Fujimi's 1:24 Escudo 3-door hardtop.

Suzuki's Escudo is also known as the Vitara, Sidekick, and Geo/Chevy Tracker.

$22.61, free shipping from Japan, via Amazon.

Box was kind of squashed top-to-bottom, but heavily bubble-wrapped. There's plenty of space inside the box, so no damage there.

Molded in bright fire engine red; clear headlights, windows, taillights; satin silver wheels. Rubber tires. 1 small sheet of decals (Suzuki Escudo and Vitara emblems and dashboard).

Looks like an easy build. The plastic's of good quality, not soapy looking.

Very nicely molded--no flash on the body, which is bagged separately from the main parts trees.

Low parts count. All the interior detail is in the dash (radio & other controls and dials), seats, and shifters. But there's no floor or sidewall detail at all. There's a big pit behind the back seat where the fuel tank is. If there was no center console, you'd have a gaping hole over the transmission, as well.

No engine detail. The entire interior and underbody are molded in one piece with separate suspension components.

Can be built as left- or right-hand drive--just a matter of which dash you put in. Thought that was a nice touch.

About the only moving parts are the steering and wheels, which press on with little rubber bushings so the car can roll.

4/5 for lack of engine and interior detail--but only the one point off because I knew what I was getting ahead of time. A few hours with some sheet styrene and felt can take care of the lack of interior detail. Adding something like an engine compartment and opening hood would be much more ambitious than I'm prepared to be.

I do plan to paint it to match my own Tracker, inside and out. Too bad the kit's not a convertible.

Pic of the Day: Revell 1:96 Saturn V build, Part 6--Still on the S-IC

Calling this "Part 6," though I haven't been diligent in numbering all the previous Revell Saturn V posts. Sorry. Just go here or click on the "Saturn V" label at the end of the post to see the others.

Still working--very slowly--on the S-IC. I did make some significant progress in recent weeks after almost 2 years of leaving the thing in the box.

I wrote about the big, ugly gaps along the edge of the two wraps forming the O2 and kerosene tanks back in August. Did something about them shortly after that.

First thing was to cut the systems tunnels (the big "pipes" along the sides of the stage). I was going to remove all four of the kit pieces, but realized that the lower halves looked fine. The wrap for the kerosene tank (the lower "half" of the stage) didn't look nearly as bad as the upper one did. I left it alone.

It took some careful work with a straight/chisel X-Acto blade to cut the pins holding the two upper halves. The stage is pretty big and bulky and I didn't want to cut into the wraps, but everything went smoothly.

Once I had the O2 tank wrap exposed, I got to work cutting the overlapping end away. This amounts to a 1/4"-wide strip, as seen above. Then I ran some liquid model cement under the new edge of the wrap and held it with my fingers until it set, working a little at a time. There's still an overlap, but at least it will be covered by the upper half of the systems tunnel when it's glued on.

Here, the upper ends of both systems tunnels have been glued and clamped. No more gap at the midpoint.

There's still a gap under one of the tunnels along the length of the kerosene tank wrap. I'm filling this in with gap-filling "Super Glue" a layer at a time.

I've yet to glue up the second and third stages, but I'll be using the lessons from this one to do them both right the first time.

Pic of the Day: A Room Full of Saturn V F-1 Rocket Engines

It never fails to amaze me how big the Rocketdyne F-1 is, or how complex they are. Here we've got several in various stages of construction:
--a pair of thrust chambers to the right waiting for their plumbing followed by several more that have been plumbed. It looks like the last one in line has a red shipping cover like the last one on the left.

--the first on the left is getting something welded (pretty neat that the guy's head is mostly clear, but his welding mask is blurred as if he was shot in the act of flipping it). From the looks of some of the other engines, I think he's welding those rectangular tabs onto the "hat bands." These have threaded studs on them for later attachment of insulation blankets to protect the engines from each others' exhaust plumes during launch and flight.

--the last on the left looks like it's being shipped out; it's on a cart and has a shipping cover, but I wonder where the interface panel on top is?

