Thread: Building a Tamiya Missouri with Super-detailing

Worked a little on Sunday and bit the bullet by amputating those perfectly good plastic 16" gun barrels to make way for the spiffy brass ones. The plan was to glue them all in and cut them all off together with a razor saw in one swipe, thus keeping them all pointing the same general direction and facilitating the sanding of them evenly.

Here's the gruesome results:



As you can see, IT WORKED!

Next, following this little four photo vingnette (way to cheat the 5-pictures-per-post-rule...clever, eh?) you can see the steps taken to make nice, even, centered holes to receive the new barrels. From top left: you can just see the punch marks made with a scratch awl using hand pressure only. This is followed by a small pilot drill. Size isn't critical, just much smaller than the next 2.0 mm drill which is the size of the machined lug on the barrel's tail. Besides making the drilling of the 2 mm hole easier, a pilot drill makes it easier to keep it centered in the punch mark. Finally, you use a 1/8" twist drill as a countersink. Again, just twirl the drill in your fingers. One the countersink is even with the plastic edge of the blast bag.



The trickiest part is getting the initial center punch actually in the center. If it's a tiny bit off, you can do a little angular drilling to move the center position a tad, but you should get it close at the start.

Here's a couple of shots with the barrels trial-fitted. I will glue them in permanently when everything is painted. I want to get the slide area of the guns right and it makes it much easier to paint the blast bags without worrying about painting the guns too.





I finally found something to grab hold of those tiny PE parts. It's called pic-n-stic and they're actually manufactured for dentists and available from MicroMark. I've actually had them sitting around for years, but didn't have an application for them. NOW I DO. It a plastic stick with a wax pad on the tip. If you look closely, you can see one of those &%!!$**& oars sticking to it. The plexiglas holding thingy is great to contain the parts when you're cutting them off the fret, but moving them from the fret to the workpiece using a tweezer is an absolute horror. This sticky tool picks up the part without deforming it, and let's you deposit it where it's needed. It lets you hold it while using the tweezer tip with the other hand to move the part from the stick to the superglue waiting for it on the workpiece. I worked 3 hours. At least 1/2 hour was crawling around on the painted concrete floor looking for two tiny parts that decided to cross into the 4th dimension.



Watchmaker's benches, beside being almost eye level (so you don't have your neck in a weird position), have a pull-out tray that butts up against your belly that wraps around a bit. It is designed to catch parts before they leave this earth. I am going to build a pull-out, parts catcher under the work bench to cut down on the floor crawling.

Tomorrow I'll finish Turret #2. It's getting easier.