Pinewood Derby Car

The completed car:

Update on Life

Last week, I got that bile duct stone removed. My recovery was a little slower than I expected but I did get to work on some stuff including the SA-2 missile battery that I posted previously. But so far, so good.

Besides the missiles, my main project has been to help my son finish his pinewood derby car for this Saturday's race. Like most projects, I get bogged down on my ambitions. Adding to this has been my recovery from the surgery. By about 3:00 in the afternoon, I have been hitting a wall have little energy to do anything. Originally, I had plans to be mostly finished with the car last weekend, but Friday and Saturday was pretty much a bust. I think I was in bed by 7:00 last Friday. But if all goes well, we should be done tonight. Here is a work in progress picture.

The boy painted it. As you can see, it wasn't the neatest job, so I touched it up. When its done, there will be a driver in the form of a LEGO Star Wars minifigure. The holes behind the cockpit is to put lead weights in. 

Primerpalooza

Many a mini were primed last night

After feeling victorious in the battle to glue the SA-2 missiles to their bases, I primed them and a whole bunch of 15 mm figures using Vallejo's brush on primer. It seems to work just as well as Mr. Surfacer's primer and I don't have to deal with nasty fumes from the lacquer thinner. Up to this point, I've been just spraying the 1/600 figures directly with camo paint to save some time. But its been raining every single day for the past week or so, and spray paint and high humidity do not mix. I have figured out a few colors that are a very close approximation to the Kylon camouflage spray that I use for the Bovatopians, so I will just brush paint them instead of waiting until who-knows-when to spray paint them.

1/600 SA-2 Missiles in Progress

I am setting up the air war aspect of the invasion of Bovatopia by Lavonia, which will kick off the campaign. I have all the aircraft painted but there are a few more additions. I just got this Russian SA-2 Guideline SAM battery from Pico Armor. It includes the Fan Song and Spoon Rest radars in addition to 6 missiles with their launchers. I had a few minutes and started working on them last night. I thought it would be a quick build and I'd be showing you the painted results. Nope. 

I wasn't sure what the problem was but I could not get the missiles to glue to their launchers. I used three types of CA glue. I don't know if it was a humidity problem (its been raining in eastern Tennessee for over a week now), old glue, or the nature of the miniatures. There was almost zero surface area to glue the missiles to their launchers, plus O8 uses this very hard metal to cast its figures. I finally got three of them to stick. Here are the results:

Left side: Fan Song radar, middle: SA-2s, right side: truck for Spoon Rest radar

The Spoon Rest radar antenna is provided as a piece of clear plastic with the antenna itself printed on. I have no clue what the function of the two different radar systems are, but it seems like the Spoon Rest is closely associated with the SA-2 missiles. Maybe it tracks the missiles to their targets, whereas the Spoon Rest detects the targets.