If you zoom in on the closer ones, you can see the tubing that forms the bell-shaped thrust chamber. There are 178 of the larger ("primary") tubes forming the top end and 356 smaller ("secondary") tubes forming the lower end, all brazed together and reinforced by "hat bands". Each primary is brazed to a pair of secondaries. Kerosene fuel is directed to the "down" primaries and their associated secondaries and flows all the way to the bottom, collecting heat as it goes. The hot fuel is redirected upward through the "up" tubes and into the engine injectors to be burned. This "regenerative cooling" keeps the thrust chamber from melting.

There's an extensive tech writeup on the thrust chambers' construction here, at Heroic Relics.

Each one of these monsters burned my car's weight in kerosene and liquid oxygen every SECOND. Just one engine put out some 1.5 million pounds of thrust--more than 1-1/2 times the total thrust of all five of the dinky J-2 engines on the Saturn V's second stage.

Some trivia:
Weight 18,500 pounds dry
Height 19 feet
Diameter 12.3 feet
98 production engines
82 development engines
7 serialized mockups
1 shop-floor engineering model
65 engines flown on 13 Saturn V missions
Most of the R&D engines were destroyed in testing
37 engines remain as museum displays or whatever; MSFC disassembled at least one F-1 in 2011 to study for possible restart of F-1 builds (or derivative engines) for the new Space Launch System.

--

As a tie-in for the Revell 1:96 Saturn V project, the kit's engines have some sketchy outside detail, but nothing inside the bells. Granted, you're not really expected to pick the model up to look in the engines, since it's supposed to be displayed standing vertically. The engines aren't correct, anyway, since they're covered in insulation blankets before the rocket's rolled out to the launch pad (good picture of the blanket here, at Up-Ship's Unwanted Blog. RealSpace Models sells a set of properly blanketed F-1's for about $30.

I'm not planning on doing any superdetailing on my Saturn at the moment. I'll be content with cleaning up the existing engines and using different shades of silver to make them look...well, better than this:

Lazy astronaut dude wouldn't stand up. Had to discipline him.

Pic of the Day: NASA's badass Saturn V S-IC

This is a time-lapse shot of one of the Saturn V first stages being put together at the Michoud Assembly Facility just outside of New Orleans. I found it at Heroicrelics. He's got a much larger scan of it there.

Boeing's full-scale item has much better detail than my Revell 1/96 kit...

...but then theirs cost a lot more and was made of stronger stuff.

I haven't done anything with mine since December of 2011, when I scribbled my last review of the kit. In the past few weeks, I pulled the model out, looked it over and decided that I can work with it.

I'm still not thrilled with Revell's design decisions, where each of the three stages are made of solid styrene end-caps joined by rolled-up styrene sheets. There's an ugly, very visible overlap, especially on the upper half (click on the picture and look along the left side). I didn't use enough clothespins to clamp the thing together.

The other big issue is that the "systems tunnel" (the long pipelike structure on the left, used to clamp the rolled-up sheets into a cylinder) is in two pieces, which don't meet in the middle. There's another such tunnel 180 degrees around on the stage. At this scale, that's a one-foot gap in each of them.

Time for some surgery. I'm going to cut both systems tunnels off, glue them up separately, and re-install them after trimming the excess sheeting off. Hopefully the sheets don't just tear themselves loose when the pipes are removed.

This should be a lot simpler than the approach I was going to use when I first saw how jacked up the thing was. I was going to throw some plastic filler in the gaps and try to sand things smooth.

I'm playing it smarter with the remaining two stages. I'm going to roll the sheet sections up and put them into hot water so they'll stay rolled, then glue them up a little at a time to their end-caps and trim off any overlap. Since each stage has at least one systems tunnel intended to clamp things together, I'll arrange the sheet so that the tunnel covers the seams.

Pre-repair pics of the stage are here.

Pic of the Day: Revell's Crappy S-IC

It's been a week since I got bored and glued up the first stage of Revell's 1:96 Saturn V moon rocket.

I haven't done anything with it since--but this is it, the ugly truth of 4 hours' work. I'll be upping full-res copies of this and the other pics to my Flickr account soon--I just wanted to throw this up as a "before" shot.

I really like how--with even a little backlight--you can see the markings on the inside-out rolled-sheet sections; I hope that a little primer and proper paint will fix that.

UPDATE: The pics are up.

Kit Review: Revell 1:96 Apollo-Saturn V Part 2--build diary, First Stage

A little more than a year ago, I published a review of this kit based on initial impressions. I didn't do much more than some minor pre-assembly--the first- and second-stage engines, LES tower, and other small stuff.

