's coming down the slipways in the Shipyards.


Now, you may be thinking that you've seen this before, but this is a new LCM-3 that came with the Dragon LCM and Sherman combo kit.


I started with the basic construction:





Here's the fiddly little control box used by the driver:





The main difference between this one and the other LCM-3 I started some time back (besides the manufacturer), is this one does not have any propellers or rudder underneath. In fact, it has an even shallower hull. This is why Dragon included a clear base piece to place this on so it can be displayed deploying the Sherman in a mini dio:





I plan on pulling out the other LCM to see if I can finish it in tandem with this one.


After this, I pulled out an old Shelf Queen, the old RAF Rescue Launch from Airfix, circa 1970's. I almost feel like I started it back then too! This has actually been on the Shelf of Doom for five to seven years; it's time to get it finished. I'd shot the sides of the hull way back when, and then recently masked off the sides. I then shot the hull red on the bottom and after that dried, I shot the grey over the whole upper deck and superstructure:





Later I pulled the masking off to see how this looks:





Looks good on this side. When I turned it around to check on the other side I found that the tape had pulled a bit of the black off the sides. Looks like I also left a bit of tape on it. Easy fix with my Sotar 20/20 and tweezers for the tape.


In this pic, you can also barely see the red bottom hull:





Sweet! Now to get the touch up done and the demarcation lines cleaned up and I can see what else I can do with this.


Moving on, I continued work on this SMS Emden commission build. First off, I removed the masking on the hull to see how well the boot stripe looks. Not bad on this side:





Needed improvement on this side:





I took some time to fix that hull stripe to make it look more consistent, then I painted all the upper grey parts grey as indicated on the paint scheme. I also did a bit more touch-ups on the other colors too:








You'll also notice that all the main gun turrets are back on this. Before, when I painted the deck, three of them got stuck and wouldn't rotate. When I tried to loosen them, they snapped right off. After painting the grey, I went to work fixing these turrets so they could be added back on and rotate like they did before. First I drilled some holes in the bottom of the turrets and cemented in a length of styrene rod right where the broken ones used to be:





After drilling out the holes in the deck I just slipped these right in. After all that was done, I decided to paint the masts, boats, davits and searchlights and all other extra parts that need to go on:





Now I should be able to get this finished fairly quickly. I'm hoping I can deliver this to him at the next Hobby Day. I gotta clear that slip for another naval project I want to get to.



Now that we're done at the Shipyards, lets move on to the Motor Pool where quite a bit has been done...


The first thing we'll look at is the gantry crane. I shot some panzer dunklegelb over the whole thing, hopefully covering all that brass. Not sure if I did. I still need to find that tiny wheel that broke off and get it replaced:





While I had the panzer dunklegelb out, I painted the interior of my Sd Kfz 234 Pakwagen and then did the details:





I also painted the inside of the gun shield and the back part of the gun:





I'm gonna do a bit more detailing there before I go on. While I was shooting paint, I shot the Australian Bushmaster with a coat of Olive Drab:





While that was drying, I shot British Gulf War Sand over the British Bushmaster. I thinned it a bit to much so this will need another coat:





The final thing I did was to shoot the green basecoat on the Russian 2S35 Koalitzia so that I can clear coat it and add the decals:





And that concludes our tour of Maddog Manufacturing for now. Thank you all for joining me on this trip; comments are always welcome.

[JCON]

Keep em' going... good job!!!

[JED]

Great stuff just makes me feel sooooo slow!!!!

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you Joe! Check out my efforts to keep things going below. I hope you like them...

Thank you Jed! Sometimes I feel the same way!

With all the extra time I had at Hobby Day weekend this past weekend, there's a lot to show in this next tour! Come on in and board the trams to see the latest progress.


Starting again in the hanger, we did get the landing gear and gear doors on the Vampire. We also got the bombs painted up:





The next pic of this will be in the Finished boards...


We also got the decals on the F-117 stealth fighter:





Now I'm not sure if the decals have silvered or if that is that milky stuff that Monogram decals always seems to have. I'm going to wait till this dries and see what a dull coat will do before I deal with that.


