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.
I was carefully inspecting the joints between the front and side walls, and I think I may not have properly attached the front facade. However, in my defence when I glued it on it seemed to fit properly, even after some sanding and filing to improve the fit. Improve? I thought it was ideal, but now I'm not so sure. Too late now. I'm filling and smoothing the gaps as best I can to make them look normal so my secret is safe :-)
While gap inspecting I realized the backside of the false front had no detail. It's just plain plastic with some unsightly tabs that are to slip over the visible surface of the roof to hold it in place. I ground those tabs off and installed some pieces of styrene brick sheet to make the wall look more reasonable. The roof will hide most of those seams and joints in the brick sheets.
I think it's finally ready for the first round of colour. Stay tuned.......
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.....
The colours of the raw parts are somewhat toy-like and don't do justice to the detail in the mouldings. I'm going to give this model a little more realistic paint scheme, and the first step is to prime the surfaces. For this I used Tamiya's white fine surface primer.
The walls are a bit thin, so even with a uniform layer of primer applied, there's a bit of a yellow cast when light is shone through the model. I'll need to paint the inside black to make the structure a bit more opaque.
And, if you were wondering, I did straighten one of the walls a bit by freeing the problematic partition and gluing in a slightly longer stretcher piece. No doubt at sometime in the future when this model is for sale on some forlorn swap-meet resale table a potential purchaser will wonder what kind of a nut couldn't measure a partition properly and created this vile glue bomb of a kludge :-)
After finishing off the Canadian Press complex I thought I'd try and do a speed build on the Weekly Herald as I did on Cal's Coastal Cafe earlier in the summer. I made a start, but no such luck on the speed thing :-(
I figured I'd start by building up the basic structure and then spray it with white primer in preparation for detail painting.
Assembly was slow because there was a lot of sanding and filing and fitting required to get the pieces to glue together nice and square and even. The mouldings are not the most precise, and there seemed to be a considerable amount of flash on the parts. It reminded me of the time I had building the old Revell Gran Turismo kit. Back in the '70s I loved many of the old Revell automobile kits, but although the designs were great, half the time they had twisted bodies as well as parts that weren't too sharp and had lots of flash. They seemed to require a lot of work to make a presentable model. Although this Weekly Herald is an AHM boxing, it's a reboxing of the Revell original, and maybe the production processes that plagued the automobile kits were a problem here as well. All speculation of course.
Once the walls were glued into a box, the structure seemed a bit wobbly, so I decided to add a floor and partitions to stiffen it. The floor is cut from 0.080" sheet styrene, and the partitions are 0.060". That elliptical hole near the the front door is me realizing after the floor was glued in that I wasn't going to get the front door to fit properly if the floor was attached to the inside sill. After some cursing, a hole was hacked in.
I think I see a little snaking in one of the long walls, so maybe I didn't quite pull-off that whole nice and square and even thing, but I'll check, and if it's good it'll be on to priming. Stay tuned!