Tonight, in a fit of boredom, I finally opened the dusty box and pulled out the pieces of the rocket's first stage (the S-IC).

The S-IC consists of three solid "rings" (the structural skirts that formed the two ends and the middle of the stage) and two styrene sheets for the main assembly, a flat plate for the bottom, the four conical engine fairings and their fins, and four half-round pieces that hold the rolled-up styrene sheets.

Given the color mismatch between the sheets and the ring sections they join, I decided to roll them inside-out, shoot a thin coat of primer on the outside, and paint the entire rocket a single shade of white.

I am not impressed with the fit of the sheets, though. I made the mistake of rolling and gluing up the lower piece without test-fitting; the holes punched into both sheets made the rolled pieces too small to fit properly. I opened up the holes on the second sheet just enough to get it to fit.

Both sheets are rolled into cylinders and "pinned" together by half-round "pipes" that run nearly the full length of the stage. When I got the upper half of the stage rolled and tried a test-fit (learned my lesson!), I found that neither of the pipes' upper ends join the lower ends properly (a gap of about 19" across on this scale!). There are also sizable gaps along the length of both rolled-up sheets where the "pipes" hold them in place and around the edges where they're cemented to the "ring" sections. Even with careful assembly, it looks horrible.

The engine fairings are just glued on across the corrugations (stringers) of the bottom ring (the rear skirt) with no effort at molding them to the structure. The real fairings were notched over the stringers where they mounted to the skirt's skin. Time to break out the gap-filling Super Glue.

The fairings and the baseplate have molded-in blocky details that aren't seen on the real ship. I'm just going to leave them alone, since there's enough other work to be done just spackling over the gaps around those rolled sheets.

On its display stand, it stands slightly more than 18" tall. It took about 4 hours to get the first stage assembled to this point--no engines or other small details--and now there's the promise of several hours' worth of filling, sanding and prep before shooting paint.

For the $115 cost of this thing, it would have been nice if Revell had made an effort at producing a better kit.

Given the looks of this first major section of the kit, I might have saved myself a lot of effort by buying the detailing kits I mentioned in Part 1 and scratchbuilding the rest of the thing, buying Apogee's 1:70 scale flying monster for about $300, or even going for the Estes 1:100 flying model for $60.

Revell's offering isn't completely hopeless, though. Author 4D posted details of his own build-up in the Airfix Tribute Forum. The level of detail on his Lunar Module alone makes it worth clicking the link.

Kit Review: Space: 1999 Eagle 1 Transporter

I have wanted one of these since the late 70's, when I spotted one on a store shelf. I was about 10, on an allowance, short a few bucks...I got the Hawk fighter from the same show instead. I never saw another Eagle kit anywhere, other than an assembled one on display in a little toy & hobby shop in the mall.

I coveted that model until that store closed up, still hoping to find a kit, going by to "visit" it, studying details and then going home and trying to draw what I'd seen as a set of plans, the closest thing I had to having an Eagle.

Once I had internet access, I found a site detailing the restoration of one of the original 44" miniatures from the show. A bit more digging turned up a guy who made CGI models of the ships, which he put into vignettes of his own. I wasn't up for scratchbuilding one of my own, couldn't pick up a CGI model or put it on a shelf, and still didn't have an Eagle.

I finally found one at John's Models, a little shop north of town [I don't normally use real names in the Blog, but he deserves a nod for his shop; dude's got EVERYthing!]. I was originally going after the Revell 1:96 Saturn V kit.

But then I saw The Eagle.

New MPC/Fundimensions kit (1975). In box (a little sun-faded, no shrinkwrap). In bag. Instructions and decal sheet intact.

Sixty bucks. Six-zero. Ouch.

I knew it was a rare bird already, and I knew the mighty Saturn could wait a few more weeks. I took the $60 hit, then went looking on eBay to see whether I'd messed up. Nope! A new-in-box, in-bag kit (unassembled) was listed for about the same amount--but a new-in-box shrinkwrapped kit was running around $120.00! I'm afraid to assemble the thing, now. Opening the bag knocks the price down to $20 or so.

