Maddog Manufacturing 2023 Grand Reopening!

[Dukemaddog]

Robbo, anywhere I have space to be honest. Lately, that is getting more and more difficult to find, hence the renovations. Hopefully, I'll be able to clear out some of my larger models so I can get rid of the boxes.

[JED]

Great work Duke

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you Jed. I hope to have more to post soon.

[Dukemaddog]

It's been awhile since I've been here with enough time to follow everyone and due to so many issues, events, small jobs and other incidences; I have been very neglectful in checking out and commenting on anyone else's work. For that I apologize; it has been so hard to find the time to just enjoy the Forums. This coming week will be another extended absence as well due to a long and arduous job I'll be doing, so if I don't reply right away, you know why.

I don't know how many people take my 'tours', but here is an update from the last month or so, whenever I was able to find some time at home and at Hobby Day events to get something done.

That being said, this might be a bit of a long tour so all aboard the trams and remember to keep hands and feet inside at all times. Our first stop in the Hangar.....


Our first stop shows the Me-110 cockpit assembly finally painted. It may not be the most accurate color but it's the closest I have and I want this finished so this is what I used.:



Decals go on this instrument panels so that will be next before I close this up and start painting.

Next, two Spitfires were started. These were from Saul, and so I pulled them out and we started them while waiting for other things to dry. First is the Mk.VIII, starting with the cockpit of course:



Later for ease of handling while painting, we cemented the cockpit assembly into one of the fuselage halves:



While that was drying, we cemented the wing tops to the lower wing section:



In the next bay, we have the Mk.XIVC, which also had the cockpit assembled and then cemented into one of the fuselage halves:



Followed by the same wing assembly as before:





Yeah, not too much was done here, but some good progress was made. Now let us head on out to the Shipyards....



Here in the Shipyards, all the work has been focused on the small torpedo boat craft since some of them are so close to being completed. The first one is the German Schnellboot, which has been fighting us all the way. Final detail parts were added and some rigging was done, but I decided to leave off some parts that are just extra stuff. It's slowly getting closer:





That is one long boat! As of now, we won't be able to complete this until I find the screws to it which I had in place ready to install, and they completely disappeared. I have to wait until they're found before I can call this one finished:



Moving along, the British Vospers 71 foot boat got final detail painting, some rigging and some last details installed:



The white styrene rods are rigging that we're using instead of thread because we could not get the thread to look right. At least this; when painted black, will simulate rope better. Once that is done, final decals and finishing will be done.

Finally, in this last slipway, we have the Vospers 73 foot boat. Lots of seams needed filling and lots of extra parts were installed as well:



All of that was painted and now all that is needed are the decals, rigging and weapons:





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


Here in the Motor Pool, there is a lot that has been happening. With the influx of new kits, we went to work to get as many of these built as fast as possible.


Our first bay holds one of the two SCUDs, this one is the SCUD C. The driver's cab was completed and windows installed:



With that completed, we installed all four body assemblies onto the chassis:



We can't go much further on this one until the sprue with the correct launcher arms are found. The ones I currently have are for the early SCUD B and this is the -C.

Meanwhile, we got the launcher arms assembled and installed for the SCUD D:



Yes, it does elevate and I forgot to get pics of it fully elevated. All that is needed now are the missiles to be painted, windows masked so we can start with Silly Putty and paint to add the other two camouflage colors.

In the next bay, we started the FROG-7 missile truck. Ever since seeing this in some larger scale when I was a kid, I've always dreamed of having this as part of my 1/72 scale collection. Finally, thanks to Trumpeter, that dream is becoming reality. We started of course with the driver's cab, building the interior and testing it with the cab shell:



Next all the rest of the rear parts were added to the chassis:



Preliminary paint and the final launcher arm assembly was added next:



This arm elevates vary nicely:



After the interior of the cab was painted, the windows were installed and the cab was painted outside; the whole sub-assembly finally added to the rest of the truck:



The missile itself was then completed and left to dry on the sprue:



Later it was removed and tested on the launcher arm. Additional rear body parts were added as well to complete construction as much as possible for the next coat of paint:



This one is coming close!


In this next bay, we got started on the SA-4 Ganef, starting with these wonderfully complex missiles:



Next was the lower hull and tracks, which were molded into one piece with the outer road wheels molded separately:



The complex launcher arms were next, they do work well when assembled:



The upper hull was completed with all but the most breakable parts, the launcher arm was added; and the whole thing was dry fit to the lower hull. Then for fun, we added the missiles to see how this ungainly vehicle was going to look:




That is where this is so far. I do have a lot of missiles that we need to get painted, so someday when I have the spare time; there's going to be a missile painting marathon!


