11.17.04 » The Story...

"Twenty minutes until commencement of operation! Twenty minutes until commencement of operation!" boomed the voice over the carrier's intercom. The flight deck personnel hurried around the bay, performing their pre-flight checks and assisting the pilots with boarding their craft.

In moments, several squadrons of Fliege and Kauz armors would be on their way to take out an unsuspecting Mercenary supply convoy. Meanwhile, propellant tanks needed to be filled, weapons needed to be charged, and pilots needed to be suited up. The latter was no small task as everything needed to be checked to ensure the pilot would be protected against the rigors of solo space-flight.

11.30.04 » Panzer Kampf Anzug Space Type: Fliege

Since I'm still gathering parts for my Pak Krote project, I decided to move on to the next kit. This is the Fliege from Maschinen Krieger. I wanted to do something with the larger scale figures so I'm making a small dio consisting of 2 figures and the Fliege.

The setting will be inside of a ship in zero-g. The background will be a section of the ships hull with pipes, monitors and equipment inspired by this, but not destroyed as such. The inside will be detailed similar to these images from a submarine...

The Fliege will have the red tags that say "Remove Before Flight" only in German as well. The figures will both be "floating".

By the way, "vorflugkontrolle" means "pre-flight check" in German. Thanks to Tuffskull for the translations!

I'm giving the Fliege a blue and gray "camo" for space use. Sure, black or dark gray would be better space camo, but not nearly as interesting visually. Here's the scheme with the decals I designed for it.

I'll be modifying the interior of the Fliege to look more detailed since it will be posed with an open cockpit.

The first figure will be the pilot that came with the fliege, but with a different head since I'm not big on the mustached fellow that comes with the kit. The second figure is a flight crew member which will be a modified Tamiya 1/20 pit crew figure.

11.30.2004 » In-Prog Extravaganza!

I've been slacking on creating this in-progress page, but I've been taking a lot of pics and doing a lot of work to this kit so there's a lot to see.

11.30.2004 » Recasting the Prowler Head

Since I don't want to use the mustached head of the fliege pilot, I'm going to use the goofy, but more detailed one that comes with the Prowler. I like the hat better as well.

WhiteBase posted a technique for casting with "Miliput" so I decided this would be a great way to use the Prowler head without "wasting" a good looking head that I could use again later. Plus with multiple heads, I can practice and pick the best looking one.

Basically what you do is take a glop of miliput and coat it lightly with talcum powder. You then coat the head as well. You push the face into the miliput (MP) and wait till the MP hardens. After its cured, you redust the back of the head, the hard MP and a new glop of MP and press over the top to make the other half of the mold. When the second glop is cured, remove the piece from the center.

Make sure you don't have any undercuts or else you won't be able to remove your part later.

I drilled a few holes after my first casting attempt failed (a). You can see the hole in the nose and back of the head in the mold. The second attempt worked out much better (b). You can see the "flash" on the nose and around the head compared to the original (c). I'll clean up all that later.

Once you have the molds made, you can put that extra wad of miliput to use instead of making a "rock" out of the extra. It's not as clean as resin casting, but works great for ball joints and other small extra parts you use a lot of.

11.30.2004 » Pilot Parts

Here's a shot of the pilot body. I'll be cutting and modifying it later to have a different pose. You can see where the pilot body comes in 2 halves in case you want to put it into the Fliege cockpit. Since I'm not putting the pilot into the cockpit and leaving the hatch open I'll be detailing the insides which is just an undetailed hollow space really.

The helmet is great if you're planning on placing it onto the figure which unfortunately I am not. The helmet will be held by one of the figures.

The outside seams sanded down nicely, but there's a bad seam inside of the helmet which needs dealt with. Unfortunately, my fingers are way to big to get into there with sandpaper.

My solution is "flocking". After the helmet is painted, I'll be adding flocking which gives it a fluffy fabric texture. It's used a lot in auto modeling. First though, I used thinned putty to smooth out the inside as best I can. Here's some pics.

Next I'll be adding "padding" to the inside of the helmet with miliput. More pics about this after I do it.

11.30.2004 » Feets and Legs

The feet and legs are a bit of a change from what I'm used to with MG kits. They use less polycaps and the joints are covered with a ribbed rubber tubing for detail. Here's a shot of the p-caps and tube.

The feet are in 2 halves with a piece for the sole detail. These don't fit together that great and require a lot of putty and patience.