Everything's molded in white. There aren't many pieces, and the level of detail is disappointing, if typical for a mid-70's MPC kit. If you peek over at the 44" miniature you'll see an intricate space-frame forming the spine, forward and aft sections. The kit's got the trussed spine section, but only molded-in framing on the other two sections. The remainder of the ship is somewhat better, with basic geometric shapes instead of fine detail.

There's little molding flash on any of the parts and the plastic is of good quality (not soapy), but what detail there is isn't sharply defined. It's not an impressive "hero" version of the famous Eagle, but the 10-year-old me would have loved it. He just wouldn't have had the $60 in his allowance to get this one, either.

This one's staying on my shelf, in its expensive bag.

Kit Review: Revell 1:96 Apollo-Saturn V

This beast set me back $115 a couple of years ago. It's easier to store than the real thing, but a four-and-a-half-foot plastic model lacks the towering scare-the-neighbors quality of a 365-foot-tall rocket stack.

Even at 1:96 the size, this is a big model, standing around 4 feet. It was originally produced in the 1960's, with re-issues by Revell Germany from time to time. Mine is boxed for 1994, the 25th Anniversary of Apollo 11. Kind of sad if it sat in various warehouses before I bought it in 2007. Even the dust is historic.

The kit's primarily molded in white; some parts that are supposed to have a "natural metal" finish (the Command Module, Service Module, and Lunar Module) are done in a dark silver-gray. There are four styrene sheets that get rolled into cylinders to form sections of each of the three booster stages; these come pre-printed with roll patterns, flags, and "USA" or "United States" insignia. Two packs of "Bare-Metal" foil are included to get the proper natural-metal finish on some of those silver-gray parts.

Assembly is easy, with a small amount of easily-trimmed flash on some pieces. You'll need to do some careful filing and trimming on the join-lines on all of the rocket engines, the Lunar Module, and the Service Module. Because of that silver-gray plastic, the joins are especially visible on the latter. Detail is reasonable for an entry-level off-the-shelf kit.

The three booster stages--the S-IC, S-II, and S-IVB--are each built up by rolling a styrene sheet, pinning the edges between parts that simulate external pipes, then cementing endcaps to each open end. The first stage uses two such sheets and three "caps." The second and third each use one sheet and two caps. Detail and fit are good, but those styrene sheets seem flimsy and thin. If you're not looking to super-detail the kit (just assembling it straight from the box), paint the inside surfaces of the sheets and the end-caps black to keep any back-lighting from showing through. I'd prefer that the exterior markings and insignia had been done as decals so that the whole thing can be painted the same color, but I'm lazy enough these days that I'd rather just put the thing together with the least amount of fuss and financial outlay.

One big howler common to most of the Saturn V models on the market: the black bands of the S-IC roll pattern extend halfway up the length of the stage. This was only seen on the 500F Facilities Integration Vehicle, not any of the actual flight ships (Apollo 4's first stage did have them originally, but most of the black was painted over).

The Command Module is too detailed if you're building the kit in "launch" configuration; the actual CM has a protective cover over it which is jettisoned a few minutes after the rocket has left the pad. Revell's CM doesn't have the cover. Fortunately, The Google can find aftermarket detail sets that will help make the beast more accurate. There's a detailed description of what's in the resin-and-etched-brass detail kit at Ninfinger Productions.

Another issue is that the Command and Service Modules are Block I items. Think of them as working prototypes not intended for manned operation. The correct Block II items are significantly different.

If you're really serious about detailing, you could end up replacing most of the Revell kit with aftermarket pieces. It'd make more sense to just buy the detailing kits and scratchbuild the rest. Either way, a visit to Rick Sternbach's Saturn V Clinic will give you more than enough to do.

If you want one that flies, you could scratchbuild a 25-foot beast like the Arizona Rocketry Team's 1/16 rocket (shots of the Command Module being built here) or shell out $450 for an EMMR 1/48 scale flying rocket kit that'll take up less room than theirs but still be twice as large as Revell's. And it'll fly. Did I mention that it flies?

Overall, the Revell model isn't a bad kit. It'll take up lots of room on your workbench, require plenty of rubber bands, clothespins, cement, paint, filing, filling, and all the other tools and skills you need for a model--just more of it.

