Godzilla gets an orthotic

With the weather as its been so far during my hiatus I've found myself indoors more days than I had expected; puttering around and rummaging through old kits. My old, started-but-never-finished Godzilla kit from Polar Lights I bought nearly 6 years ago in July 2019 has been on my mind lately after seeing those monster kits at BMV earlier in the spring.

He seems to have a taste - or maybe dislike? - for railway cars.

In the summer of 2019 I glued all the parts together and started in on smoothing and building up a hip joint with putty. At the time the amount of work ahead of me on this kit seemed daunting, and combined with not being sure of how to proceed I set the project aside. 

Well, at BMV I had a flashback to seeing Aurora famous monsters kits at the Painted Post Smoke Shop. I took that as a sign to finally finish the plastic beast :-)

Scrap sheet styrene orthotic glued in place and beginnings of reshaping the foot with acrylic paste.

When I left the build it had one big problem: he wouldn't stand on his feet, but leaned back and rested on his tail. I had no plan to use the stand that came with the kit for support, and I couldn't take him apart to put weight in his feet, so I had to do something else. 

After some playing around I found that sliding a plastic shim under the back of his right foot caused him to tilt forward enough to stand on his feet without support from his tail. I was quite happy and went ahead and cobbled together an orthotic from scraps of sheet styrene. Warning: I don't have a medical degree, so don't try this at home without the assistance of a licensed Godzilla medic :-)

With the orthotic installed the patient stands in the correct position for bipedal locomotion.

You can see in the above photo that he stands up quite straight without any reliance on that tail. I base coated him with white acrylic paint as I built up his joints with acrylic modelling paste. This made it easier for me to see the state of filling and figure out which areas needed more building out and shaping.

I toyed with calling the orthotic a 'horseshoe', but that sounds demeaning for a monster of his renown :-)

Up there you can see the orthotic and surrounding foot pad are almost completely shaped. I didn't spend time making the foot pad look real as my concern was getting the beast to stand. I wasn't going to be staring at the bottom of his feet, well, hopefully not :-)

The undignified scene after painting the feet.

Once I was happy with all the shaping and filling I had done on the body I applied a coat of black acrylic paint. The green acrylics were painted on top of that layer.

Coming to a theatre near you: Godzilla vs Minion.

After several sessions in the paint shop Godzilla was set free to roam around the backyard at his leisure.

After some romping I checked his orthotic. All was well. He can stand tall and proud once again after a stay at the Godzilla Orthotic Clinic.

Hiding from the smoke

I returned to the basement to find a Godzilla infestation!

I'm on a brief hiatus from my brief hiatus now that the smoke from the western wildfires has blown into town. Yesterday the air quality index here hit 10+ on a scale where 1 is good and 10 is very bad, so I'm hiding in the house for awhile. Well, more specifically, the basement.

I've installed trolley wire supports all along the Mt. Lowe track, and I'm in the process of figuring out how to install the overhead wire. Also, I'm finally painting my Polar Lights Godzilla (who is apparently in N-scale!) that I started 6 summers ago. He's almost done. While working on his teeth I noted he has surprisingly good dental work for somebody who has breathed nuclear fire and munched on railway cars as snack food for the past 70 odd years :-)

I'll have more detailed notes and updates later when all the hiatuses have passed. Until then I'll leave you with Oscar Peterson.

Coffee and Miniature Buildings and Godzilla....

... who could ask for more? Certainly not moi. I came across these at the legendary Max's Models and was not disappointed. If that one isn't enough, there's this 'making of' too:

Godzilla vs P-38 Lightning

I'm working away on the Revell P-38 kit. I suspect this isn't considered one of the best models of that airplane. Part fit is not that great, and I can see a lot of filling and filing and fitting on the horizon. You can see many issues in the photo. I'll need to make a decision about how far to go with that work.

Although it's not the greatest kit, this project is sort of a sentimental journey. The P-38 was one of my father's favourite planes, and in a post at the long defunct retroDynamics from back in 2009 I included a scan of one his P-38 postcards in a story about Godzilla and disk planes. It's a little hard to explain, so here's the old post.

