The Anti-Pesto van is ready for action!

Over the holidays I went back to work on the Airfix Wallace and Gromit Anti-Pesto van from the movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I've been promising to get this finished for Debra for quite sometime, and with a little time-off, it was a pleasant diversion.

It was a fairly straightforward build. The parts are well moulded and flash-free. One thing I should mention is that I cut out and discarded the square window area in the side doors and kept only the triangular, no-draft portion. This makes it easier to see the interior, and allows for Gromit to stick his arm out the window.

I haven't mastered applying decals and there's a cloudy area under the main logo. Looks bad in sunlight, but it's not too bad in low light. 

About half the components in this project were brush painted except for the body, chrome pieces, and wheels. Those were painted with a variety of spray can colours - mostly Krylon brand. For brush painting, I only use acrylics. They don't have an odour - which is important for working in the house - and clean-up with water. For this project, I discarded the Humbrol brand paints that come with the kit, and substituted with matching paints from my collection.

The figures had to be washed with some mild dish soap before painting.

[Cracking good coveralls Wallace]

Not all acrylics are created equal. I first painted Wallace's coveralls with a Tamiya blue, but didn't like the tone and overpainted with a Poly Scale blue. Bad idea. The paints reacted and caused a cracking pattern all over the body. I didn't want to start over, so I merely painted on several layers of Poly Scale blue until the cracks were more-or-less invisible. The end result looked ok.

The thing I find about painting figures is that once the eyes are painted in the whole piece 'pops' and seems to come to life. Until then, it's just some dead statue.

That's not some weird cargo in the truck, just my reflection in the back window. Those hinges work and the backdoor opens.

It's roomy back there! That's Corgi's diecast of the Anti-Pesto van they sold a few years ago.

The Corgi set comes complete with a BunVac 6000. I'd love to scratchbuild one of those babies for the Airfix van.

Wanderers

Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist from Erik Wernquist on Vimeo.

It's hard to believe this is the last day of 2014. It might already be 2015 when you read this. No year end reviews here, I'll just tip my hat to the old year, welcome the new year, wish everyone a good one, and leave you with some thoughts from Carl Sagan via Erik Wernquist's excellent video.

E. L. Moore and The Great Selective Compression Controversy of ’74

[My rendition of E. L. Moore's RMC Paper Company located on a prominent corner of the Marmora, Havelock and Points Northern Railway taken in July '75] 

Back in April ’74, Railroad Model Craftsman published E. L. Moore’s RMC Paper Company project. I was model building crazy then, so I jumped in and had a go. That’s the result up there; not so good, but it was fun. 

Being young and impatient, I skipped over the article's prologue, tall tales and other ‘extraneous’ stuff and dove straight into the instructions. Some forty years later I learned that the extra stuff, and the build itself, raised a little controversy. 

In the August ’74 issue, a reader wrote in to say that even though Mr. Moore was the master of selective compression, his paper mill was too compressed to be believable. Paper mills are massive structures and his main building only had a 35’ x 50’ footprint.

The editor did respond that they put E. L. Moore up to converting what was originally a city incinerator to a paper mill to help them make a statement about the then current paper shortage. And the project article shows it was done with Moorian humour - it was the April issue after all :-)

Interestingly, in the part of the article the young me skipped over, Mr. Moore recognized that the facility was too small,

So, when finished, I had a main structure 35‘x50’, with a rear addition of a little over half that area, a total of maybe 50‘x60’. Even at that the main floor area is only about the size of the single room wherein three of us once did a stint of crate making (flat paper was shipped in wood crates) in a large northern paper mill shortly after World War I. My apprenticeship began with hammer and nails and ended similarly...whatever other knowledge I have arrived at concerning paper mills, aside from the smell, has had to come from encyclopedias. Which now brings us face to face with the problem of paper making machines. These babies are not small, some stretching for as long as 300 feet.

[This passage also includes another clue in the E. L. Moore biography that I need to re-read and and pay closer attention.]

And he goes on to discuss other size related problems.

The kerfuffle didn’t end in August, but popped up again in the letters pages in the January ’75 issue. This time E. L. Moore’s friends jumped in with words of support.

From what I can find out, Bart Crosby (1911-1995), for a time the assistant editor of Model Trains as well as a writer and photographer of several model railroading articles, was a longtime friend of E. L. Moore and inherited some of his model buildings. Mr. Moore had a loyal following. 

In retrospect the paper mill model wasn’t actually a model. It wasn’t quite a caricature of a paper mill. It was more of a stage and a statement. A very elaborate setup to get that closing shot of the Model Railroader transport truck - apparently being driven by college boys looking for the local brewery, - pulling up to the loading dock in the dead of night.

Launch pad layouts of the mind

[The caption beside this photo reads, The launching rocket for a Soyuz spacecraft, at Baykonur. The Soviet approach to more elaborate space operation and giving cosmonauts more room in orbit involves more than one spacecraft docking at a Salyut space station, while unmanned cargo ships ferry supplies from Earth. Pages 110 and 111 of Spaceships of the Mind; photo attributed to Novosti. This is where the train in the NASA photo was hauling that rocket.]

I’ve been thinning my library and came across this photo in Nigel Calder’s Spaceships of the Mind from 1978. If I ever get around to actually building the Launch Pad Layout, this could be the centre-piece. 

C. L. Moore

[The dust jacket of The Best of C. L. Moore, published in 1975 by Ballantine Books, has a rather lurid painting of the main characters from C. L. Moore's most popular short story, Shambleau. It was originally published in the November 1933 issue of the pulp, Weird Tales. That's Shambleau on the left, and leading man, Northwest Smith, on the right.]

No I didn’t do one of my usual typos in the post title, that does read C. L. Moore and not E. L. Moore. However, it turns out that I learned about C. L. Moore by mistyping a Google search :-) 

According to Wikipedia, Catherine Lucille Moore (1911 - 1987) was a science fiction and fantasy writer between 1933 and 1963. Although I’m not much interested in fantasy, weird tales or horror stories, I do enjoy some sci-fi. She sounded like an interesting writer, so I hunted online for an old copy of her collected works. I’ve read a couple of stories from The Best of C. L. Moore. They were good and I’m hoping the others will be just as enjoyable.

The only apparent connection between C.L. Moore and E. L. Moore is a literary one: she was a master of weird tales and he was a master of tall tales. If there had been a pulp specializing in Weird Tall Tales, with a railroading bent, their paths might have crossed :-)

[Photo of C.L. Moore sourced from her Wikipedia profile]