I've been really diggin' Tamiyas extra thin cement on this kit for the seams. Basically you put the two parts together then run the water-thin cement down the seam. It melts the plastic as well as the normal cement IMO. Both have there uses however. The black circles are a reminder of where I need to putty to fill sink holes.

The hip joints are the weirdest of all. They consist of a plastic ball which is held by 2 cups in the thigh halves. At first I thought the balls would be seen so I cleaned them up and puttied them. Later I realized that they'll be covered by the ribbed tubing as well.

After reading the kit specific tips for the Fliege on Kruegers Kriger, I found that the thighs would have to be widened a bit to prevent a gap. Plus this keeps the balls from being too tight. (I sanded down the "cups" to help this a bit which ended up being a mistake since after all was done, the balls are now too loose. Ahh well... white glue will fix that.) So I glued the thighs together with a shim of really thin styrene. When the glue dried, I sliced down the excess with my blade. I also removed the details along the seams and added them back in later.

Here's a shot of the puttied and sanded down leg. Looks good, but we'll see how it looks after it's primed. Notice the "T" connector?The calves were supposed to fit over that. Well, I like to keep as much of the kit separate as possible, so I cut the "boxes" that hold the "T" so that the T could slide in and be glued after painting. The calves have since been glued and sanded.

Here's the finished Thigh pic with the details.

11.30.2004 » Body and Cockpit

The cockpit was really made to have the pilot bust in it so as a result it's very underdetailed. Which is fine since with the bust, you wouldn't see anything anyway. However, I am having an open cockpit without a figure, so I needed to add some details. You can see the lack of detail and the bust support pegs in these pics.

I had to sand down the bottom inside of the hatch to allow it to open and close properly. In the first pic, you can see how far it'd go before getting stuck.

In the second image you can see some of my added details to the cockpit. These were in my "big bag-O-resin" that I picked up at the Morgantown show for $5. Basically they're the sleeves for control levers in aircraft, but they looked like hose connectors to me so I added them inside with some "hose" made from wire. There will be more hoses coming out from the holes in the connectors later. You can also see where I cut off the connector pegs from the figure/arms. Since this will be fixed posed, I didn't need the peg holes anyway. They'll be covered with the modified shoulder padding intended for the figure bust. For those that don't know, the pilots arms would go through those holes and into the Fliege's arms.

The hatch had a pretty good sized sink hole on the front. I applied Tamiya putty with a q-tip and sanded it smooth. Still needs a little pin-hole fixed, but looks good.

So in the cockpit, the pilots legs would go into the legs of the Fliege. The cockpit however is just a hole at the bottom. I wanted to make the leg holes, or at least an approximation of the leg holes, so I pulled melted styrene sheet over 2 exacto handles to make the leg holes area.

Inside the cockpit I used a bent piece of styrene to first cover the leg joint connectors. Then I glued in the leg "cups". After the glue dried, I used miliput and "blended" the leg hole cups into the rest of the cockpit and covered a few seams as well. Aside from the head/backrest, this will all be covered with flocking to make the inside look insulated and to cover any imperfections.

Now this isn't the perfect design set-up for this type of cockpit as the pilot would be very uncomfortable, but I had to leave room for the leg support rods. It's still better than what was there though.

In the above pics, you can see where I drilled out the seatbelt holes in the seat. I'll be making seatbelts from thin styrene, just like I did with my Cloud 09's straps. Below is an image of my 2 seat belt buckles so far. They still need some shaping. I still need to make the other end of the buckles for the front of the Fliege's cockpit as well.

12.02.2004 » Body, Arms and Booster Guards

Here's more shots of the body as of yesterday. The sensors have been glued onto the front and the panel lines on the hatches have been rescribed and molds redrilled.

Here's a shot of the arms. The hand is from a 1/60 scale Patlabor kit. The black rubber tubes weren't working that great so instead of using them, I sculpted new ribbed covers made from miliput over the joints. The arms no longer bend, but this will be a fixed posed kit anyway.

I wanted to make some booster armors based off of what I saw on someone's Kauz kit. I wanted rounded armor pieces. I first tried bending them with my bare fingers in hot water and over a candle. Both yielded sore fingers. So after some thought, I wrapped the armor piece over some PVC pipe and taped it so that it would hold it's shape. I then rolled the PVC over a candle for a bit. After removing the tape and armor, the shape held and had a perfect roundness to it.