Just don't detail it the same way whomever built the kit on display at Pensacola's National Museum of Naval Aviation; theirs is the same 1/96 kit with a sloppy white paint job (done with a house brush?) and a bright red escape tower (also sloppily painted). It really looks bad, especially given their modest space display that includes the Command Module from Skylab 2 and a moon buggy.

Pro: Impressively big; easily assembled; pre-printed styrene sheets simulate the original's black & white roll patterns; better detail than the smaller 1:144-scale model.

Con: Expensive; the solid pieces and the styrene sheets aren't the same shade of white; poor mating between some significant parts, leading to lots of time prettying it up; big footprint (you're gonna need a bigger desk); first-stage roll pattern matches the 500F; poor detailing or incorrect detailing on significant parts of the stack; no decals for camera targets, fin or stage markings.

Kit Review: "Back to the Future" DeLorean (Aoshima)

Rating: 5/5
Scale: 1:24
Purchased: April, 1994
Assembled: April, 1994

I bought this kit hoping that it would include the option of NOT building the "Back to the Future" version of the car. All I wanted was a straight-stock DeLorean. No such luck. Still, Aoshima's kit is impressive.

I'm not familiar with Aoshima as a company, but if their other kits are as well-done as this one, I won't mind throwing them some money. The BTTF Delorean has excellent detail for the most part, something I associate with more familiar Japanese companies like Tamaya.

The car can be built with the original fission reactor (as first seen), the hooked pole, or the "Mr. Fusion" setup. There's a slide lever under the completed model for moving the wheels up and down for rolling or flying modes.

The interior's good, with many of the time machine gadgets rendered as decals, but some scratchbuilding for added detail wouldn't hurt. There's even a tiny wind-up-style alarm clock. I don't like the molded-in cables running across the dash; they're very hard to paint properly.

The outside is beautiful, though again there are molded-in cables running from back to front along the sides. Painting them is even more of a hassle than those of the interior, given the need to paint the body with a "metalizer" paint to get the proper stainless steel finish. Once that's on there, doing spray-can touch-ups is a bitch.

Around back in the time machine parts, most of the pipes and hoses are molded separately and are reasonably scale-like. Good detail on the bits & pieces. Underneath, though, there's a lack of belly detail, the wheels don't align well in "drive" mode, and the mechanism that rotates the tires down into "flight" mode is clunky.

I was impatient when I built mine. I did well on the stainless steel painting and buffing, but I'm embarrassed by the brush strokes and uneven paint on the nose and tail caps (gray on the actual car) and satin-black body details. I recently took the thing completely apart with an eye toward rebuilding with much better paint and detail. All I have to do now is put it back together.

Pros: It's a DeLorean!; faithfully detailed, for the most part; several options--"original" or "Mr. Fusion" reactor, cable hook.

Cons: Gray body finish has to be painted to look like stainless steel; cables and parts molded as part of the body; no "stock car only" option; clunky "flight mode" mechanism; poor belly detail.

Kit review: Bond. James Bond.

I've mentioned my friend the movie freak a few times; he's a James Bond fan, so this year for his birthday I hunted down and found a 1999 re-issue of the '63 Polar Lights James Bond model kit.

Polar Lights made tons of pop-culture, movie and TV-related kits, such as Dick Tracy, the Beatles (Yellow Submarine era), Sean Connery's James Bond, Dracula, and the Munsters' living room.

The kit's pieces were well-detailed, but the sprue "trees" are a bit thick. It's very easy to cut too close to a part and damage it, which makes for more work later on. Assembly went quickly. None of the parts were warped and needed only minimal cleanup, but I did need to hit the seams with a file to smooth them out.

I hit all the major subassemblies with primer--and that was probably a mistake, since I used filler primer. It went on heavy and helped to obscure some small details.

My next mistake was in painting; it's been several years since my last model and I had some issues with my several-years-old flat paints coming out glossy (especially the Humbrol "flesh tone," which made Bond look like old wood). It took days for the Testors flats to dry out.

Don't use cheap brushes! I kept having to pick bristles out of fresh paint.

The instructions called for the model base to be painted green and the dead tree was to be brown. Very realistic. I left it all primer-gray, then dry-brushed with flat black, brown, tan, green, and olive drab to pick up details. Then I laid down some Woodland Scenics turf in patches.