Finally the last bay here contains the US Army D-7 Dozer that we got in. First assembly was the surprisingly detailed little engine:



Next were the tracks. Again, simple assembly, but very nicely detailed:



Now since most of this needed to be painted before any assembly of the main body could be done, we went ahead and built the dozer blade itself:



Now after some preliminary painting again, we started building this up. First, the engine was added to the main body:



Then the driver's seat and the rear section were added:



Final assembly, painting and early weathering were done next:



The track assemblies were weathered next so we could get it in places we wouldn't be able to reach when these tracks were installed:



Once done, these were installed on the dozer itself:



The dozer blade was then snapped into place:



Looks great doesn't it? The blade will be weathered later and then installed. This little model was a blast to build; just so you know what I was dealing with, here it is next to the Exacto blade I used for removing the more delicate parts:



Pretty darn small!



That concludes our tour of Maddog Manufacturing for today. Thank you all for stopping in, your patronage and comments are most appreciated.

[BUCKY]

Some nice progress, Duke! Things are looking good!!

[JCON]

Busy boy for sure!!!   P.S. You need to clean that exhaust fan before it catches on fire... at the very least its not good for your health... 

[JED]

Nice work Duke

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you for the awesome comments guys. Joe: duly noted.

[Dukemaddog]

Despite having almost no time, I was able to get a bit more progress done, and even finished a few models. Some of those models have already been posted so these pics will show them on the way to the dispersal yard or dock.


Okay, lets start this tour by boarding the trams and heading out to the Hangar.


There's been some good progress in the Hangar here, starting with the two Spitfires we've been working on.


First, the Mk XIV got the decals in the cockpit which was also glued to the right fuselage half:





Meanwhile, the Mk VIII got the fuselage assembled and the wings and tails installed:





In this next bay, the German Me-110 got the final details added to the interior and sides of the fuselage halves:





This enabled us to then close it all up inside the fuselage:





Progress was quickly made as the wings and tail were then added:





Later the nose and exhaust were installed. The nose sub assembly had four parts to assemble before they could be mounted on the front of this plane:






That completes the tour of the Hangar, lets move on to the Motor Pool as my Shipyard crews are taking a much needed break after completing three boats.




Here in the Motor Pool, we have in this first bay the Russian FROG-7 Luna. First, the tires were dusted and weathered. This meant adding Tamiya weathering powders to the tire treads and then wiping them carefully off the raised surfaces after it dried:





Next the missile itself was painted and decaled. I tried to eliminate the silvering but no matter how many times I poked holes with a brand new Exacto blade and added Solvaset; they stubbornly remained silvered:





Finally, the decals were added to the main truck and then it was weathered:





Later on, the wheels and tires were added, the missile was loaded and she was sent to the dispersal yard for delivery to my Russian Army. You might have already seen those pics.


Moving on to the next bay, we got the base coat of green on the Sa-4 Ganef:





The missiles were then painted and the decals added. Once again, as with the FROG-7, these decals resisted all efforts to remove the silvering. Here's one of them. There were something like 30+ decals to add to each missile, I decided we'd only use about half of them:





This was then taken for a test drive sans missiles and brought back very dirty. Here it is before a loot of that dust and debris came off:





This one has since been cleaned up and the missiles loaded and final details added. She has now been sent to the dispersal yard for delivery to my Russian Army.


In this next bay we have the British Scimitar Mk.2. Almost all the assembly has been done and so the photo etch was then added:





All that was left, with the exception of breakable details was the base coat of green:





And that completes this short tour of Maddog Manufacturing again. Thank you all who stopped in to see this latest tour.

[JCON]

Only half the pics are loading once again... the ones I can see are good!!!

[JED]

All the pics were good for me, great stuff too. That Scimitar looks an awesome little kit

[Dukemaddog]

Joe, thank you for the compliments on the pics you did see. I don't know why only a few pics are loading. I've checked everything I could on my end; on the Gallery's end, and everything is working right on both counts. I've even worked with the IT guy that set up the Gallery there to see if there's any reason pics won't show up because of Gallery settings and there isn't any reason. They should all show. That has to mean that internet speed may be the one of the issues, or there's something else about these OSM boards in particular. I post this very same thread and posts on at least seven other Forum boards, three others of which are also ProBoards; but I never have anyone else tell me on those other boards that they cannot see the pics. And yes, I asked the last time this was brought up to me. If this is going to be too big an issue, I may just decide to close down these tours here and just post pics from my dispersal points when things get done. I don't like doing that, but what's the use if things can't be seen?


