The weekend of March 1st and 2nd, 2008

I've had a busy weekend, but still found time to construct this model from the Japanese animated film 'The Castle in the Sky.' A film that I can highly recommend.

The model is stated as being 1/350th, but doors and walkways look to be closer to 1/300th scale and therefore will fit in with my scratch built Aeronefs.

The model was bought at the IPMS Show in Telford late last year - I think it cost 10.00 UK pounds (which I thought was rather expensive for a model that is only 11 cms long!)

As an aside I would recommend the show to all modellers - a great day out and loads of bargains to be had.

Called Tiger Moth - the airship is the main transport of air-pirates and plays a very important part in the film.
The kit was very difficult to put together, as none of the mounting pins would line up and the fine detail had a lot of flash. In addition the plastic was very brittle and the sprues overly thick.
The model needed a lot of cleaning up and filling, which was in the main done with white PVA glue, the only exception was where the main envelope joined the gondola (see the grey Humbrol filler).

I made two alterations, the first was to do away with the propellers as I will model them with clear plastic discs and the second was that I reduced the wing span by two segments or 10mm per wing, I thought the model looked strange with such a wide wing, now I wish I had only taken out one segment per wing!

I will post more photos as work continues.

My second project was as a result of a post on TMP, see; http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=133439

I constructed my mines to the scale of 1/300th - the mine is an 8mm faceted bead, with prongs from plastic rod and a flag added to the top. I had assumed that the mines woould be painted a bright colour - red being an obvious choice as I can remember seeing a mine at Mumbles Pier, Swansea, South Wales that was used as a collection point for the RNLI.

The only problem with this is that I game on Mars and the red terrain would make the mine all-but-invisible! Therefore I added a yellow flag!

The mine is mounted on an 80mm rod attached to a 40mm base. I would expect to model between 6 and 10 to act as a mine field.

Tony