From 29 April 2009:

Early last summer I stumbled across the comic book reprints offered by DC and Marvel in their DC Showcase Presents and Marvel Essentials series. Basically, these are 500-page volumes of reprints of selected comic books in black-and-white form. Well, I dove in and bought and read a number of titles that I either was forbidden to read as a kid or missed entirely. I readily admit there was no intellectual value in this comic reading extravaganza, but it was fun. Godzilla: King of the Monsters in the Marvel Essentials series is a one-volume collection of all the comics in Marvel’s Godzilla title published in the late ‘70s. All I can say is that it is one weird, absurd and hilarious read. The storyline does appear to run out of steam near the end of the series, but it was probably tough to dream up things to do for two years for a character whose main attributes are stomping around and breaking big things.

[The cockpit is huge]

There’s an incredible collection of strange flying machines in Godzilla, but the ones that caught my eye were the seemingly circular wing interceptors used by S.H.I.E.L.D. From my haphazard reading of comics, it seems that flying things whose primary feature is a disk are usually some sort of alien spacecraft: classic flying saucers. Atmospheric airplanes flown by human beings whose wing is a disk or circle seem almost nonexistent, so I was surprised to see these.

[The wing planform looks elliptical - that's gotta hurt !]

When I was looking up the pictures for this post, closer examination suggested that the wing may be actually a rather fat ellipse and not a circle at all. I think I jumped to the circular wing conclusion because I was biased that way, and I figured the perspective views of the planes were just distorting the circular planforms into ellipses, but they really do look like rather fat elliptical planforms when you study the drawings more carefully.

[A P-38 postcard, from the 1940's I think] 

As well, their twin boom design and large cowls instantly reminded me of the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. However, unlike the P-38s, these S.H.I.E.L.D disk-planes can also hover. How they might do this is obviously a quirk in the physics of the Marvel universe.

[It can somehow hover - and no downwash!] 

Mr. Herb Trimpe and Mr. Tom Sutton are attributed as the Pencillers or Artists in this series, so I assume they invented these airplanes. They did a great job; the planes have a ring of truth to them.

This just in ....

Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. We interrupt your regular instalment of the Weekly Herald to bring you this breaking news. Godzilla has been spotted on the workbench. Take cover immediately. Stayed tuned to this station for updates.* 

*With apologies to Walter Winchell.

Weekly Herald: Black Holes & Godzilla

I got out the black paint and a brush, then went ahead and carefully painted the interior. I try to use the paint sparingly so not to have any leak out onto the white outer surface. I also drilled some holes in the floor in case I need to insert lights from the layout for future scene photos.

It turns out there are some gaps that need filling where the front facade joins the main structure. That's a particularly bad one in the picture over on the right.

I've got a few tubes of putty on the shelf, and for some reason I'd forgotten about the Deluxe Materials Perfect Plastic Putty that I had bought last year for the Polar Lights Godzilla build. Godzilla got shelved 'for a while', where 'for a while' has turned out to be almost a year now :-( I think the shelving happened because there was so much filling, sanding, and fitting on the horizon with that project that I wasn't in the mood for it all. Anyway the PPP is still workable, so it has been called into service to fill in some of the gaps on the Weekly Herald.

Maybe I need to continue surgery on the big green guy now that the putty is flowing.....

He uses trains as dental floss

While escaping the heat in the comfort of an air-conditioned hobby shop, what did my sunburnt eyes see, but none other than Polar Lights' re-pop of the original - accept no modern-day re-boots - Godzilla! 

It's been a long wait for this day. I've been walking around unattended all this time not knowing this kit was out there. I need to get out more. Who knows what other wonders await.

As the box says, it's 16 horrific inches tall, and the internet says it's in 1/144 scale, which is very gosh darn close to N scale. Maybe I can say he's actually HO, but awaiting a growth spurt :-)

When I'm 65, I can only hope that I too will be out there stomping on hideous modern towers, swatting away pesky airplanes, while happily astride a diorama base featuring crushed buildings and a tank.