Jed, thank you. I'm glad you got to see everything. Yes, that Scimitar is an awesome little kit. It does go together very well, but so many of the tiny parts can be bothersome. Sometimes I wonder why they didn't just make one part instead of breaking these tiny things in to three or more for assembly. A few of them stretch the abilities for properly assembling them! Also, some checking and rechecking of the upper and lower hulls is needed. Without constant test fitting and adjusting, you will have a gap around the two.

Thanks again fr stopping in.

[Robbo]

Lots of lovely build in here Duke, like them tyres

[Dukemaddog]

Thank you Robbo!

[Dukemaddog]

I'm not sure how much anyone will be able to see, but here is another rather short tour today.

This has been a rather wild few weeks. I'm surprised I actually had time to work on my models. Now that I'm fighting a mild flu, I'm taking the time while I'm home to start a new tour showing what I have been able to get done in between fighting this thing and taking care of other things.


For those interested: all aboard the trams now for our next tour.




As always, we'll start in the Hangar...


Quite a bit has been done here, particularly since I've been sick and tired of some of these long term shelf queens. This particular one comes to mind:


The A-400 I started six years ago has been fighting me almost constantly. While I was applying the decals for the French Armee del'Air in this first bay, the main landing gear and nose gear constantly broke:





Because almost all of that won't be seen, I decided to try some out-of-the-box thinking to make these landing gear stronger. Here's one technique we used, gluing an angled piece to the main gear to support the forked wheels:





That's just one example; the rest glued just fine and I was able to finally call this beast done! One Shelf Queen finally off the Shelf of Doom!


Moving on to the next bay, we were able to slather a bunch of Mr. Surfacer 500 over the Spitfire Mk. VIII, give the number of crazy gaps and seams we had after gluing it together:





After a good amount of sanding, things started looking better on this Mk.VIII:





Once I was satisfied with our sanding job, we added the canopy and windscreen to this so we could mask it all later and get ready for paint:





I was very pleased with the fit of this.


The Spitfire Mk. XIV in the bay next door, did not need nearly as much attention, a good sanding took care of those issues. However, I did lose the little cockpit door so we replaced it with some sheet styrene:





Later on that canopy and windscreen went on too:





While we were doing canopies and windscreens, we decided to finish off the canopy/windscreen assembly on the Me-110 as well. All six parts fit together nicely:





Finally in this last bay, our improved cockpit assembly for the Tu-95 Bear was test fit inside the forward fuselage halves to see how it looks. It's a vast improvement over the kit supplied parts:





The forward fuselage halves were taped together and then taped to the rear fuselage assembly to see how this beastie is gonna look. She's a long one indeed as you can see by the Exacto blade next to it:





All we have to do is add some 50kg's of nose weight to this before we can close it up. Shouldn't be too long if I can recover quickly enough.


That's all that's happening in the Hangar for now. We'll bypass the Shipyards as they've been dormant for a bit and move on to the Motor Pool...




Here in the Motor Pool, we started a little Ford Model A car in 1/72 scale from Zebrano. It's a cool little car that started well:





I can't wait to start the little Stakebed truck I got and place it next to this!


Moving on, we found another Shelf Queen languishing in this back bay since 2015. It had been started for a "Modern Armor Group Build" on a Forum I left long ago, and while cleaning out the Motor Pool, we found it back here. Wheels were missing from it, and idler had broken off, but it was overall intact. It was time to start moving forward on this.





First of all, this is my Swedish Leopard 2A6, and here is what it looked like once the wheels were all glued back on. It is a Revell kit and was quite brittle after all this time. So, to preserve the wheels as much as possible, we took the one run of track and glued it to the bottom of the main roadwheels and then to the idler and drive sprockets to hold everything together:





The tracks don't wrap up far enough on either side, but it is enough to at least keep everything together. We can add more tracks later to close things up. You can also see we started the second of the three color splinter camouflage.



Later, the third color got applied. It was a mix with a gloss green to try and get the closest match to a field green I could so once I gloss this, decal it, and then flat coat it; everything should blend:





Another couple steps and another long term Shelf Queen will be off the Shelf of Doom....


Finally, I decided we should tackle the Armory ZSU-23-4 Shilka. Now you'll see why I am reluctant to get more Armory Shilka variants.


