Welcome to the first tour of Maddog Manufacturing in October. We've got a short one here, but some good progress has been made. Without further ado, let's board the trams and be on our way!
First stop is the Hangar, where a couple Russian aircraft were worked on. The first bay here has the Yak 28 nose cone assembled. I'm not even gonna try to make that center seam disappear; I just don't see how it will happen on this short-run kit:
While that was drying, we started another Russian aircraft, the An-2 Colt. First up, the cockpit:
I actually got to sit in one of these cockpits back about a year ago. Amazing!
In this last bay, the Japanese Jake got the pilots painted and the canopy installed:
Now to add decals and this bird is close to done.
That concludes the Hangar part of the tour, now on to the Shipyards....
In this first slipway, I found a long-time shelf queen and decided it was time to move forward on it. Some of the extra details were added, and preparations were started for the 37mm gun tie-downs:
In the next slipway, we laid the keel for the French battleship Jean Bart in it's 1955 fit:
Followed later by the main superstructure assemblies being built. Here they are dry-fit to the main hull:
Finally, another shelf queen was worked on. In this last slipway, the German carrier Peter Strasser got some work done, starting with some photo-etch underneath the rear flight deck:
While we were working with photo-etch, the Island stack got the grid added on top:
While that was all drying, the boats and davits and other details were added along the sides of the carrier. These pics aren't the best as my camera didn't want to focus on anything I wanted to show:
Later the whole thing was finally cemented together. I just need to touch up some paint and add a few more detail parts and she'll be ready for her shakedown cruise:
That completes the Shipyard portion of this tour, now on to the Motor Pool....
As most of the vehicles are already done; we only have the last two vehicles under construction to achieve my next Milestone. In the first bay, we have the Japanese Rosenbauer Panther 6x6 Fire Tender. The basic chassis was started first:
Later the base part of the main cabins was added to the chassis:
Then we started work on the driver's cab interior. The red blobs are fire crew that will be painted later:
In the next bay is the US Army C-911 HET tank transporter. As before, most of the chassis and suspension were built:
This was later finished and the upper parts were added to the main chassis:
The cab was then started:
Later I dry-fit the cab on the chassis to see how it fit. I was pleasantly surprised:
Finally, the trailer was started as well:
And that is as far as I got on all these. This concludes our short tour; thank you all for coming in and as always, comments are welcome!