Finally, we also put decals the Japanese U-125. What an ordeal that was! These large decals were so thin and delicate they folded under if you looked at them wrong. Then they tore as you tried to fix them! We somehow managed to get 99% of this large decal on one side:





We stopped right there and pulled out my liquid decal film to coat the rest of the decals. After sufficient drying time, we finally got them on the plane. Wow, what a great improvement on the ease of application! We still cut the large side decal into two pieces to make sure we got it on right:








Yes, that wrinkling is from the Solvaset we applied to the engine nacelle decals since they did not conform at all to the curves of those nacelles. Later we added some more and they smoothed out much better. She is turning into quite the pretty plane!



That was the quick tour of the Hanger, now on to the Shipyards...


We got more work done on the Trumpeter LCM, adding the propellers and rudders underneath:





Next we added all the detail parts left off before. The ramp in front is just dry fit; the hinge system Trumpeter uses is useless, unlike the Dragon system. We will decide how to position that once it gets rigged with the rope included in the kit:





In the last slip here, we got the deck painted on HMS Kelly:





She'll be ready for more detail work now.



That completes the quick tour of the Shipyards; now on to the Motor Pool...




Here in the Motor Pool, we added the decals to the Russian 2S35. It was quite easy since it only had numbers on the sides of the turret:





Later we might decide to dress that up a bit with more markings just to give it some more color. Artistic license and all....


Since we were on Russian subjects, I consulted the instruction sheets for the Russian CLUB anti-ship missile defense system. There's a cover that goes over the cab, with openings on the front for some lights on the top of the cab to shine through. So we got busy and added the lights and the photo-etch cages that protect these lights. Why they still have those protective cages with that cover on, I don't know but since the instructions said they are supposed to go on, we added them:





Later we painted the cab top in the same Russian green as the exterior and then installed the cover on top:





It does look pretty funky up there now, but once the launch bay is added to the back, this will look better. Time to mask these windows to prepare for paint.


Next I pulled out a shelf queen that I'd put aside some time ago because of the way the wheels had to be assembled. It is the armored HUMVEE and it was time to get this thing moving so we went to work. These are the parts to each tire. Note that the hubs were already glued together:





Yes, those are six tread pieces that are supposed to go on the hubs. This is what the wheels look like fully assembled:





I'm not sure what to do about all those seams and gaps. What a ridiculous way to build wheels, especially since the tread pieces had so much flash you didn't know where the flash ended and the tread started! I might just forget any attempt to fix them just so I can move on...


We finally got all four wheels done. I can send this to the paint booth now....





Earlier we had started a WWII Swedish assault gun, building the lower hull first. I forgot to take pics of it before we added the wheels and sprockets to it. We then added the engine deck on top along with the front glacis plate:





This kit came with a resin fighting compartment that houses the gun and all. Here it is dry fit on the hull to see how it fits. It is hollow and needed a slight bit of persuasion:





I'm not sure whether we should install the fenders before gluing that down, or try to fit the fenders after. If I decide to add the fenders first, we'll need to add the tracks to the running gear first. I'll have to think on this....



After al that, I wanted something simple and fun to work on. I pulled out this Japanese Material Handler to do for my 12-hour build challenge that my So Cal AMPS club is doing. After three and a half hours we had this:





This thing is so cool! It is a funky looking beastie but it even does all this:





That was all we got done this weekend in the Motor Pool.



And that completes our tour of Maddog Manufacturing, I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for coming along, comments are welcome.

[JCON]

Yup you're busy all right... bring em' across the finish line!!!

[JED]

Speedy Mc Speedy!!!!

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you guys! I'm hoping to finish a few by Easter weekend.

[ogrejohn]

Fine looking work Mark! 

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you John!

[Tobi]

One thing's for sure, that is you are not underemployed.
the German phrase to describe your modeling activities would be: "dancing at several wedding celebrations simultaneously"

Is there a comparable expression in the English language?

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you Tobi! There is a comparable saying in English but my mind has gone blank trying to remember it. I do like dancing!

Stay tuned, more to be posted very soon.