First, the four lower hull parts were glued together. Looks simple right? There was an interesting amount of shaving that was needed to make these parts fit this way, as the flash was so misleading:





And now for the craziness to begin. I shot all the first four steps of the lower hull assembly so you can see how much was needed to do even before adding the torsion bars for the roadwheels! The hull should show you how tiny these parts were too:





That pic above shows steps one, two and three for the lower hull. Next I thought we could start on the upper hull. Again, six parts to build this before getting to the hatches and engine deck details. It's obvious Armory does not have slide mold tech. I understand it is expensive for many smaller companies, but it shouldn't be too hard to simplify things a bit to make this fun. I don't mind detail parts but to break things down for the sake of adding to the parts count, is not cool. It did go together a bit better than the lower hull:





I decided to test fit the upper and lower hulls; as you can see from the inside, they will need a bit of finagling to sit right:





One other critique on this kit: there are no numbers and letters stamped on the sprue. One has to follow the sprue map on the instruction sheet:





That makes thing tough when you have to keep flipping back and fourth to find where the part is on what sprue. Once more larger parts start getting used, finding parts like this will be even more difficult to find, thus complicating this build even more. I've dealt with worse, so yes, this will get finished.


Well, that completes this short tour of Maddog Manufacturing again. Thank you to all who have joined this latest tour. Comments are always welcome.come.

[WardWorks]

The Academy Spitfire XIV has one fault, its fuselage is too wide by far, park it next to any other Spitfire kit and it looks very overfed, Its a Griffon engined Spitfire, the nose should be slightly wider, (by the width of the "eyebrows" over the exhaust stacks, but they were not anywhere near as prominent as Academy has moulded them) but nowhere near as wide as Academy have done it, In any case, the fuselage from the firewall back did not change in width, Sword and a couple of other Manufacturers (even the old Frog kit, which they paired with a V-1 was more accurate than the Academy one, even though it pre-dates the Academy by at least 15 years !) all have done very nice kits of the XIV, I know, I've built most of them (unabashed Spitfire fan that I am) 🤓 (The V-1 with the Frog kit was abysmal and cartoon-like, as was the one in the old Frog (then Matchbox and now Revell) Arado 234 kit, all of which use the Frog kit's moulds.

Re the Shilka instructions, I've always dealt with parts maps, (particularly in Ace kits with their microscopic parts numbers in the instructions), by scanning and printing them with a 23-50% enlargement, so you have a seperate parts map to work from and do not have to bend/fold/spindle/destroy the instruction sheet many times to find where the next part(s) are lurking on the sprues - simples really.

By the by, you have built at least 2 Shilka chassis recently, you'll find them under the SA-6 Triple missile launcher and possibly the other Trumpy missile tank with the pair of fat missiles aboard, the SA-6 triple is on the same chassis - in 35th, the Dragon Shilka chassis could be built from the Trumpy SA-6 chassis instructions, the two kits seem to share common chassis assembly instructions (I've built both).. I think the Armoury Shilka is a re-pop of the old Ace jobby, from way back when, that's what I thought immediately somebody handed me the Armory kit for a shufti. Were I still interested in 72nd, I'd be biding my time, patiently waiting for Zvezda to release their 72nd Shilka kit (its supposedly on imminant release, may even be out by now in your neck of the woods) 

For the rest, its all looking good, bar for the e-boat's stern, those things were one piece plywood efforts, there was no big join line up the middle of their sterns, give it a sand and a fill (if necessary), and all will be well I'm sure

Best
Gomez 😉🙃

[JCON]

Excellent point on the instructions Gomez! I'll have to do that on those very detailed armor kits I have!

Line up looks good Mark once I got them all loaded... took a few tries... internet is spotty here in the mountains. I'm looking into changing companies.

[BUCKY]

It's amazing the amount of work coming from your workbench! Keep it up, dude!

[WardWorks]

Good point about connection speed Joe...

The tyranny of distance is alive and well out here in Oz - took about 20 minutes for all the photos in Mark's last post to finally show out here...

That's what I meant in a previous post when I said Mark didn't need to post photos of every little part added to what he's working on - we do believe him about that !

Best
Gomez 😉🙃

[Dukemaddog]

Gomez, thank you ever so much for the fantastic information. I never really knew that about the Spits as I always get confused when trying to differentiate the different marks even today. They were gifts from a friend thrown in on a sale of a Dremel speed control; I never expected them. I'm just going to get them completed and sitting on the shelf.

I never knew ACE made the Shilka; at least I never saw them in my search for them. I certainly love building ACE kits, as shown my the latest scores I purchased. I will muddle through this and if Zvezda does release one in a different variant in 1/72 scale, I will get it and build it. They already have one released in 1/100 scale and that is far too small.

Thanks for the pointers on the E-boat stern, I hadn't noticed. Easy fix. I am especially pleased with the suggestion to copy the parts map. Gonna do that right away.


Thank you Joe. I do hope things work out for you.

Thank you Bucky! Consider this a small update too! Stay tuned!