Afterwards, I glued some bent styrene strips and rivets to it for detail and to connect it to the mech.

Here's some shots of it sticky-tacked to the hull.

12.08.2004 » Crewman

My Tamiya 1/20 Pit Crew set arrived the other day and I got started on the crewman for my dio. Luckily there was one figure in pants as the rest were wearing shorts. I used his legs, another figures torso, and arms from two other figures to make this guy in the zero-G pose I wanted. I used sticky-tack to test poses out with the various limbs till I found one that I liked. I used my exacto to scrape off all of the flash and needle files to get into the recesses.

Once the flash was cleaned up a bit, I glued the figure together. The last 3 images show where I'll need to putty and reshape to blend the misc limbs to this body. The blue lines are where I was testing out my new seams for the shirt.

12.08.2004 » Pilot

The pilot is taking quite a bit of work to repose. I need him to be in a floating position as well. His pose can remain somewhat stiff though as he is in a bulky space suit. To repose him, I wanted to bend one of his legs and reposition an arm so that the hand can rest on the Fliege. That hand will be where he is connected to be in the floating pose. Same for the crewman.

The first images show the leg mods so far. First I hacked off the leg at the knee. Then I cut a taper in the lower leg so that I can bend it.. (image 2) I added a bit of styrene tube into the leg cavity to extend the leg a bit since I had to remove some for bend. Next I'll use some Miliput to fill in and shape the knee.

For the arms, both were in the "hands on hips" position. O cut the left arm in half and rotated it so that the lower arm was pointing outward. This way, I can add the hand in an up position so that he looks like he's resting his hand on the Fliege while floating.

12.08.2004 » Hull

I got to start the backdrop of the hull as well. This was made from .06 inch styrene heat-bent over a very hot pasta pot. I-beams were added to support the thinner sheet of styrene that will be the inner hull and will stick out for visual interest. A panel line was scribed in the outside and sidewalk scribed styrene sheet was added to simulate ceramic heat resistant tiles.

For the rivets, I took a tip from the StarShip Modeler forums and used straight pins that were cut short. These were put into pin-viced holes and CA glued.

The hull is attached to the wooden base using brass rod and tubing.

12.17.2004 » Figure Mods & TV

Since my last update, I carved up the excess on the crewman and used miliput to fill in gaps and reshape a bit. The images below are of the dried and unsanded miliput. I've since sanded them down and reshaped them a but with files and sandpaper. I have also applied a coat of tamiya putty and will take more pics when that is dried and sanded.

Here's the pilots leg. You can see where I added the miliput around the styrene tube to bulk it up. Next is more shaping and putty.

For inside of the hull, I'm adding a TV monitor. I'll be lighting this up with some LEDs. It's made from styrene and a clear plastic sprue "box" that was protecting a patlabor lens. The screen will be frosted acetate with a printed transparency over it for the monitor interface.

12.17.2004 » Pilot Ready to Prime / Hull

The pilot is just about ready for priming. I have a few little dots of putty left to sand, then I can prime and see if there.s anything major that needs fixed. You can see in the photos the details I changed/added to the pilot suit. Originally on the chest there was some shallow details. Not sure what it was exactly. I used some miliput and extra parts from an M-8 and made it into some ventilation equipment and a air hose connector. Mode detailes were added where they were shallow on the waist and the back. Treads were added to the bottoms of the boots.

I also started detailing the inside of the hull. I made a cabinet from scraps of styrene, and a rise on the floor which will contain lighting. The cabinet will hold batteries. I'm still working on the doors.

The detail on the wall is clapboard siding shaped styrene on the lower portion and to change the texture a bit, IDE cable on the top. Pipes, tubes, and misc greebles from my $5 bag-O-resin will be added. The floor is 1/48 scale diamond plate embossed styrene. The 1/20 was WAY too big. The 1/48 looks far more realistic.

12.22.2004 » More Hull Detail

Here's some pics of the added hull detail so far. I'm using various sizes of brass and aluminum tubing for pipes and wires for... well wires. I'm adding some misc. stuff as well such as bed rolls, computer equipment, the tv, and eventually I'll be scratching some gagues and valve knobs for the pipes. The cabinet doors were cut from thick styrene (.06") and the edges were beveled using a power sander.

Go To Page 2