Miniart 1/35 T-55

It's been a pretty quiet month modelling-wise as I've had to do some DIY due to a new fire being fitted in the front room plus the Miniart T-55 has been taking up all of my spare time, along with doing five kit reviews for Model Military Int'l magazine.
The build of the T-55 is virtually finished, all I have to do is fit the tracks, photograph it, do the write-up then you can all read about it on The Modelling News at some point. You can find the in-box review here;

http://www.themodellingnews.com/2018/01/in-boxed-135th-scale-t-55a-early-mod.html#more

So here it is at the moment, once the build is done it will go to the back of the queue for painting as I need to shift a couple of other projects along such as the E-75 tank destroyer and the Takom Leopard C2;

Although the links have four sprue connections they weren't that bad to remove from the sprue due to the soft plastic, however care needs to be taken cleaning them up as it is very easy to bend the ends of them.

The things you find when you tidy up

I was sorting some crap out in the loft and re-arranging the stash of kits and built up models when I found a Revell 1/32 Fw 190D that I had finished a few years ago.
It wasn't in too bad a condition considering (I store the built models in clear plastic storage boxes) apart from the wing mounted pitot tube being bent and the tailwheel had fell off. Rather than bin it I've decided to use it as a test bed for some weathering techniques I have recently learned from these two rather excellent books;

Old models are ideal for this rather than experimenting on your latest and greatest so we'll see what I can come up with. Here's the model at the moment;

One thing that DEFINITELY needs doing is the prop as I used a silver pencil to replicate chips and scratches on it, unfortunately sometime after finishing the model I learned that the props on 109D's were wooden.....duh....
The actual kit was first issued by Hasegawa and when I first looked at the kit it was expensive back then, however Revell re-boxed it under their name, included the later squared-off tail unit and charged substantially less for it :o)

Airfix 1/48 P-51D Mustang

The tail section was glued into place, filled with Mr Surfacer (1000 grade) and cleaned up using fine grade wet and dry and paper then a ladies nail buffer. It was VERY important to polish the plastic due to the natural metal finish I had planned so nail buffers are an essential piece of kit. Overall the fit wasn't THAT bad really and any gaps fell along natural panel lines which helps;

The fit of the main wings was a little tricky as the mating surfaces are very narrow. I had glued the areas inside where the upper and lower wings touch so I split them again to see if that helped with the fit (it did somewhat) but it all came together when fitting the lower cowling and wing section.
I used masking tape to hold it all together and ran a length from wingtip to wingtip to keep the dihedral and to help with the wing joints, which look very good actually and may not need filling.

What WILL need filling are the inserts on the leading edges for the machine guns as there are some considerable gaps;

Again care will be needed as the model will have a natural metal finish so any scratches will need to be buffed out otherwise they will show up massively.
After the experiences with the wing roots of the Hurricane it's nice to have a good fit of parts in this area and I have to say I'm quite impressed with this Airfix kit so far.